Attack of SPYTEK and the GM Clones!

NFL Divisional – The Minnesota Vikings could be getting a whole lot cooler very soon: they interviewed Buccaneers executive John Spytek for their vacant general manager position on Monday.

That’s right: SPYTEK. The Vikings might be purchasing a general manager from the Sharper Image catalog. No more throwing money at Kirk Cousins and hoping for the best. Spytek will bug every other team’s boardroom and hack military satellites for footage of Packers practices, and he’ll do it all while playing baccarat in Monte Carlo and wearing tactical slacks. With a name like Spytek, he’s gotta be a regular Bluetooth Belichick.

Have a look at Spytek. OK, maybe he’s no Daniel Craig, but he’s definitely GM material:

We have completed an interview with Buccaneers Vice President of Player Personnel John Spytek for our open General Manager position.

📰: https://t.co/1EXhtqoZPJ pic.twitter.com/5jqhRDneXC

— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) January 17, 2022

Now compare him to fellow GM candidate Adam Peters, who interviewed with the Giants at about the same time as Spytek infiltrated Vikings headquarters:

We have completed a GM interview with 49ers Assistant General Manager Adam Peters

Details: https://t.co/7LfEsyJISG pic.twitter.com/u95SsNYsmz

— New York Giants (@Giants) January 17, 2022

Peters may have to look elsewhere, however, because the Giants are hot-‘n’-heavy on Joe Schoen:

We have completed a GM interview with Bills Assistant GM Joe Schoen

Details: https://t.co/qfdM6qWHyU pic.twitter.com/VADz3LUrGd

— New York Giants (@Giants) January 12, 2022

And let’s not forget leading Bears candidate Eliot Wolf, who loved the guy who gave him his first NFL break so much that he called him “dad: “

Bears to interview Patriots consultant Eliot Wolf for GM job Tuesday (per @RapSheet)https://t.co/tZAwap7uLb pic.twitter.com/v1FYWHYOZ1

— Around The NFL (@AroundTheNFL) January 17, 2022

If those photos have you wondering, the Rooney Rule now requires teams to interview two minority candidates for any vacant GM position, so the handful of front office lieutenants who don’t look like their ancestors sailed over on the Mayflower will be very busy over the next week or so, and one or two might even end up getting an offer! The Vikings, for example, interviewed Eagles Director of Player Personnel Brandon Brown during what is becoming a comprehensive search. Still, the demographics of the top GM candidates are rather predictable.

Comparing the merits of these nearly identical deputies is fruitless. Spytek rose through the Buccaneers ranks and became a hot candidate about the same time that Tom Brady showed up. Peters has been John Lynch’s right-hand man for the 49ers for a few years; before that, he was the Broncos director of college scouting at around the time that Peyton Manning showed up. Schoen has been so instrumental to the Bills success over the last three years that his name was never mentioned in the media until he showed up atop the GM candidate wish list. Schoen worked for Bill Parcells’ Dolphins staff, which is why John Mara is sending paratroopers to camp out on his front lawn with suitcases full of money.

Determining which individual scouting or personnel success each of these candidates might have been responsible for at past stops is impossible and irrelevant. The GM promotion game is part apprenticeship, part patronage system, with a little bit of cagey behind-the-scenes self-promotion and a dash of wishful thinking sprinkled on top. Spytek has a recent Super Bowl ring, Schoen a Letter of Introduction with Parcells’ seal on it, Wolf a Hall of Fame legacy, so they get the interviews. Any front office that enjoys reasonable success and stability for a few years begins shedding spores like these to populate the weaker organizations. It’s like asexual reproduction, which helps explain why everyone looks alike.

The alternatives to hiring some young 40-something wearing an old school necktie who slow-cooked in some other team’s front office are all unappealing:

Give the coach personnel control: Coach will then hire his own suit-filler, who is likely to be far less qualified than the fellows above.

Hire from within: Then why fire the last guy?

Seek out a veteran GM: The John Dorsey/Dave Gettleman approach is a great way to build the sort of roster that would have competed for the Super Bowl 15 years ago.

Mike Mayock: Selecting players is harder than talking about them on television. Who knew?

