All it takes is a simple phone call. That’s been made clear to Thomas Dimitroff since his first day on the job in Atlanta. If he ever needs to use Arthur Blank’s private G4 jet for business purposes, it’s his, as long as it’s available. So if he wants to see three different workouts in three different parts of the country and be home in time to put his son to bed, all he has to do is ask.
Dimitroff and his staff have taken Blank up on the offer many times, and they’ve walked away in awe of the power, luxury, and convenience after each ride. But in late January, with the entire league making its annual trip to Alabama for a week of scouting, socializing, and gossip, the Falcons decided to go SUV for the five-hour drive from Atlanta to Mobile. In the next few months, leading up to the April draft, there would be many good reasons to use the plane. Everyone knew that the general manager was determined to add explosive, urgent athletes to the roster, and sometimes finding those players meant hopping a jet in the middle of the week. For now, the search would begin with five guys on four wheels.
This trip to Alabama was already guaranteed to be more successful than the last time they all piled into a truck. This time, at least everyone was paying attention to the gas tank. The previous year, they had made the two-hour drive to Auburn to scout the university’s pro day. On the way back to Georgia, they may have been wrapped up in a conversation about players, or maybe it was the good music that was pounding the speakers. Whatever the distraction was, no one noticed that the needle had gone well below E until the truck began to sputter and they had to pull to the side of the road.
What a sight: Dimitroff, Lionel Vital, Dave Caldwell, and Les Snead, the Falcons’ top evaluators, stranded because they didn’t evaluate the gas gauge. They were lucky, though. They were just thirty miles from home, in Newnan, Georgia, and the guy who stopped to help them was good friends with the owner of a local gas station. News traveled fast to the office, and Snead was given the bulk of the blame since he was the driver and an Auburn grad as well. The next day, he was teased by head coach Mike Smith and also found gas cards on his desk.
The trip to Mobile, with the same quartet plus director of football administration Nick Polk, had more focus, and not just with the fuel. The loss to the Packers was just two weeks earlier, and no one was over it.
“It’s like that breakup you have with that girl or that guy. You wake up the next day and you still can’t believe it’s over,” Snead says. “And as bad as I felt about it, being a longtime Atlanta person, I felt even worse for the fans. That was the best and loudest Falcons crowd I’ve ever been a part of.”
It didn’t make any of them feel better that Green Bay was not a typical sixth seed and that the Pack had gone on the road to knock off the Bears in the conference championship game. They all had opinions about what had gone wrong that night at the dome and what needed to be done to fix it.
“You need guys with edge,” says Vital. “This is a mean game. You’ve got to have that edge, that attitude. I think it starts on defense first, because if you show me a ferocious defense, most of the time it’s gonna be a team that does some damage in the play-offs.”
During the season, even after victories, Dimitroff had been unhappy with aspects of the team’s play. He believed the Falcons needed to take better advantage of the resources they had on offense. He was bothered by their middle-of-the-pack scoring numbers, especially since they had Matt Ryan, Tony Gonzalez, Roddy White, and Michael Turner. It almost seemed impossible that the Falcons could rank thirty-first out of thirty-two teams in explosive plays, which are plays of twenty yards or more.
Shortly after the Packers loss, Dimitroff, Blank, and Smith had met for dinner in Atlanta to discuss the season and how the Falcons could get better. Over the course of a conversation that at times became tense and animated, especially when the GM praised the talent on offense but went to the edge of questioning how it was designed, Dimitroff found himself citing Bruce Lee and Sun Tzu. “Bruce Lee was good at a lot of things, but when he wanted to knock you out he played to his strengths,” he says of the martial arts icon. “He had two or three knockout moves and he used them.” As for Chinese strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, Dimitroff referred to his unpredictability. “Your enemy thinks you’re coming from one direction prepared to fight in a certain way and you do something totally different,” he says. “It’s the idea of using some element of deception to always keep an opponent on his heels.”
