What Makes a Good NFL General Manager?
Brian Gutekunst is a good general manager. How would you go about hiring someone like him?
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With some of the GM positions opening up, I was just kind of curious about your thoughts on what makes a good potential general manager? If you could Frankenstein together an optimal candidate, what would you tack on their resume?
If I had to boil it down to one thing, I’d look for an established track record of success on a defined career path. I came to that conclusion by thinking about what I wouldn’t want as my GM, and working backward from there.
If I were an NFL owner, my big fear would be hiring someone by the Peter Principle; i.e., I don’t want someone to end up with control over my roster just because they spent a long time in the building and GM was the only role they hadn’t done yet. I would rather hire someone with a background of progressive success in a team-building field. What are those fields? In my mind, they boil down to three big areas: personnel, finance, and data science.
Modern NFL teams are constructed by marrying those three areas, and I think you can end up with a good GM by finding someone from any one of them. In Brian Gutekunst, the Packers picked someone who rose up the ranks on the personnel side, but they could have just have easily gone with Russ Ball, who’s made his mark as a contract guru. I don’t know what Ball would have been like as a GM; I have my reservations. But his career path to the GM job would have been perfectly legitimate. Minnesota, meanwhile, has hired Kwesi Adofo-Mensah as their new general manager, and he comes from a data science background while adding on some experience in cap management.
Adofo-Mensah is actually a really good representation of what I’d consider a strong “Frankenstein” candidate, to get to the second part of the question. If I was putting together the perfect candidate, I’d look for someone with primary experience in one of the three areas I mentioned, but who also has some added experience in one of the other ones. If you came up as a scout, I’d like to see you add experience on the contract side or in data science. If you’ve primarily been a money man (or woman!), show me you’ve got the chops as a scout. You get the picture. Adding expertise in multiple areas is never a bad idea, and the more well-rounded you are as a GM candidate, the more interested I am.