Non-football help to pick head coach, GM; could it become a trend?
Commanders tap former Warriors GM to aide in football ops, HC search
Every year it seems on Black Monday, the day after the close of the NFL regular season, one of the teams firing its head coach taps an executive recruiter. This year thus far its the woeful Carolina Panthers, which is using Sportsology https://sportsologygroup.com/. Perhaps what is even more interesting is the Washington Commander using former Golden State Warriors GM Bob Myers as a consultant on for its new football operations chief and head coach hires, a rare if not unprecedented cross sport pollination when it comes to on-the-field hires.
First the recruiter. In 2019 when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers hired Korn Ferry to find a new head coach, the Twitter verse took particular umbrage.
“Perhaps the biggest boondoggle in the business of sports,” tweeted former NFL executive Andrew Brandt.
Rich Eisen, the NFL Network host, tweeted, “Why does any NFL team need the help of a headhunting search firm to hire the right coach? It’s not like a team in need of a coach just got dropped into the league from another industry. Or another country.”
In retrospect they might want those back because the Bucs hired Bruce Arians, who would lead the team to a Super Bowl win the next year (yes he did have Tom Brady, no executive consultant could have foreseen that). And I am sure Brandt and Eisen would point out it wasn’t necessary to hire Korn Ferry to find NFL lifer Arians.
Use of executive recruiters is not the norm in the NFL for coaching positions. Typically the team’s owner, his or her advisers, and football operation staff if they haven't been shown the door, counsel on the critical hire. In the days before the NFL became big business, it would have been unheard of to go outside the cloistered football world to hire a suit to advise on who is best to motivate the players and manage the team.
But as the business grew, and owners from the corporate world increasingly came into the league, comfort with executive recruiters became more common. David Tepper, the owner of the Panthers, is a hedge fund billionaire and already used Sportsology to hire a coach for his MLS team. The track record of these executive recruiters are hit or miss, but given up to a quarter of the league changes head coaches each offseason, so is the performance of those teams picking without one.
Thus far, only the Panthers are known to have hired a recruiter in the latest Black Friday cycle. The Commanders move is the most eye opening. There isn’t really an apples to apples comparison, but there are some oranges. In 2014, Panthers then owner Jerry Richardson tapped Jerry West to be around the team to infuse his Hall of Fame mentality into the club. It must have worked as the team went to the Super Bowl the next year.
And the Cleveland Browns in 2016 hired MLB analytics guru Paul DePodesta as chief strategy officer, a post he still holds today (I am sure he would be hard pressed to say his analysis predicted Joe Flacco would come off the couch and save the Browns’ season).
The NFL is a copycat league so if Myers helps land the Commanders in the playoffs in future years, look for other clubs to go outside the gridiron universe for assistance. New Commanders owner Josh Harris, one of whose limited partners is NBA legend Magic Johnson, is undertaking his first NFL coaching search, and he is already doing it differently.
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Big day tomorrow in court for the NFL. In Nevada Supreme Court the league will argue Jon Gruden’s lawsuit against the league belongs in arbitration. Gruden sued the league after the Las Vegas Raiders fired him after racist and homophobic emails he sent years earlier surfaced. Gruden argues the NFL compelled the Raiders to fire him and thus tortiously interfered with his contract. A lower state judge agreed with him last year the case belongs in court, but that decision remains on hold until the higher court rules. Gruden last week filed papers that cited an ESPN article which reported NFL commissioner pressured Raiders owner Mark Davis. In response, the NFL wrote in their own filing, “Respondent is citing the article in an effort to shore up the conclusory allegation in his complaint that `Commissioner Goodell himself directly pressured the Raiders to fire Gruden.’” I’d expect the arguments to be overly technical Wednesday, about arbitration clause language, the NFL constitution, whether Goodell can oversee a fair arbitration process and previous cases. Whatever decision the Supreme Court of Nevada issues, look for it to be appealed again to the federal level.
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Hearing that Jason Wright will be out as Washington Commanders president. That’s not much of a surprise as new owner Josh Harris is going to want his own hires in key positions. We already saw this in his cleaning house on the football side, so it makes sense from the business side as well. Wright is well regarded and deserves a medal for surviving the end of the Dan Snyder regime. I wouldn’t expect him to be a free agent for long.
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Now even the players are complaining about Saturday evenings playoff game exclusively on Peacock (except in the Miami and Kansas City home markets, where it is on free TV) https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/sports/nfl/2024/01/09/peacock-exclusive-stream-dolphins-chiefs-playoff-game-stirs-fan-anger/72162648007/. It’s old hat for viewers to complain about games migrating behind a streaming paywall, but players are a new voice. I hadn't considered they would decry the limited exposure after so much experience with TNF on Amazon Prime. I suspect someone will explain to them that Peacock paid $125 million for the one postseason contest, and about half of that goes to the players.