Here’s a memorable story from the offseason, though the player and general manager involved will remain nameless.
The player was wrapping up his honeymoon on St. Lucia, and readying to head back to the States, when volcanic eruptions began on the island. Quickly, those there were warned that much bigger eruptions could come, and to take all precautions to stay safe. One problem: All outgoing flights were grounded, the island’s airspace was closed and pretty much the only way to leave would be if you had your own boat.
Soon thereafter, the GM was apprised of the situation. So in an instant, he went from his predraft work into crisis mode. He worked to see if there was a way to get a boat to the player and his new wife and got the team’s security force on the case.
There’d be no boat. But the team did find the player safe shelter to ride the situation out.
Suffice it to say, Kevin Costner definitely didn’t deal with anything like that in .
The job of general manager in the NFL is changing. It’s growing. It’s becoming more challenging. And thus, what a team is looking for in one has had to evolve, too.
In this week’s column, we’ll present to you our 13th annual future GMs list. It is, to be sure, a challenging exercise to pull off every year. Aspiring young GMs usually can’t point to one thing or another, the way an offensive coordinator can cite a quarterback’s development, or a defensive coordinator can send a team his unit’s key metrics, as a reason why they should be the next guy to land one of 32 coveted spots running a team.
Scouting roles, and roles in personnel in general, are normally too vague for any facts or figures to be blindly reliable—a person who holds a title in one place might have a vastly different job than a person holding the same title in another place—so sorting through a mountain of names to be considered usually requires a whole lot more digging. And it’s getting even harder as NFL organizations continue to add new departments and staff.
But one thing that’s abundantly clear is that NFL hiring into these positions could soon be counterintuitive to the conventional idea of who GMs are and what they do. The eruption in St. Lucia’s just one example of why Costner’s caricature of the role might not hold up much longer.
