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Mike Borgonzi of the Chiefs & Joe Schoen of the Bills are my favorites because of the rosters they've put together.Originally posted by Xenos View PostComment
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Here's an interesting article about Edd Dodds of the Colts. He's definitely intense.Originally posted by ghost View Post
'You gotta be relentless. You can’t stop. I don’t': Colts assistant GM Ed Dodds won't settle for...
Zak Keefer
11-13 minutes
He was pissed off, tired of all the attention they were getting, tired of hearing how good they were and how great they were gonna be. The room needed some truth, some leveling, so eight days after it ended, emotions still raw, weeks and months of grueling work ahead, the damn Patriots punching another trip to the Super Bowl on the TV screen a few feet away, Ed Dodds gathered his scouts inside a bar in Mobile, Ala., and gave it to them.
“We ain’t done shit yet,” the Colts assistant general manager told them. “We won a fucking wild-card game.”
You don’t get trophies for AFC wild-card games, and Dodds didn’t come to Indianapolis to win wild-card games. But two years in, anyone could see: the rebuild was working. The Colts had flipped 4-12 into 10-6, won a playoff game and had a roster stocked with young talent. The pundits couldn’t help but praise. The Colts were coming. Soon.
But Dodds didn’t wanna hear it, and didn’t want his scouts thinking it. If there’s anything that scares the hell out of him, it’s complacency. He fears it. Fights it. To him it just felt like it needed to be said, then and there, the night before they went to work at the Senior Bowl in late January, the unofficial kickoff to an exhaustive three-month stretch that would ready the entire personnel department for that spring’s draft. So he lit into them.
“I just felt like everyone was jacked, we’re on this win streak, and I’m kinda like, what the fuck does it matter?” Dodds said a few months later. “If we don’t go to a Super Bowl, so what? A couple of injuries, bomb a couple of draft picks, no one in the pipeline to replace the players you lost? You gotta be relentless. You can’t stop. I don’t.”
Dodds has done this for a decade and a half, so he knows. He cut his teeth in Oakland, learning from Al Davis that B.S. won’t get you far in this league.
“With Mr. Davis, you learned quickly,” Dodds explains, “that if you don’t know the answer to a question, just say you don’t know and take your ass-beating right there. Don’t guess.”
His next stop was Seattle, where he climbed from low-level scout to front-office Swiss Army knife, helping build a monster that came a yard short of two straight Vince Lombardi Trophies.
Then, in the winter of 2017, the call came, the call he knew was coming. His friend of 25 years, Chris Ballard, needed help reviving the Colts.
Twenty-seven months in and Dodds’ fingerprints are all over Indy’s staggering turnaround, from the late-night claim of undrafted corner Kenny Moore to the free-agent push of line-wrecker Denico Autry.
He’s become known as one of the sharpest talent evaluators in football.
“A scout at heart,” more than one league source calls him.
Most figure he’ll end up a GM, and soon. Dodds, just 39, doesn’t blink when you ask about the next step – the biggest step. He knows it’s coming. He’s also not in a big hurry.
“You’re gonna get one chance to do it,” he said. “And I don’t wanna do it until I’m overprepared.”
But that decision will have to wait. The Colts aren’t there yet. All they’ve done is win a f***ing wild-card game.
“We’re not gonna just walk in and think we’re done,” Dodds said. “I’ve seen too many teams and places, like, you sense it, ‘OK, we’ve arrived, we had a good year.’ They just kind of sit on their laurels. Like, no, you gotta keep going. We’re gonna keep going.”
He grew up around the game, tagging along with his dad to practices at Texas A&M-Kingsville, which was just down the road. As a teenage intern in Oakland, he made coffee and fetched copies and tried to stay out of Al Davis’ doghouse. By the end of his four-year run with the Raiders, he was one of the few staffers Davis let in the weight room with him. They’d talk every day. Dodds watched and listened and mostly kept his mouth shut.
As a grunt on the coaching staff in Kingsville, he spent game days in plywood press boxes, trying to calm down the fiery defensive coordinator. Ballard rarely listened.
One memory: Tight game, fourth quarter, and they need a stop to seal the win. They don’t get it. While the opponent’s video crew is cheering wildly a few feet away, Ballard is fuming.
“He throws a chair against a wall,” Dodds remembers, chuckling at the memory, “and tells them not to cheer or clap anymore, otherwise he was gonna make them stop. Then he sat down next to me and said, ‘Well, I’ll probably hear from the NCAA on that one.’
“And he tells me I’m too emotional sometimes.”
As an area scout scouring south Texas for talent, he learned to be blunt with prospects – “if I don’t like a guy, I tell him why,” Dodds vows – and in Seattle he watched John Schneider build and Pete Carroll lead. Dodds found a home, climbing to the role of senior personnel executive by the time the Seahawks were making two straight Super Bowls. Teams would call, begging to interview Dodds, and Schneider would turn them down.