Front office assistant roles are essentially administrative desk jobs with little more glamor than a managerial role at an accounting firm. Execs such as Spytek don’t really grind film while biting the eraser off a pencil in a darkened draft war room. (Who’s that Eastern Michigan left guard? Rewind. Magnify. ENHANCE.) They don’t drive across the prairie in rental cars to pry secrets from a college conditioning coach over a Whataburger. They sure as hell aren’t shouting “That’s our final offer!” to Jerry Jones and theatrically slamming the phone down on their desks. They spend their long days collating scouting reports, trading emails and phone calls with the agents for street free agents, negotiating boilerplate contracts with fifth-round picks, and attending endless meetings about things such as the budget and next week’s private workout schedule.

Mastering the daily tedium of an NFL front office is important, because rosters aren’t built by just circling names on mock drafts and free-agent lists. But a mastery of tedium does not automatically translate to brilliant big-picture decision-making. Typically, it only translates to a glowing recommendation from the big-picture decision-makers.

Anyway, Spytek, Peters, and Schoen will probably be fine, in part because the bureaucracies through which they all climbed guarantee a baseline level of professionalism and competence. The organizations that spend decades in the gutter usually have meddlesome owners (Browns, Washington), take the coach-as-savior route a little too often (Jaguars, Browns, Washington, Raiders, Panthers soon), or change regimes so constantly and suddenly (Browns, Jets) that their front-office infrastructure never really coalesces. All a team must do is grab a guy who knows how to push the papers around and can avoid doing anything patently stupid. After that, central tendency, the league’s parity-loving slingshot mechanics, and the vaunted “process” will keep any franchise buoyed around .500.

Yes, I keep saying “fellow” or “guy.” In addition to Spytek, the Vikings also interviewed Eagles Vice President of Football Operations Catherine Rache, who if hired would become the first female GM in the NFL since Susan Tose Spencer (former team owner Leonard Tose’s daughter) was the Eagles general manager in the mid-1980s.

Rache rose up through the CFL ranks and has worked in both personnel and cap management capacities. She also practiced law in Canada, which is the sort of thing that can come in handy when making decisions in the modern NFL. It makes sense that the lone female GM candidate took an alternative route to her position, since the main route is clogged by men who look suspiciously like the men who hired them. There are female executives scattered around the org charts of many franchises, but most are shunted far from personnel departments, lest the manly men who sit around discussing salary cap budgets and the interview results of sixth-round prospects get cooties.

Rache deserves her opportunity as much as any young exec. But it probably won’t come from the Vikings. They may be cool enough to hire someone named Spytek. But they aren’t that cool.

New Methods for Firing Old Coaches

NFL teams used to simply call the head coach into the owner’s office on Black Monday, tell him the bad news, let him address the lads before they cleaned out their lockers, and then watch him ride off into the sunset. But the league’s more dysfunctional organizations decided to get a little more innovative this year.

Las Vegas Raiders Method
Leave Nick Bisaccia twisting in the wind while firing Mike Mayock and lining up interviews with Bisaccia’s replacement. Hey, he’s just an “interim” coach anyway, right? No reason to keep him in the loop when there’s a slim chance the next GM and head coach will want to send Bisaccia back to his special teams coordinator’s office in the broom closet behind the weight room. Now that’s how you treat someone who has devoted 40 years to college and pro football, Mark Davis. Daddy would be proud! (Daddy is probably trying to figure out how to wrangle a lightning bolt from the clouds to strike Davis’ Mercedes moments before he climbs in as a warning shot.)

Houston Texans Method
Spend a week “evaluating” David Culley before firing him. In other words, spend a week watching Jack Easterbonnet make paper-clip chains at his desk and stall like the sales manager at a used car dealership in an elaborate pantomime of looking “thorough” and “careful,” because that’s what he thinks real team executives do. Then round up the old Patriots assistants, starting with Brian Flores, who if hired would burst the bubble of relatively good vibes Culley used to shield the locker room from Easterbunny’s prickly life guru routine in about three seconds.

New York Giants Method
Call Joe Judge in for an exit interview, but don’t make it clear that it’s an exit interview, to him or to yourself:

JOHN MARA: I’m afraid of change.

JOE JUDGE: I’m a barking lunatic.

JOHN MARA: I don’t want to appear impatient.

JOE JUDGE: Did I ever tell you about how Bill Belichick was nearly fired in 2018, but I saved him by convincing the team not to quit on him?

JOHN MARA: Let me hear your vision for our GM search, because I ran out of ideas 20 years ago and also have a profound instinct for subtle cruelty.