It wasn’t necessary to read philosophy or study martial arts to see where Dimitroff was going. He expected more, right now. Since October, long before the play-off loss, he had been thinking of pulling off something dramatic with his draft picks. For what he wanted to do, recent history wasn’t on his side. Teams that traded multiple first-rounders to get into the top of the draft usually weren’t smiling three or four years after the trades. Washington once traded the sixth and twenty-eighth overall picks for the right to move up to number four and select Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard. Three years later, they let him go in the expansion draft. The Saints once traded eight draft picks for another Heisman winner, Ricky Williams, and after all the stunts were over—head coach Mike Ditka wearing a dreadlocked wig; Williams appearing on the cover of a magazine in a wedding dress, signifying the commitment the Saints made to him; Williams conducting interviews wearing a helmet and visor—the Saints traded him to Miami. And although Kentucky’s Dewayne Robertson didn’t win the Heisman, the Jets moved up for him as if he had in 2003. They traded overall picks 13 and 20 for the right to pick Robertson fourth. Their general manager at the time, Terry Bradway, said he didn’t see any players projected in the 13-to-20 range who excited him. Robertson turned out to be a bust, and several players drafted after 13, including Troy Polamalu, Dallas Clark, and Nnamdi Asomugha, turned out to be impact players.
Taking a trip to Mobile for the Senior Bowl wasn’t going to solve all the concerns Dimitroff had about the Falcons, but it wasn’t a stretch to say the week there could be significant. As disappointed as he was not to be preparing for the Super Bowl as the Packers and Steelers were, Dimitroff didn’t believe the Falcons were two or three drafts from greatness. He and Bill Belichick both saw draft picks as capital, but there was a difference of opinion on how to spend it. Belichick liked to roll some of his picks into the future and watch them mature after a year in the bank. Dimitroff was okay with that, too, although he believed some years were for accumulating and some were for cashing out.
As the Falcons made their way to Interstate 65 toward the Gulf Coast and Mobile, everyone in the truck had a rough idea of how the five hours would unfold. The first hour or two would be used for Dimitroff to make and return phone calls. There would be a fast food stop along the way with everyone, including the pescatarian GM, walking away satisfied. The reason for that was Snead, who grew up in Eufaula, Alabama, and claimed to know where every Whole Foods and natural-foods-friendly place was in the state. He once found a “late-night hippie pizza joint with tofu subs” in the middle of Alabama as he and Dimitroff were finishing up a scouting trip. After the food stop, they would listen to music for a while, laugh, and bond. Then there would be an impromptu fifteen-minute staff meeting. Dimitroff would look at film on his iPad, and then, in the final hour, they’d all look at one another and agree: We should have flown.
Football people love the Senior Bowl and especially the week that leads up to it. They love the practices, where they get to measure just how fast and strong a player is compared to the top athletes in the country. They love to see how a player reacts when he’s beaten in a drill or dominates it; how he responds to instruction from the pro coaches on-site; how he interacts with teammates who make him look either good or bad. It’s a great way of getting information that has either innocently slipped through the scouting cracks or has been hidden by certain schools who don’t want scouts to know everything about their players’ limitations.
It’s easy to latch on to a favorite player here, especially for veteran scouts. You see a player do something and it reminds you of what you saw a great one do fifteen years earlier. Dick Haley used to watch these practices and when a player jumped, Haley would shift his eyes from the height of the leap and focus instead on the landing, because that told a more revealing athleticism story in his opinion. He’d always remind his son, Todd, “No matter how fast and strong they are, they still have to be able to play football. Don’t lose sight of that.” Mobile is the place where you find dozens of scouts trying to become the next Dick Haley, identifying some of the same undervalued gems that he did in the 1970s.
Actually, that’s the average scout’s reward: being excited about a player, having your boss heavily consider your opinion, and then seeing “your guy” picked by your team on draft day. It’s got to be a labor of love for most college scouts. Some of them spend two hundred days or more on the road, and when they go home, the paychecks they bring with them are relatively modest compared to the men they report to. The average area scout makes between $40,000 and $50,000 annually, and national scouts bring in $80,000 to $90,000. The average GM makes $1.2 million.
In the first few nights here, some of the scouts who hop in and out of the popular bars on Dauphin Street are desperately trying to climb to the next professional notch. But for many of them, it’s more about football and team-building than money. Besides, some of the more keen football watchers believe that promotions and pay raises will naturally come as they excel at their jobs.
One of the scouts here is Jim Nagy, who works for the Chiefs now after spending seven seasons with Scott Pioli in New England. Nagy, thirty-six, has wanted to be in football since he was a kid growing up in Michigan. The son of a high school coach, he used to take his naps on tackling dummies. When he was seven, he kept his own scouting book, filling a notebook with players the Lions drafted and ones he wanted them to draft. While attending the University of Michigan, he got an internship in the Packers’ public-relations department. It turned out to be a good connection for him because when he moved to New York City in 1997, a sportswriting legend needed his help.
