Two weeks before the draft, Bill Belichick sits at his desk in his Foxboro office and goes over possibilities and strategies. He’s relaxed, and just in case you can’t see that, you can hear it. He’s dialed into the Margaritaville station on satellite radio, with the familiar bass line of “Get Up, Stand Up” resonating off the walls.
If there’s a day when he considers walking away from pro football and throwing himself into another passion, that day won’t come in April. He loves the draft too much, layer by layer and pick by pick. He’s reached an anniversary of sorts this year: It was exactly twenty years ago when he arrived in Cleveland with a grading and scouting idea that has now grown into a grading and scouting system, with general managers in the Midwest and Southeast running some version of it. He refuses to take all the credit, saying that it was Mike Lombardi in Cleveland who helped till the land and it was Scott Pioli in New England who helped cultivate it into what it is today.
What he’s got now, in the NFL, is something collegiate-sounding. He’s got a program. It’s part of the reason that two weeks from now, the Patriots will pick seventeenth and twenty-eighth in the first round, and then pivot for pick 33, the first choice in the second round. Belichick is the rare coach who is operating with the long view, so he’s not always in a hurry to see the player right now; he’ll wait a year or even two years, which is the story with the seventeenth pick, acquired in 2009. Pick 33, which originally belonged to Carolina, was his reward for patience. The Patriots had picks 89 and 90 a year ago; the Panthers wanted 89, and they were willing to pay with their 2011 second-rounder. The result sounds like some Internet scam: Give us the eighty-ninth choice right now and you, my friend, could have a selection as high as 33 one year from now. And all you have to do is … wait for it.
It’s almost one year to the day of that deal, one of many that have shaped how Belichick goes about his draft business. He may have a grading system when it comes to the draft, but he swears that there is no draft formula, unless you consider “do your homework” to be a formula.
“You’ve obviously got your own feelings about players, but you’ve really got to know what the league thinks, too,” he says. “Whether it’s by numbers, like which positions have depth, or by players, like identifying who the risers are and what players are in free-fall. All of that information affects your decisions. Especially if you know a team or teams are after a certain player. It doesn’t even matter which team it is. You just know there’s a certain guy teams are trying to climb to get. Well, if you’re in position for that player and you don’t really want him, then, you know, you have a market.”
On the flip side, sometimes you want a player and you perceive the rest of the league wants him, too. It can lead to a case of overdrafting, or picking a player too high, which Belichick admits the Patriots did in 2009.
“Sebastian Vollmer is a good example,” he says of the Patriots’ starting right tackle, one of the team’s four second-rounders in ’09. “There’s no way he was really a second-round pick. Based on film or really based on the player he was at the end of the ’08 season. You know, East-West game and all that. You took him betting on improvement and upside. We knew that there was an undertow of Vollmer. And it was just the question of, ‘When’s this guy going to go?’
“He should have been a fourth-or fifth-round pick, by the film, by his performance. But you saw him as an ascending player and he had rare size, and there were a lot of things that you had to fix and all that. But it was clear the league liked him. Now, the question is always, ‘How much do they like him and where are they willing to buy?’ I’m sure for some teams it was the fourth round. For some teams it was the third round. But we just said, ‘Look, we really want this guy. This is too high to pick him, but if we wait we might not get him, so we’re just going to step up and take him.’
“And sometimes when you do that you’re right and sometimes when you do that you’re wrong and everybody looks at you like, ‘Damn, you could have had him in the fourth.’”
The upcoming draft will be Belichick’s seventeenth as a head coach, his twelfth with the Patriots. Over the years, his teams have had a sampling of enough first-round positions to qualify them for a draft lotto: 2, 6, 9, 9, 10, 13, 14, 21, 24, and, of course, 32. His penchant for draft-day deals has put his teams in draft slots that belie their success. After their last Super Bowl appearance, in February 2008, they held the seventh overall pick and after a trade down picked tenth. They had the best record in football last season, 14–2, yet they have multiple picks woven into the early rounds of the 2011 draft, which will allow them to be the team most capable of steering it in their favor.
Belichick remembers all the drafts, through and through, without notes or media guides. He remembers the time, in 2003, when he started to panic. The Patriots held pick 14, the Bears were on the clock, and just one of New England’s desired defensive linemen was on the board. Belichick had a feeling that the Bears would take a defensive lineman, too, and he didn’t think it would be his guy, Ty Warren. But he wasn’t sure.
He called Bears GM Jerry Angelo, an old friend, and asked if he wanted to move the pick. He was offering a sixth-rounder to move up one spot. Angelo asked what he was coming up to get.
“A defensive lineman,” he said.
“Well, we’re taking a defensive lineman, too.”
“I know you are,” Belichick said. “But if we’re not coming to get your guy, it’s basically a free sixth.”
