Gridiron Genius
Page 7
Bye week schedule
Player discipline
Philosophy
How do we handle:
Weight problems?
Sleeping in meetings?
Missing meetings?
Travel
Dress code?
Kind of plane?
When do we leave?
Who makes the trip?
Job at the game? Do they come?
No job at the game? Do they come?
Return policy:
Can players stay in the town?
Dress for return?
Airport bars?
Curfew on trips?
Hotel rooms:
Singles for players? Pay own or club?
In city or out? Isolated part of town?
Movies in the room?
Who is allowed in meals?
Family rates?
Friend rates?
Security on floor?
Room check?
Who gets suites?
Two-day philosophy and one-day philosophy?
Buses:
Who rides them?
How many do you want?
Taxi for players? Mandatory for buses?
Monday Night game away?
Planes:
Coaches in with players?
Players’ seats?
What beverages are allowed on the plane?
Boosters on plane?
COACHES AND SUPPORT STAFF
What is your role on game day: Calling plays, game management, or both?
Instant replay: Whose responsibility?
Rules: Game day and during the week?
Time-outs?
Personnel?
Special teams decisions: You or coaches?
Onside kicks: What is the primary option call?
End-of-the-game play: Do you have one?
Fourth-down calls?
Who has final say, you or coordinator?
Handling officials?
Report to the NFL office: Who?
Conduct on the sideline?
Who is allowed to be there?
Where should coordinators sit?
Pregame talk?
Who decides on who gets introduced? Leave to PR?
Halftime talk?
Locker room access?
Video of game?
Handling of the computer printouts?
Media after game:
How much time after game?
What staff members can talk to media?
Briefing before meeting the media: Who?
Radio show?
Any one-on-one media commitments?
Assistant coaches
Do you have candidates for offensive, defensive, and special team coordinator?
Who calls plays?
Will you have overruling power?
Who are your candidates for offensive and defensive line coaches?
Your choice or coordinator’s?
Who will decide on the staff once the coordinators are picked?
Salary of staff? Your call or GM’s?
Years of contracts?
Rollovers?
How many staff members?
Secretary or assistant?
What kind of people are you looking for?
What kinds of personalities are you looking for?
Level of experience?
Friends? Do you need to have known them?
Film breakdown coaches?
Who coaches the younger players?
Evaluation of staff: Do you welcome any input?
Off-season role for assistant coaches:
What do they work on?
Trends?
Visit other places?
Evaluation of own team:
Draft role?
UFA [undrafted free agent] role?
Media responsibility for assistant coaches:
Can they talk?
When and to whom?
Reporting process: How will it work?
Player personnel staff
How do we work the roster?
Players 46–58: Who controls them?
What day is a workout day for emergency list?
Training staff
Who will handle their schedule?
Vacation time?
Who handles the players before camp—July?
What needs do you have?
Treatment of players:
Schedule of times?
Home treatment?
Players getting operated on: Who handles them?
What do we send to them in the hospital?
Rehab in season: Who handles?
Rehab out of season: Who handles?
Medical meetings?
When?
Who is involved?
Who has final say on who is cleared to play?
Medical definitions of injuries?
Out-of-town second opinions?
View on second doctor doing the operations?
Weight coach involved in rehab?
How many trainers at camp?
How many team medical people are involved?
View on massage and rub-down people?
Who pays: Players or team?
Dietary experts: Who handles?
Equipment personnel
Who will handle their schedule?
What needs do you have for them?
Who assigns jersey numbers?
Needs for players?
Shoes?
Equipment deals?
Game role in pregame, postgame?
Travel: Extra people?
Locker access: All allowed?
ORGANIZATION
Free agency
Coaches involved?
Who will recruit them?
Pro board or coaches’ board?
Salary cap knowledge:
Coaches know numbers?
Can agents call coaches? Can players?
Projects
Coaches’ schedule in off-season?
What do they work on, not personnel-related?
Trends?
Vacation time?
Owners meetings?
College draft
How much involved?
Philosophy of draft: Aggressive, team needs? Best player?
Coach reports: Grades?
Coaches work out players?
Coaches in draft room?
Indy Combine?
Interview of players?
Who comes in to visit? Our 20-players list?
College free agents:
Who sets that list?
Who recruits?
3
TEAM BUILDING
IN SEARCH OF PROGRAM GUYS
We are not collecting talent; we are building a team.
—BILL BELICHICK
El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, is a well-known thoroughfare that stretches from San Diego to San Francisco. On a Tuesday in April 1986 the road that once linked California’s Spanish missions carried me on an early-morning pilgrimage from my town house in Mountain View to the San Francisco 49ers’ office in Redwood City. There is nothing easy or simple about the imperfect science of team building in the NFL except maybe the commute. In those days the NFL draft was still a midweek affair that began with a yawn and a whimper at 8 A.M. on a Tuesday in New York. The 5 A.M. start time for the 49ers staff put me, by then a West Coast college scout for the team, on El Camino Real at 2:30 A.M., when the normally jam-packed highway was empty, with nothing but green lights the entire way. Call it the calm before the most important draft in 49ers history.