At that time, Dick Schaap was working with former Packer Jerry Kramer on Distant Replay, the final installment in their trilogy of Packer diaries. Schaap needed research help from someone who was in tune with contemporary Green Bay players, so Nagy was his man. A proud name-dropper, Schaap regaled Nagy with tales about Malcolm X, Arthur Ashe, and Robert Kennedy. Nagy helped Schaap finish the book and enjoyed the time he spent with him, but book-writing was not his passion. The next year he began working with someone who would become a sports celebrity of sorts for football fans, although he and Nagy were both unknowns at the time.
He was hired by former NFL scout Gary Horton, the founder of a think tank for draftniks called War Room, Inc. The small staff watched coaches’ tape, which captures all twenty-two players at once on camera; tapped into sources from around the league; and wrote draft reports. One of Nagy’s coworkers at the time was an even-younger-looking Todd McShay, who can now be seen on TV, not looking a day over twenty-five, dueling Mel Kiper during ESPN’s draft coverage. “I think we’re both doing exactly what we want to be doing,” Nagy says. He got his NFL break in 2000 with Washington and made it to New England in 2002. When Pioli left the Patriots in January 2009, Nagy wasn’t far behind him.
As he studies and takes notes on players in Mobile, he might be the most self-assured scout in town. For one, he’s in his backyard. He and his wife have made south Alabama their home, so if anything happens during the week that he misses, he’s got sources in the area who can fill him in. Most important, he knows what Pioli and college scouting director Phil Emery are looking for in players. He’s been trained for nine years in the Patriots/Chiefs system, so when he excitedly talks about a player he’s seen, there’s a good chance the bosses will be excited as well.
A couple people from the week have gotten his attention.
“Well, there’s Rodney Hudson. This guy is going to be a good pro. He’s highly, highly intelligent. He was an undersized guard at Florida State, but he’ll probably be a center in the pros. Really impressive guy. He was essentially an offensive line coach on the field.”
The Chiefs don’t need a starting quarterback, but there’s a down-the-road project who the scout believes is going to surprise people.
“If I could pick a quarterback who we’ll all look back in five years and say, ‘Can you believe he lasted that long?’ it would be Ricky Stanzi of Iowa,” he says. “No one is talking about him as a high draft pick. He was the most improved player I saw all year. There’s something about the guy. And I’ll tell you something else: When I was watching tape here of practice, he was there, too. Watching Senior Bowl practice tape on his own.”
Nagy has watched practices and tapes to back up his opinions. He admits that he used to watch too much tape because of his youth and insecurity. He’d never played the game in college, and yet he’d look around a New England draft room and see former collegians and pros like Pioli, Dimitroff, and Vital, and he’d be intimidated by the credentials that they had and he didn’t. He eventually learned to maintain the intensity he brought to the job without trying to hammer people with the fact that he belonged. Pioli pulled him aside in New England and told him that he could see that he knew his stuff and respected the effort he put into his work.
When he became a Chief, Nagy realized that he was going to have to work even harder than he did in New England. Sustaining a championship roster is hard work, but building a roster from the bottom up is even harder. There were things the scouts in New England took for granted that scouts in Kansas City couldn’t. The Patriots’ scouts already knew the system, so they didn’t need the two-week scouting seminar that Emery conducted when he arrived in Kansas City. He talked out the grading scale and then put on film so he could specifically point out acceptable examples of athletic ability, change of direction, explosive strength, etc., until he was convinced everyone got it.
As for who “everyone” was, Pioli had predictably chased all the slackers out of the department. Sometimes he intentionally put his employees in situations that might frustrate them, just so he could see how they’d respond to it. It was his go-to move, and even his friends weren’t exempt. He had known Jay Muraco for nearly a decade when Muraco, then working for the Eagles, called him in 2000 and asked if Pioli had anything with the Patriots. Pioli told him that he did, but the move would be lateral, and the best he could offer Muraco was a 30 to 40 percent pay cut from what he was already making. Pioli wanted to see if Muraco truly could accept a job doing the same work, for less pay, and not have a bad attitude while doing it. Muraco called him back the next morning and accepted the deal. After a while, after proving himself, Muraco was given a raise.
“He purposely grinds guys,” Nagy says, “to test their mettle.”
Pioli even did that when Dimitroff was the Patriots’ director of college scouting. He gave him a modest salary for the position, and when his friend proved himself, his salary doubled. It was going to be the same story for anyone working for him with the Chiefs.