They danced for a few seconds, trying to see who would actually mention a name first. Finally, Belichick said, “We want Ty Warren.” And Angelo said, “We want Michael Haynes.” They made the deal anyway.
Belichick has seen enough drafts unfold that he has been able to pick up a general pattern of what each round represents.
“The first-rounders are the guys, obviously, with the fewest questions. In the second round, a lot of times you find players with first-round talent but not first-round performance or production, if you will,” he says. “Then in the third round, you see guys who are maybe better football players than a lot of guys in the second round, but not as maybe overall talented, in terms of measurements. So I think there’s a certain bust factor, if you will, in the second round. That’s just in general.”
He’s been around long enough to have specific examples from his own teams.
“In last year’s draft, Brandon Spikes was a good football player who didn’t run well and didn’t test particularly well, but he’s probably a better football player than a lot of guys that were taken in the second round ahead of him who tested well, who had more upside but produced less on the field than he did,” Belichick says, referring to his young inside linebacker. “I’d say that’s fairly common. In the second round, you’re more likely to say, ‘Let’s get somebody fast. Let’s get a Bethel Johnson or a Mike Wallace.’ Okay, well, one of those guys works out and one of them doesn’t. Neither one of them was any big deal in college.
“You want that speed. Or if you want that kind of upside, you want that kind of potential, then that’s where you’ve got to take it, because it’s not going to be there in the third round, generally speaking. Those players, if you don’t take them somebody else is going to take them. I’m not saying a guy who just goes out and works out. I’m saying a guy who’s got a lot of stuff going for him as a player but not enough to really buy early.
“You know, Ben Watson. Thirty-second pick. He’s practically a second-round pick. Now, if he had played to his ability in college he would have gone in the middle of the first round. But he didn’t, so you hope you can generate that out of him. Then you have an All-Pro tight end. But in the end, he played in the pros about like he played in college.”
Watson was drafted in 2004 because of his size and speed. He played six seasons with the Patriots, with his best production coming in a forty-nine-catch third season. His signature play featured a different kind of catch, though. He ran from the goal line, crossed the field, and then ran the entire length of the field to catch cornerback Champ Bailey and prevent him from scoring on a hundred-yard-plus interception return. The Patriots lost that playoff game in Denver, but people still talk about that play. Watson left New England after the 2009 season and currently plays for the Browns.
Even now, still a week away from the final positioning of the Patriots’ board and fifteen days from the start of the draft itself, Belichick senses emerging plans and information that will help him in the draft room. He thinks he’s got a handle on who this year’s tumbler is: Clemson defensive end Da’Quan Bowers, who has scared off a lot of teams with his microfracture knee surgery. He notices that many teams have visited with quarterbacks and seem prepared to draft them early, a move that will help the Patriots because it will help push down more good players that they want. He also envisions a pack of players, likely selected in the 15 to 40 range, who have similar value.
“I think some teams are going to look up at that board in the first round, see where they’ve ranked their players, and say, ‘Okay, well, here’s our guy. He’s still there. Let’s go get him.’ Whereas to me the reality of it is that guy’s packed in with a bunch of other guys and it’s just a question of how the league ranks them,” he says. “This year it’s all jumbled, so when you say, ‘That’s our number one guy … three guys have gone ahead of him, he’s still there.’ Well, that’s because he’s probably still there on ten other boards, too.
“It’s the dynamics of each year as the whole thing gets put together and there’s no real—I don’t think there’s any real formula to it. You’ve just got to do your homework and then as things happen during the draft be able to put it together.”
Anyone who has ever worked with Belichick understands how much of an emphasis he places on being prepared. They also have been told, time and again, that what he wants to know about players is how they will help the Patriots. That’s all that matters. So if Vollmer is drafted in the second round and the talking heads on TV say it’s a reach, it’s irrelevant. His mission is always to help the Patriots, and sometimes the swings have connected and sometimes they’ve become Bethel Johnson and Chad Jackson.
What you do is gather all the information that you can, listen to a number of opinions, and then do what you believe is right. One thousand miles away, in Atlanta, that’s what one of the men who used to work for him has been doing for the last month.
Only a few people know what Thomas Dimitroff has been thinking about in the last three and a half weeks. He wants to move out of the Falcons’ first-round pick, number 27, and get the team in position to draft either Julio Jones of Alabama or A. J. Green, the kid from just down the road at Georgia. Both players are wide receivers and top-ten talents, so the jump from 27 to, say, 4 or 6 will be a pricey one.
Talent is not an issue.
When asked to compare Jones and Green, Lionel Vital quickly gets to the point.
“Green is Randy Moss,” he says. “Jones is Terrell Owens.”
When Les Snead is asked, his answer differs slightly.
“When you turn on the film, Green reminds you of a better-route-running, just-as-fast Randy Moss,” he says. “He plays fast and has that great body control. With Julio, I think you’re looking at a better Michael Irvin. He’s just a strong human being. Both of those guys are going early. They’re both starting receivers in this league.”