Soon enough, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle would walk to the podium at the Marriott Marquis in New York City’s Times Square and announce Auburn running back Bo Jackson as the first pick of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But we were in a much trickier spot. For starters, the 49ers were picking eighteenth, a spot that didn’t bode well for a burgeoning dynasty. If it was rather high for a team that had won a Super Bowl two years earlier, it was also a bit low for a team that had just finished second in the NFC West. (There were 28 teams in the NFL in 1986.) Under Bill Walsh’s leadership, the 49ers franchise was no longer accustomed to second-place finishes or to being beaten decisively in the wild card playoffs by the New York Giants, with our high-octane offense held to three points in the process, as we were in 1985. It was clear as we headed into the off-season that the owner, Eddie DeBartolo Jr., would not tolerate another lackluster finish. Of course, the only person more eager than his boss to make the necessary draft-day tweaks to the team was Walsh himself.
The coach believed that securing a handful of new starters, including an elite pass rusher and upgrades in the backfield, was our ticket back to the Super Bowl. In 1986, the draft was really the only way to find those players and to build, or rebuild, a team. Despite all the changes to the economics of the game during the last 30 years, that’s still very much the case. If anything, the finite resources teams now have under the salary cap (more on that in a bit) have only made the relatively inexpensive young talent in the draft even more valuable, and the grand art and science of talent evaluation and team building even more important. Back then, though, free agency didn’t exist; when a player’s contract expired, his team essentially retained control of him. There was the occasional difference-making trade, but for the most part, in 1986 draft picks were the gold. And Walsh needed to find his fortune.
It didn’t matter that his scouts and personnel people were calling that year’s draft the worst ever. That just made him crazy. I mean, he would go nuts, snapping back with “We only need to find 12 good players!” before stomping away in disgust. Walsh hated that kind of defeatist chatter, not least because if it was true, how could he ever improve his team? He didn’t care what the rest of the league was doing or thinking or whining about; he simply wouldn’t tolerate excuses. That extended even to speaking badly about a prospect. If someone needed to be critical of a player’s talent, he was to keep it professional. Stay clean and to the point, and don’t denigrate. Words such as sucks or blows had no part in a report. “It’s our job to find talent, not dismiss it,” he told me. His dignified single-mindedness led us to work harder than ever that spring.
Leading up to the 1986 draft, there was an unusual sense of urgency even for a workaholic like Walsh. That winter he seemed to always be calling me to fetch film of prospects or work the phones in search of more information. My job was to be on call at all times to help him with whatever he needed. That included invitation-only Saturday sessions in which Walsh and the 49ers staff discussed in great detail the players each of them had scouted over the previous week. Walsh controlled the meetings with his probing questions, reminding presenters always to highlight “what the player could do for the 49ers”—that is, how he specifically fit our schemes or needs. Through it all, he took notes on his ubiquitous 3-by-5 cards, leaning my way and whispering instructions whenever he needed supplemental information.
On draft day in 1986, driving through the inky, deserted darkness of El Camino Real, I thought a lot about those Saturday staff meetings and everything I had learned during the frantic three months of nonstop work that led up to the draft that would build a dynasty. I’ve never forgotten the main takeaway from that year. It remains just as relevant and vital more than three decades later. The game of football might be ruled by perfectionists, but at its core, success in the NFL comes down to managing the maddening, inexact science of talent evaluation and team building. And when it comes to predicting human performance on a football field, the only thing for certain is that nothing is ever for certain. Despite the thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars teams invest in the draft every year, a recent study showed, teams still get it wrong on almost half of their top draft picks.
The imperfect nature of team building is why Walsh and all the other great football minds I’ve been around have approached the eternal puzzle of personnel the same way: Instead of trying to “solve” or perfect the draft, they have figured out how to create an edge by developing methods, strategies, and insights—things such as deeper background checks, better character evaluations, and more thorough off-season evaluations—that minimize risks and improve the odds of building a better team. Few mastered these techniques better than Walsh.
That’s why, as I pulled into the San Francisco facility on the morning of the 1986 draft, I was overcome by the strangest feeling in our business: confidence.
* * *
—
One of Walsh’s draft mentors was Al Davis himself, whom Walsh had worked for earlier in his career. Having spent time with both legends, I saw firsthand how Davis influenced Walsh’s ideas about team building, especially the importance put on a prospect’s pedigree. Both Davis and Walsh understood that digging deep into a draft pick’s background could be indispensably informative. For one thing, Davis believed that any player who demonstrated rare talent in high school needed to be considered carefully regardless of how he played in college. After all, his prep potential could have been squandered by poor coaching or a mismatch in talent and scheme. Davis believed in this theory so deeply that he carried around a file of old Sunday Parade magazines so that in free moments he could pore over the tissue-thin pages that listed past Parade high school All-America teams in hopes of uncovering a forgotten diamond.