Chapter 1

When folks in the sports media run their regular stories about the current generation of young genius wonder kids that now seemingly run professional sports, two names constantly appear; mine, and Marguerit "Margot" Millet. At the time I was hired I was the youngest General Manager of a professional football team in the modern era, hired at the ripe old age of twenty-seven and a few years later I'm still the kid of the group, younger by far than all of my peers. Margot, on the other hand, became the Vice President of Operations for her football club, an arch-rival of mine, at the same young age, but she had a slight advantage that wasn't available to the rest of us — her grandfather owned the team.

Right from the start, the two of us seemed to be fated to have our paths repeatedly cross, and not always in a good way.

I didn't set out to become the youngest executive in the history of professional football. I would have been quite happy becoming an electrical engineer, as I had planned. Instead, I had to go show off how smart I was by nearly winning a Fantasy Football contest that was hosted by our local newspaper, while I was still in high school. I came in third, but the fact that I was only sixteen caught some attention.

No one thought too much about it though until I did it all over again the very next season, this time winning the contest beating twenty thousand other contestants. The $2000 grand prize was pretty nice, but the offer of an unpaid job as a summer intern for my home town San Francisco team was even better.

It was actually quite humorous at first. I was far too precocious and prone to correcting my betters at nearly every opportunity. I think they fired me at least four different times the first month alone but someone in the organization would call me the next day to tell me to come back to work. Apparently I was far too interesting and amusing in the front office and things were too dull without me for long. During my four years of college I again spent my summers as an unpaid intern, and I was being increasingly fascinated with the management aspects of the sport.

I made it through college with my electrical engineering degree in hand and I was actually hunting for a real job when the Director of Scouting for the club called me into his office and actually offered me a real paying job with the club. I would become an assistant to his assistant with no authority to make any kind of decisions and a pittance of a salary that would just barely keep me in my tiny studio apartment, assuming I could do without any other unnecessary expenses like eating or bus fare. I wouldn't actually have to do very much travel to watch games or evaluate players, but he wanted a geeky whiz kid to take all of the huge stacks of scouting report folders (tens of thousands of them) and cram them into a computer somehow so that they would make some sort of sense.

I'd run my loud mouth off about this topic at least a thousand times and now it was going to be put up or shut up time, but I was sure that it could be done.

They still did things the old-fashioned way (most clubs still do) and scouting talent was very much a subjective eyeball sort of business done by grizzly old veteran former players that had performed their last chop-block over twenty years ago and now constantly bemoaned the lack of talent/work ethic/savage brutality they saw in the modern era of players. They wrote long scouting reports on obscure players that nearly no one else ever heard of or saw, and then they watched miles of high school and college film to triage out the twenty to fifty best players and pretty much marginalized the rest into a fairly even midden heap. Late round talent drafting in our organization was pretty spotty as most of the coaching staff just barely even knew the names, let alone their strengths and weaknesses of most of these lower picks. My job was to improve this somewhat.

Right about that time, "Moneyball" was just entering the vocabulary of the sporting world. Although created mostly for baseball, this mathematical philosophy incorporated the idea that computers and the applied focused use of statistical data could glean out better players from other more flashy players. Even in baseball, a very heavy statistically oriented sport where nearly everything can be turned into a number, most club GM's preferred to see what the wizened eyes of their scouts saw, rather than what a computer said. This is still mostly true today, especially in football.

My job was to take years of scouting material and put it into a format that the Scouting Director and the coaches could at least utilize to some degree. It took me about two years to get it all done, and then another year to tweak it until I could be confident of my results, but in the end I found a way to obtain some fairly useful projections for how young players would develop and mature, if drafted for our team. In theory, given a choice of a hundred virtually identical marginal players, I could select the top ones that had the best potential for growth and become future contributors to our team.

Of course it wasn't a perfect system. It still isn't perfect years later and never will be ... but it provided a slight 'edge', that little 'Moneyball' edge that let us enjoy greater success drafting our late round players and selecting the better veteran Free Agent players that still had the skills to perform for us.

In just a few years we went from a laughing stock franchise to a deep talented team that was now ready to go deep into the playoffs. I received several nice fat bonuses and even a promotion to Assistant General Manager at the tender age of twenty-five, but already I was becoming slightly bored. My chances of further promotion here were about nil, since my boss the GM was an old college friend of the relatively young owners. They were also a fairly wild group, prone to rather exotic partying in the wild sexually permissive city of San Francisco. I was fine with that and had no problems with the fact that nearly all of my bosses were all wild swingers ... but I just didn't go around partying with them ... much. I wasn't really a stuffed shirt, but neither was I much into banging a girl at a party whose name I didn't even know.

My tastes in women run to a cross between 'the girl-next-door' look mixed with that of the naughty librarian. You don't meet a lot of those sorts of girls at either football games or the city's infamous Erotic Balls, or at least I hadn't so far.

Upon further review, ok I was close to be being a stuffed shirt! Too many hours playing with my player database and evaluation algorithms and not nearly enough time getting laid. My ideas about love and sex were a bit too old fashioned and I was focused upon dating and looking for Ms. Right rather than just getting my rocks off with the bimbos or the professional submissives at our rather strange company parties. I'll explain that a little better later on.

Then one day, completely out of the blue, I received an offer to become the General Manager for the hapless Texas Toro's, a relatively new expansion team playing in Houston that had an appalling record for organizational ineptitude and was a textbook example to other football executives on how to do nearly everything wrong. In four seasons, their best record yet was a miserable 4-12.