But when Ballard did, Schneider knew he couldn’t. These two, they went back two decades, back to plywood press boxes in Kingsville. Ballard had told Dodds for years that if he ever got the chance to run a team, he wanted him there with him. Here it was.
“You have to at least give me an opportunity to counter,” Schneider told him. Dodds nodded.
He flew to Indianapolis, he interviewed, then he told his friend to wait. Dodds mulled his options on the flight back to Seattle. The building’s not very impressive, he thought. The roster needs a lot of work. That place has a ways to go.
He’s right – it did. The defense was old, the QB hurt, the depth thin. The Colts were a mess. Dodds wrestled with the decision for over a week: Leave a good thing in Seattle, working for a boss he loved and a coach he admired, and move to Indianapolis, where a fresh start and mammoth challenge awaited? When he returned to Seattle, he told Schneider he was torn.
Colts assistant GM Ed Dodds in the team’s war room during the 2019 NFL Draft. (Courtesy of Indianapolis Colts)
“Let’s go have a beer,” Schneider told him.
The more they talked, the more Dodds couldn’t shake these two words from his mind. It’s what Carroll told his players every day:
Always compete. Always compete. Always compete.
It’s the third day of training camp and Dodds is lugging around a bulky knee brace on the sideline like he’s a fifth-string safety coming off an ACL tear. Old football injury? Nah. Dodds didn’t play a down of college ball, something he regrets to this day.
“Pickup basketball game back in Kingsville,” he said, shaking his head. “Hurts if I stand on it too long.”
He’s got a cushy office at the Colts’ West 56th St. facility he never uses; he prefers grinding out most of the season on the road, seeing prospects in person, chatting with coaches face-to-face – a scout at heart, remember. As soon as the season ends, the entire staff shifts into draft mode, huddling at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, then the combine in Indy, then breaking off to hit pro days across the country.
In the four months leading up to the draft, Dodds lives in the film room. His staff rips off 17 straight 12-hour workdays in February, poring through thousands of hours of tape, whittling each position down from hundreds to dozens. They do 15 straight more in April as the draft inches closer. It’s demanding, it’s exhaustive, it’s necessary. Dodds loves it. It’s his favorite part of the job.
“You always talk about how players miss the locker room?” he said. “Well, that’s our locker room. We get pissed off with one another. We laugh and joke with one another. We bond in there.”
That’s one thing Dodds loves about Indy: the staff Ballard has put together. Get him going, and he’ll rave about everyone who shuffles into that draft room, from the area scouts (“those guys kick-ass”) to head coach Frank Reich (“he’s phenomenal”) to the Colts’ analytics experts, John Park and George Li.
“John will make you feel stupid,” Dodds said, “and George has forgotten more about football than I’ll ever know.”
The risk Dodds took two years ago? It worked. Competing worked. The Colts are coming, coming soon, and he’s one of the biggest reasons why. You won’t see him behind the microphone, you won’t read his name in the headlines, but in two years on the job, Ballard’s No. 2 has quietly and effectively helped construct one of the best young rosters in the NFL.
Next up: Win more than a f***ing wild-card game.
A week after the divisional playoff loss in Kansas City, this is what Dodds told his scouts before his candid closing words: “We’re all tired. We’ve all been out a bunch. We all got shit going on, but lemme tell you: it’s gonna be worth it.”
He’s lived it. He knows. The way Ed Dodds sees it, there’s only one barometer in this league.
If you don’t go to a Super Bowl, so what?Comment
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TT has had horrible luck at drafting OL. I like him as a person, appreciate that he was less drama than AJ Smith especially when there were contract disputes. And he drafted Herbert so kudos to him. But it's time to clean house.Originally posted by ghost View Post
Sidenote: I love that even when the Spanos bring someone like Ron Wolf to help with the process of hiring GM, things still don't end well.Comment
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We've now witnessed 8 years of bad special teams play.
This Co-GM thing of John Spanos and Tom Telesco must end.
John: I'm a big boy.
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Great article Xenos
thanks
Dodds impressesG-Ro knows.Comment
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Wow - an old tweet of mine!Originally posted by ghost View Post
I don't think the John Spanos thing will ever end no matter who the GM is - what else is he going to do?Comment
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That is an old tweet of yours
2017
coolG-Ro knows.Comment
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Schoen would probably bring Daboll -Originally posted by ghost View Post
Dodds - who knows, Eberflus with him
I still think if Telesco is let go - Riddick involved as GM. Jeremiah also has a lot of knowledge about the team.
I liked the GM choices from Popper better than his HC candidatesComment
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Dodds scares me!
I like to be scared.....
Plus, we use the same barber.Comment
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