For the first time in a decade, the Chargers are searching for a new general manager.
Tom Telesco and head coach Brandon Staley were fired on December 15, ushering in a new era of football in one half of SoFi Stadium. Telesco, hired in 2013 as the youngest general manager in franchise history, brought the team to just three playoff appearances and two wins.
So, who could be next?
Colts Assistant General Manager Ed Dodds
Called the number one general manager candidate in this year’s hiring cycle by NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, Dodds will reportedly meet with the Chargers on Wednesday. He has also interviewed with Carolina and Las Vegas, the latter of whom gave him his first job in the league in 2003.
Dodds has built a name for himself purely via scouting. From 2003-2006, he was a pro personnel intern for the Raiders, before landing his first full-time job as a pro personnel scout with Seattle in 2007. The Seahawks moved him to the college side the following year, where he remained as an area scout until 2014 when he was elevated to a national scout. Another promotion followed in 2015 to senior personnel executive. In 2017, Indianapolis hired him away to become vice president of player personnel before he entered his current role of assistant GM under Chris Ballard in 2018.
An alumni of Texas A&M-Kingsville, where Ballard once served as defensive coordinator, Dodds’ current role as assistant general manager is primarily overseeing the day-to-day operations of the college and pro scouting departments. It’s a fitting role for a man whose tenure in the league has included, in part, the selections of Kam Chancellor, KJ Wright, Richard Sherman, Super Bowl MVP Malcolm Smith, Grover Stewart, and Zaire Franklin on Day 3 alone.
That work has not gone unnoticed: Dodds has been a hot GM candidate since at least 2020 when he turned down an interview with the Browns. In 2021, he interviewed with Carolina but withdrew from the running and was interviewed but not selected for the job with the Lions. Chicago, Las Vegas, and Pittsburgh all made inquiries in 2022, with Dodds withdrawing from the Bears’ search. (Dodds did not get a reported interview for the openings in Arizona or Tennessee last season.)
Indianapolis’ assistant GM is on record saying there’s a method to all of this. In a 2022 article with The Athletic reporter Zak Keefer, Dodds said:
I mean, there’s quality of life. You have to feel like you’re being allowed to make an impact and do it the way you know works. I mean, there’s more than one way to skin a cat — like, there are other ways that work, but there’s a way I know, and I’m not going to learn some new way and become an expert on it at 42 years old. That’s not the training ground to do it.
The way that Dodds does know it took him two years to perfect, from scouting travel to area scout documentation to background research. He uses a modified version of legendary GM Ron Wolf’s 1-9 grading scale, has every member of his team watch every player, and stays in the office nearly every day from December to April, 12 hours on weekdays and 6 on weekends. That sort of demand requires buy-in from staff, even in an industry famous for early mornings and late nights around the league, and Dodds has consistently gotten it and been able to reap the rewards.
Dodds has also been tied to the oft-rumored Chargers’ head coaching target Jim Harbaugh. Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer reported last week that Dodds was seen as the “Harbaugh GM” when he interviewed for the Raiders job in 2022. The two men also overlapped in Oakland in Dodds’ first year in the NFL: while Dodds was a pro personnel intern, Harbaugh was completing his second season as the Raiders’ QB coach. It’s a brief connection, but one that has reportedly spun into a strong relationship that has led insiders to believe Dodds is still the most realistic general manager option for a team looking to employ the current Michigan head coach.
An old-school Texan seen as one of the league’s best talent evaluators, Dodds has been in high demand for close to four years now, but his commitment to his own system and alleged desire to find the perfect situation have prevented him from finding his own team to run thus far. Could Los Angeles, where ownership under the Spanos family is famously disconnected from personnel decisions, be the situation to link Dodds’ own interest with a similar desire from the organization to hand things over?