If they stepped back and thought about it, Kansas City employees would see that turning the Chiefs into champs, in terms of degree of difficulty, would be the most ambitious challenge of Pioli’s career. In New England, he had an advantage that no one could match: On draft day, he had one of the top draft evaluators and strategists on his side in Bill Belichick; on Sundays, he had one of the most accomplished head coaches in pro football history on his side in Bill Belichick; and while Belichick got credit for the team’s success, he also was mentioned first when things didn’t work, therefore getting blame for his own mistakes as well as the mistakes of others working for him. No other team in football had anyone with that combination of power and pedigree, and Pioli was smart enough to know that it couldn’t be re-created. He couldn’t exactly re-create the how of his Patriots days, but he was constantly in search of players, coaches, and scouts capable of getting to the same finish.
On a pleasant January night, many of the NFL’s coaches and general managers have left Dauphin Street and ventured a couple miles away to Ruth’s Chris Steak House. On one side of the restaurant, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is entertaining a group at his table. Across the room is Saints head coach Sean Payton. At a table not far from the front door is Chiefs defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel, who is having dinner with his son and a couple friends. Not far away, but out of the crowd’s view, old friends Pioli and Dimitroff take their seats in a booth and order a bottle of red wine.
When the two have dinner, the conversation never follows a predictable pattern, but it does reinforce why their friendship works. They balance verbal jabs with thoughtful conversations about their families and jobs. They reminisce. They challenge each other, each refusing to say anything that he doesn’t believe, even if it’s what the other one wants to hear.
As Pioli raises his glass for a toast, he mentions how blessed they are. They have four executive-of-the-year awards between them. They both can remember take-home pay that was far lower than what the area scouts make now, even if you factor in inflation. There were no expensive bottles of wine back then, just bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. A reference to the 1990s reminds them of the days when Dimitroff was working on the Browns grounds crew and doing some part-time scouting, ironically, for the Chiefs.
“You’d lime the field and you’d have grass chips in your hair. And I swore you didn’t know what deodorant was,” Pioli says. “You’d come and funk up my office. You’d smell like tree bark.”
“Nah. I think it was tea tree,” Dimitroff says. “Or those crystal deodorant rocks.”
They both laugh.
“Just so you know,” Dimitroff says, “and this is the honest truth: I think the Chiefs still owe me per diem from way back then. They told me they were going to pay me, and sometimes they did. It was so haphazard.”
Getting more precise financial records and slashing unnecessary spending is something Pioli has been working on in Kansas City for two years. He’s even more diligent about the budget because he wants to make sure no one is taking advantage of the fact that team owner Clark Hunt is five hundred miles away in Dallas. He shoots back to Dimitroff’s claim, “I’m surprised they didn’t pay you. They paid everyone else money.”
As close as they are, Pioli and Dimitroff don’t get many moments like this. They talk all the time, but there are few moments to sit down, face-to-face, and talk shop while teasing each other along the way.
“I love Senior Bowl week,” Pioli says. “It’s the first time that these kids are out of their element. And you see how they behave in a noncontrolled environment, or at least a foreign environment. You get to see their personalities relatively early because by a month from now, you know these kids are going to be dialed in and trained. Some of them are already.”
Dimitroff nods in agreement. Mobile is the first look for evaluators and agents. Once the agents get a sense of what the decision-makers are saying about their clients, they have a little more than a month to correct, or hide, the holes in their clients’ games. That could be off the field, as Pioli referred to, or on it.
“For me, as you know, I’m enthralled with movement and athleticism,” Dimitroff says. “I mean, you have to like power and such, but I do, I really love to see movement. I love to see recovery. And I love urgent athleticism. And I get a chance to see it all on the field here. It’s an equal playing surface. Not just one guy playing against a down-the-line guy from another team. But talent meeting equal talent.”
They both remember being in Mobile as young scouts and the first-time excitement of seeing the legends of the game, like Bill Walsh, here. Years later, they both worked for and won championships with a legend in New England, so the fact that the restaurant is filled with influential NFL people doesn’t affect them the way it did when they were in their twenties. But the awe of their twenties has been replaced by appreciation in their forties.
They point out some of the arguments they’ve had over the years. In New England, Dimitroff would often tell Pioli to back off the scouts a bit. Pioli would tell him that one day he would run a department and he’d see that certain tough-love management styles are necessary.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back to my office the past three years, wheeled back in my chair, and said, ‘Holy Pioli. That was the most Pioli-esque moment I’ve had so far,’” Dimitroff says.