I interviewed for the job, but I didn't think I had a prayer of getting it. The owner of the Toros was insanely rich but equally notoriously meddlesome, and was constantly overruling the club's management and coaching staff. There were even rumors that he had personally selected each of their previous top first round draft picks in past seasons. That would explain much about why each of those four picks had pretty much failed. Selected much too high in my opinion for 'signability' reasons (i.e. they'd sign a cheaper contract) and then pushed much too hard in their development to become stars for the franchise, but then they'd fail miserably and end up pretty much discarded to the ends of the bench.

"What are the first three things you would do on your first day, if you were given the GM job?" The owner asked me the very first thing at our alarmingly short meeting. Since I figured I had no chance to actually get the job, I told him the unvarnished truth.

"First, I would hire a group of professional mercenaries to kidnap you and lock you away on your ranch to play with your horses and not the day-to-day running of this franchise. I'd give orders that your phone calls are to be blocked as well. You can have supervised visitation into this building on alternate Fridays during the off-season, plus one executive board meeting per month. During the season on game day your cell phone be confiscated and the direct line from your box suite to the coaching staff will permanently disconnected. And then for good measure, a large former Navy SEAL named Rocko is going to remain standing behind your seat to make sure you don't try to send semaphore signals to the coaches."

"Secondly, I demand - not just want, to have the last and final word on scouting, draft picks and player development. Our new Head Coach and Director of Player Development, after I have hired them, may provide input, but I will have the final word."

"Lastly, this franchise is in a mess and there are no quick fixes to patch it up fast and get us off to playoff glory this coming season or even next. Heads around here are going to roll; lots of them. Every single player, coach and operations staff member is going to be evaluated and a bunch of them are going to be out on the street looking for jobs. In fact, my goal for our first draft pick, the #1 pick in the draft overall, will be to trade it off for as many other draft picks as possible, to start the rebuilding the club from scratch with new talent that wants to win."

"Give me four years to rebuild this team from the bottom up — without interference, even if we go 0-16, winless the entire time for each of the first three seasons. I can and will build you a winner, but it will not happen overnight!

The owner was stunned into speechless near catatonia and that pretty much finished up the interview and I flew back to San Francisco convinced that I had no chance for the job whatsoever. Instead, I found a phone message waiting for me from the owner asking me to return so that a four year contract offer could be made. Apparently no one had ever talked to him the way I had just done in his entire life ... and he found it interesting and quite refreshing!

At the ripe age of twenty-seven I now had one of the top thirty-two jobs in professional football. The owner was willing to back off and give me full carte blanche over everything, even offering a penalty clause in my contract if my decisions were ever overruled by him. They never were. We actually got along wonderfully right from the very start and he had my back 100 percent every time I had a problem or I needed him to write a fat check for a key free-agent player signing.

With my skinny ass now in that big fat executive leather chair in my fancy corner office, I copied my player evaluation program into my nice new company laptop and started to get down to business. I fired a lot of people, starting with most of my upper staff on downwards and I spent the next three weeks interviewing all of the eager 'Young Turks' I knew of that shared my interest in sports sabermetrics until I had an aggressive young crew willing (and hopefully able) to do my bidding. I had to have geek statistical analysts that I could trust since I was going to now be way too busy to maintain and update my computer databases ... and I found them.

Finding a new Head Coach was almost the simplest part. I wanted an older coach with a reputation for being both a 'teacher' and a strict disciplinarian. Years of constant losing had given our existing roster of players some rather bad habits that needed to be shed. Some players could learn, but many others wouldn't. I found a crusty 'old school' coach with a loud voice that would peal paint, but was peerless at motivating and teaching young players ... probably in brutal ways that would violate even Army regulations for training soldiers, but I carefully didn't want to know. That was going to be his problem now and I gave him permission to terminate the contract of any player who didn't take the new regime seriously enough. I let him pick his staff and agreed with his selections of promoting two aggressive former college head coaches to become our offensive and defensive coordinators and a few weeks before draft day we were finally in business, evaluating what little cream we did have and separating it out from the rest of the sour milk.

We all learned on the job, made mistakes and tried not to repeat them, and slowly we started to figure how to build for the future.

True to my word to the owner, I worked the phones to my other thirty-one counterparts over the last two weeks before the annual draft and made it perfectly clear that our top pick, which would undoubtedly be used for the consensus top draftee in the nation, a 'once in a decade' talent running back, was up for auction for the most and best draft picks. Eventually, at the very last moment, one of the New York clubs made the final top offer giving us their slightly lower first pick and their other second to fourth round draft picks this year, and the same picks the following year, conditionally, if the New York Club made the playoffs this season. They did.

Sure I was sorry to lose what would probably would have been a Hall of Fame caliber running back, but it was an obvious fact that our current offensive line players were all well below average and would be unequal to the task of opening up good running lanes, even for a star running back. There would be frustration, anger and maybe even injuries. It was far better to rebuild completely from the foundation up, getting a solid player infrastructure of linemen in place that could enhance the ability of star skill position players later. Accordingly, we drafted the six best offensive and defensive linemen that first year that we could get our hands on.

Then to the surprise of everyone I also traded that lower first round pick (#13 overall) for another lower first round pick (#27) plus an additional second and third round pick this year, and a conditional second round the next year, which we did receive. This gave us a nice solid first year draft of thirteen very decent support players, most of which we appraised as being already better than what we currently had on our team and this started to give us a little bit of talent depth on the bench for the first time.