Dimitroff doesn’t need convincing. He’s already made several exploratory phone calls. He initially thought of playing a bit of draft leapfrog, where he would call a team like Washington, which holds pick 16. He would then take 16 and make another move to the top ten. But it’s the equivalent of buying two one-way tickets when a round-trip flight is the cheaper and more efficient way to go. So he’s made calls to teams residing at the top of the draft, calling Denver at 2, and he’s worked his way down to San Francisco at 7.
Two friends of his in the business, Tom Heckert and Trent Baalke, are representatives of picks 6 and 7. Heckert and the Browns have pick 6 and Baalke and the 49ers are right after them at 7. Dimitroff is trying to discern what it will take to move up twenty or twenty-one spots, and the answer to the question won’t come for a while. Throughout the process, he’s up-front with Heckert, who wants to know if he’s talked with Baalke, and he’s honest with Baalke, who wants to know if he’s talked with Heckert.
“It’s important to have candid conversations with people you can trust,” Dimitroff says. “It saves a lot of time because you’re able to talk compensation without going through the feeling-out process.”
But there is a process, and it’s in-house. Arthur Blank supports Dimitroff’s idea, but in the spirit of collaborative business, Blank wants him to talk it over with people outside of personnel. It’s yet another example of how different Atlanta is from New England. Belichick would be taken aback if team owner Robert Kraft asked him to share his trading plans with multiple people in the organization. It might even be a deal breaker. Belichick knows what he wants, and he has many assistants, from linebackers coach Matt Patricia to veteran offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia, whom he can go to for advice. With that said, sometimes he tells them what he’s up to and sometimes he doesn’t. Blank’s suggestion to Dimitroff doesn’t come from lack of confidence or disrespect; it comes from the Home Depot. In the business that made him billions, Blank had gotten used to an organizational structure in which everyone, including himself and Bernie Marcus, was available to be challenged if an idea seemed to be too bold or even reckless. It didn’t mean that those working under them had veto power, but there was always the possibility that a raised point would at least act as a speed bump.
After working with Blank for three years, Dimitroff understands him. The two are so friendly that when they tried, without an agent, to renegotiate Dimitroff’s contract a couple months earlier, they abruptly stopped. They had gone for Italian food one night, and when they talked about the parameters of a deal at dinner, it didn’t feel right. They decided that they wanted a new contract to be done, but they didn’t want to bring negotiating into their relationship. That led to the potentially odd situation of Dimitroff’s agent trying to make a deal with Rich McKay, the Falcons’ president, whom Dimitroff succeeded as general manager. It quickly became a nonissue, as Dimitroff’s original contract, which was well below the $1.2 million average annual salary for GMs, swelled to one of the best deals among league executives.
Blank didn’t know Dimitroff before he hired him; he’s gotten to know him better since working with him, but perhaps this proposed deal the GM wants to do is most revealing about who he is. The fact is, no one in the organization or community is pressuring him to do a deal. They’re comfortable with him. He’s brought a steadiness to Atlanta that the Falcons have never seen, with their thirty-three wins in his three seasons representing the best forty-eight-game stretch in franchise history. In town, corporations are willing to pay top dollar for him to speak. He and Angeline belong to a church, Peachtree Presbyterian, where the pastor sometimes mentions him by name during sermons. He has great relationships with local and national media members, who praise him for his accessibility and thoughtfulness.
It’s comfortable. But that’s not his goal. If he wanted to be a general manager who collects checks and carefully protects the job he has, he’d never even dream of dealing for Jones or Green. What’s the point? Why make yourself a target when no one else is making you a target? Because of all his other interests, which take him from bike paths to snow-covered mountains, people sometimes overlook a humble confidence that comes from being born into a football family. His father was never about retreating. He attacked. Sometimes the elder Tom Dimitroff did that too much, like the time in Canada when he felt a player was being too mouthy and too disrespectful, so he just popped him. Right in the kisser. His youngest child subscribed to a newer school and had a different temperament, but he wasn’t afraid to fully dive into something seen as unconventional and, in the eyes of some, foolish.
Dimitroff is not insulted by Blank’s insistence that he listen to more voices before trading into the top ten, but he is nervous that too many people with knowledge of the plan will cause a media leak. It doesn’t happen. Soon, all sides of football operations are tuned in to what could be happening on draft day. The people in the know include Vital, Snead, and college scouting director Dave Caldwell; pro scouts Ran Carthon and DeJuan Polk, whose early research shows that the Falcons will be left with a player such as Wisconsin tackle Gabe Carimi if they stay at 27; and members of Mike Smith’s coaching staff, including offensive coordinator Mike Mularkey and receivers coach Terry Robiskie.