There is laughter and more wine. A waiter comes by and says, “Can I get you anything else, Mr. Pioli?”
Pioli is surprised. He spent years in Boston, walking through Logan Airport and Fenway Park, and was scarcely recognized. A waiter in Alabama knows who he is? What gives?
“I watch ESPN, sir,” the waiter says. “And I know you, too. How are you, Mr. Dimitroff?”
Even if the kid, a student at the University of South Alabama, is working for a tip, he’s charismatic enough where it doesn’t matter. He even pronounces “Dimitroff” flawlessly, not making the common mistake of putting “meat” where “mitt” should be. You can imagine him going to Jerry Jones’s table and applauding him on the brilliance of his previous draft picks and the new Cowboys Stadium. He makes sure they have everything they need and then leaves.
Pioli and Dimitroff mention how much their lives have changed in Kansas City and Atlanta. They do things now in their jobs that they never would have dreamed of doing with the Patriots.
“And honestly,” Dimitroff says, “the differences are not as related to scouting and team-building as much as they are to football business relationships that we have. Some of the marketing relationships and decisions we make. Whether it’s training camp or accessibility…”
“Or being in a commercial on a bus,” Pioli interrupts.
Dimitroff, head coach Mike Smith, owner Arthur Blank, and many other Falcons were in an NFL commercial in which they were head-bopping on a bus as music played. Except Dimitroff never bopped. Once. He’s been ragged on about it since the commercial first aired. Dimitroff smiles and continues.
“I think it’s a by-product of this league changing a little bit, too. And you and I understanding as we’re evolving, as much as we’re football traditionalists and historians and very mindful and appreciative of it, we also understand that this is entertainment and there are things that we have to do…”
“I will never say that it’s entertainment,” Pioli says.
“I know you won’t. I will.”
The word itself in a football context seems to be heretical to him.
“As soon as I succumb to that word, I’m out,” he says. “It’s a part of it, but it’s not what it is. Is it a part of it? Yeah. It’s always been a part of entertainment, that’s why I watch, you know, it entertained me in the truest definition of the word, but…”
“And this is probably the fundamental difference between my personality and yours,” Dimitroff says. He adds, laughing, “You’re the guy who has called me Eurotrash. The idea of the pomp and circumstance and the shining lights…”
“Drives me crazy,” Pioli says. “You see it all with the fireworks in some of these stadiums.”
“That would be us,” Dimitroff replies, knowing that’s exactly what the Falcons did, and more, before their play-off loss to the Packers. “And again, I’m a realist because I know that’s where it’s going.”
“I can understand that’s where it’s going, but I’m not buying.”
Dimitroff, who has zinged Pioli in the past by calling him a blue-collar guy with blue blood, tweaks him again.
“You can make your multimillions and not buy until you get out, or whatever.”
“Oh,” Pioli says. “You’re gonna put that out there?”
The flattering waiter returns and wants to know if he can get them anything. Pioli asks if it’s okay if they hang out awhile, and he says it’s fine. They continue the discussion. They would likely have it anyway, but it’s even more topical now. The NFL is just over a month away from a work stoppage, and there are lots of strong opinions about what that will mean for the league. And who’s at fault. And if the essence of what made the league what it is will be choked away in legalese.
“We have all… I’m not going to say compromised, because it’s not compromising,” Pioli says. “We understand it and we’re evolving. But I know deep down inside, you don’t love all of it, either. You understand, but you would love it to be more of football in its purest sense. However, that’s not what it is anymore.”
“Well, I mostly agree with you. I’ll differ only on this: My energy store is, like everyone’s, it’s limited. And I can’t use my energy fighting the inevitable. So it’s like, all right, if this is the way it’s going, what’s the best way to manage and accept this and not waste my energy and angst on something that you know isn’t going to change? This is the way it’s going. It’s not going backward.”
Pioli’s positions very much echo the sentiments that he and Belichick had while both were in New England. Dimitroff, even while working with them, frequently disagreed. He knew he would do things differently if he ever got a chance to run an organization, and they would be things that Pioli and Belichick wouldn’t endorse. For example, Dimitroff never understood why the Patriots did not allow all of their scouts in the room during the entire draft, and he was always puzzled why the scouts weren’t given all-access passes so they could celebrate with everyone else on the field when the team was winning Super Bowls. He’s teased about the corporate perks he has in Atlanta: access to Blank’s G4 jet, golfing trips to Hilton Head and Augusta National, and an ownership group—and a draft room—that is open to celebrity advisers and limited partners such as Hank Aaron, who grew up playing football and baseball just two miles away from the restaurant.