JOE JUDGE: My dog could be the GM! We can wrap him in a cute little Giants scarf and teach him to use a cellphone, just like we did with Dave.

JOHN MARA: Yeah, this isn’t working out.

JOE JUDGE: Sorry. Only my dog has the power to fire me.

Dallas Cowboys Method
A variation on the old toxic boyfriend approach: don’t fire Mike McCarthy, but publicly criticize him, growl at him constantly, and generally neg him in the hope that he gets fed up and dumps you first. It didn’t work on Jason Garrett, so heaven knows it ain’t gonna work on Admiral Dayspa.

Arizona Cardinals Method
To be determined.

Blame Canada
Wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster and offensive coordinator Matt Canada are the canaries in the Pittsburgh Steelers coal mine. As they go, so goes the Steelers rebuilding plan.

Smith-Schuster is a free agent. He appeared to be a superstar in the making after going 111-1,425-7 in his second season in 2018 but has since tailed off and missed most of this year with a shoulder injury, returning for five uneventful catches in the wild-card loss to the Chiefs. JuJu has been gushing lately about his desire to return to Pittsburgh, but it’s not clear if the organization’s feeling is mutual. The Steelers tend to lock down any player they wish to keep in the final year of their contract: never before and rarely after.

Canada inherited the thankless task of trying to build an offense around a quarterback who could no longer run or throw but was also immune from any form of local-media criticism, and he was expected to do so with an untested hodge-podge of offensive linemen. Canada’s offense looked comically bad for much of the year, and he became the blame magnet for anyone who talked themselves into believing that Ben Roethlisberger “still had it,” including a surprisingly large percentage of the Steelers fanbase and their media enablers.

Some Pittsburgh media members really have it in for Canada, who is apparently responsible for Diontae Johnson’s dropped passes and the feeble Steelers run defense, among other things. But again: it’s illegal to criticize the Steelers defense west of the Susquehanna River, where the clocks all stopped in 1977. Criticizing receivers is just fine—Smith-Schuster and Chase Claypool are both in constant danger of being branded as Antonio Brown Extra Lite every time they make a mistake, speak out of turn, or get too active on Instagram—but Canada is the people’s scapegoat right now.

Canada may or may not deserve a second chance in Pittsburgh: it’s impossible to evaluate his performance under such hopeless circumstances. Most organizations would toss him to the wolves, but Mike Tomlin and the Steelers tend to err on the side of patience and prefer an orderly succession among coordinators: Canada rose from his quarterbacks coach role to replace Randy Fichtner, who rose up from his quarterbacks coach role to replace Todd Haley. Current quarterback coach Mike Sullivan served as an offensive coordinator for Ben McAdoo’s Giants and Greg Schiano’s Buccaneers and was Army’s football recruiting director when the Steelers called. Sullivan is a consigliere for an old quarterback, not a candidate to step up and thoroughly rebuild an offense. Tomlin was characteristically tight-lipped about Canada’s status during Tuesday’s end-of-year press conference.

If the Steelers replace Canada with someone outside the organization, it’s a sign that they are heading for a sweeping-change rebuild. Under those circumstances, they’re certain to let Smith-Schuster walk as a free agent. Retaining Canada, on the other hand, would be evidence that the franchise thinks it can turn things around relatively quickly. That perception would be reinforced if they tag Smith-Schuster or try to lock him down before he hits the market, giving them a receiving corps they could win with while a quarterback develops.

I think the Steelers need a thorough rebuild: they must replace Roethlisberger, most of the offensive line, and large swatches of the secondary and interior defense. Their draft-and-develop plan has not churned out enough quality starters over the last few seasons and, yes, the coaching staff could probably use some fresh voices and ideas.

The Steelers organization often sees things differently, as do the players themselves. Diontae Johnson endorsed Mason Rudolph to be the team’s quarterback of the future earlier in the week, and there are other rumblings which suggest that the rarely impressive four-year veteran will get a shot.

Imagine Canada calling plays for Rudolph next year, with Johnson and Smith-Schuster dropping some of the few passes that actually reach them. Steelers fans’ only coping strategy will involve basement shrines to T.J. Watt.

A Canada-/Rudolph-/JuJu-centered rebuilding in Pittsburgh is unlikely. But we won’t know the direction the Steelers are actually heading toward until they start making their first big offseason decisions.