Even as the Falcons continue to think in terms of acquiring either player, stories of Jones’s competitiveness are popping up in, of all places, Kansas City. The Chiefs had the receiver in for a visit, and he and head coach Todd Haley began going in depth on a couple subjects. Haley has coached two Hall of Fame—caliber receivers in Terrell Owens and Larry Fitzgerald, and one just a notch below that level in Keyshawn Johnson. Haley quickly fell for Jones, and what may have sealed it was a challenge.
“We started talking about Ping-Pong and how I love to play,” Haley says. “I have a table at my house. When he found that out, he wanted to skip lunch and drive to the house instead so we could see who was the best. He just had that confidence about him. I remember Keyshawn was like that: Tell him that the game was in the parking lot and he’d be there.”
A couple months earlier in Indianapolis, Jones blew away league evaluators when he decided to run, even though doctors had discovered a small fracture in his foot. He had planned to sit out, but the competitive atmosphere got the best of him and he turned in a torrid workout, which included a sub-4.4-second performance in the forty-yard dash.
The more the Falcons study him and hear about him, the more they like him. Their scouting department has given him the same grade, 8.0, that they had on Matt Ryan in the spring of 2008. The only thing left for the organization to do is go see him, one-on-one, in Alabama.
There are times to take an SUV for a quick trip to a neighboring state, and this is not one of them. Dimitroff, Smith, Mularkey, Robiskie, Snead, Vital, and Caldwell are able to make themselves comfortable, easily, on the owner’s G4 jet for the short trip to Tuscaloosa. The plane says a lot about Blank. While it has top-of-the-line finishes and was smartly designed by Blank’s wife, Stephanie, who has a passion for interior design, there is no Falcons logo to be found on the aircraft. When Dimitroff once asked Blank the reason for that, he replied that it was important to be stylish but not ostentatious. He just didn’t believe that a Falcons logo on the plane was in good taste.
The lack of an emblem certainly doesn’t affect the ride for the Falcons’ party. They were in Atlanta one moment and standing in the lobby of the Hotel Capstone the next. When they see Jones, it’s hard to remember that they are visiting with a receiver. He’s built as if he moonlights as a bronze sculpture. He’s six feet two inches and every bit of 220 pounds, his muscles perpetually flexed, seemingly just as capable of punishing as being punished. On this day, briefly, he’s also annoyed.
He has met with many teams already, and all of them have a more realistic shot of drafting him than the Falcons. He has a look on his face that seems to ask the obvious question: How in hell do you expect to move from the late twenties to the single digits? With your draft picks and someone else’s?
The meeting with Jones quickly turns pleasant. Atlanta’s former college director, Phil Emery, described Jones as a “joy to be around” and someone who had “moxie” and Jones displays those qualities for the Falcons. At one point Mularkey asks him about a negative play he saw on film. Jones acknowledges the play and then promises the offensive coordinator, “Listen, I will kill that guy.”
He handles himself well when ribbed and tested by Robiskie, who has seen it all in thirty years of coaching and has a son, Brian, playing receiver in the NFL. The younger Robiskie is a member of the Browns, one of the teams Jones has heard is in the market for him. But as the coaches have their conversations with Jones, Dimitroff’s mind has wandered and he’s decided that there’s no way Jones will be playing in Cleveland or anywhere else but Atlanta. He thinks about the times during the regular season when defenses would get creative and tilt their coverages to Roddy White. He imagines the challenges of a team having to deal with White and Jones and Tony Gonzalez.
“This is no disrespect to Mike Jenkins, because he’s a damn good receiver,” Dimitroff says later. “But I’ve always been intrigued with the prospect of having a one and one-A with Roddy and someone like Julio.”
It’s what he thought about in October when he stood in his office and stared at what were just numbers and names on a board. He thought about it many times during the season, and even after with the scouting trips to Mobile and Indianapolis. But just as Blank believes that you get what you pay for, and therefore gets the finest material for his suits and high-quality finishes around his home, the same is true to a degree in the NFL. There’s a heavy price to move up, yet there’s no guarantee that the player will be as great as you project.
When Dimitroff talks to Heckert again, he’s got an idea of what the move will cost: He’ll obviously have to exchange 27 for 6, but he’ll have to include next year’s first-round pick, a second and fourth in 2011, and a fourth in 2012. He weighs the player vs. the pain of the compensation. He can live without the fours. The exchange of 27 for 6 is the obvious cost of doing business. But the 1 and 2 will sting. He says will sting because he’s going to do it.
Leading up to the draft, he goes back and forth with Heckert: Will you do the deal even if a player unexpectedly slips to you at 6? Will you do the deal if a player unexpectedly comes off the board? Each time the answer is yes. The Atlanta Falcons and Dimitroff are going to make a bold play for the top of the draft, a move that won’t be endorsed by one of the voices in the business that Dimitroff respects the most.