“There’s something we did in New England and I do now and it’s limit the number of people in the draft room,” Pioli says. “I need to be able to focus. I need silence. I need, even if it’s just not people talking, I need limited activity.”
“You’d be interested to see the difference in our place,” Dimitroff says with a smile. “And that goes back to the conversation we had way back. Remember what I always used to say to you, at least early on?”
Pioli nods. “You’d say, ‘You should let the scouts in.’”
“And then finally I let it go and it was a nonissue. So now I have a place in our draft where our scouts sit. They’re very mindful and they all know if it gets unruly they won’t be in there. But we also have things that you would never allow in your draft room.”
“Like what?”
Dimitroff explains the layout of the enormous Atlanta draft room, with several tables for scouts and rows of seats for some of the advisers and partners, if they’re interested. In theory, the Falcons could have Aaron in the draft room, sitting next to Andrew Young, the civil rights leader and former Atlanta mayor. Pioli shakes his head.
“This is how I see it differently,” he says. “This goes back to the entertainment conversation. Draft day is not entertainment in that room, okay? I understand that it’s going to be on ESPN and the NFL Network. I get all that. But again, there’s degrees of compromise here. So we’ve got to have that. Last year I spent thirty million dollars guaranteed on one pick. I’ve gotta have a clear head to make that decision. This is not entertainment. Do Fortune 500 companies have people coming into their boardrooms? I don’t know, maybe I’m taking myself too seriously.”
“Respectfully, Scott, if my mistakes are because we have seven limited partners and a couple business associates in there, then my personal opinion is I’m not the right person for the job. I’m not being flip or derogatory toward your comment. We all operate in a different way.”
Pioli agrees. “My way’s not the right way. Your way’s not the right way. It’s finding out what’s the right way for the leader or the leadership group. What’s the right way for the people? I’m very passionate about this, but not in the sense of where I’m saying, ‘I can’t believe you, Thomas.’ I say it because I can’t concentrate and be as effective and/or thoughtful with distractions. You can.”
The statement makes Dimitroff pause. The April draft will represent a turning point for both of them, for different reasons. The Falcons have the more mature roster, so the GM believes he can be more aggressive with his draft picks. The Chiefs are still in rebuilding mode, despite their division title, and this will be Pioli’s second draft with the system in place and Phil Emery alongside as college scouting director. It’s a chance to come up with another strong class like they did in 2010, when first-round pick Eric Berry made the Pro Bowl. Pioli had just three months to prepare for his first Kansas City draft.
“To your point,” Dimitroff says, “I might be spending more time trying to manage the room than focusing on the next pick. Because in the three years that we’ve had drafts, there have been some unruly occurrences that have been pretty agitating to me. You’re right. It’s our game day.”
“With millions upon millions of dollars at stake. And the franchise’s future.”
They’re heading toward a place they’ve been many times. Last men standing. There are fewer and fewer sounds of knives and forks lightly tapping against plates. The conversations in other parts of the restaurant aren’t as anonymous as they were forty minutes earlier. They could have this conversation for a while and continue to make strong arguments. Pioli gets the final word before they settle and give the kid waiter the tip of his life: “You know, we’ve got to be careful about how much of football loses its soul. Because we got to where we are because we kept the football soul.”
It’s a topic that they will certainly reprise many times in their careers. They are virtually brothers, but some things they just don’t see the same way. There are many times in Atlanta when Dimitroff will listen to the requests of the marketing side, weigh how much time they will take and measure what their impact on the team will be, and then decide to do them. It was one of the things that stood out to Blank during his interview: He had a football mind for building teams, yet he was also able to see all the things that make an organization successful. Pioli can see it, too, even if he sometimes sees it and grimaces.
As they go to leave the restaurant, it turns out they’re not shutting the place down after all. Jones spots Pioli and goes over to give him a hug. “I’m proud of you,” the Cowboys’ owner says. Crennel still is there, too, and they chat with him.
When they step outside, the mission is clear again. They will always have dinner conversations that will go unexpected places. But this is late January, just a few weeks away from draft meetings and the Combine, and they are two GMs whose teams were bounced from the play-offs. They didn’t win anything in Kansas City and Atlanta that they’d be willing to brag about. There’s plenty of work to do.