It became clear when Mark Davis was looking for the next GM for the Raiders this offseason, he wanted a package deal with the head coach. The hope being that the two of them could come in and instantly be on the same page and therefore hit the ground running.
Enter former (com)Patriots Dave Ziegler and Josh McDaniels. Two guys who go as far back as 2010 when McDaniels was head coach of the Broncos and Ziegler was hired as a player personnel assistant. The two were reunited in New England with Ziegler hired on a personnel assistant with McDaniels having gotten his job back as Patriots offensive coordinator.
McDaniels kept that job the past ten years while Ziegler worked his way up the front office ranks. So, you could say they are pretty familiar with each other. It makes for a lot of agreement on prospects during the draft process.
“Typically we see players the same,” Ziegler said of McDaniels Wednesday in the GM’s pre-draft press conference. “Like if we end up watching players separately, we’re going to come back and I would say the vast majority of those players we’ll see the same. There’s always going to be some one-offs here and there where we just see it differently and those are the guys where we end up sitting down and working through a little bit more throughout the process to try and find some common ground and learn why we saw those players differently. But for the most part, yeah, we see a lot of things the same when it comes to evaluating players. We talked about our scouting system before but we look at players and the role that they’re going to fill and so often we see those players and what the role is the same.”
This symbiotic relationship is important because the Raiders are in the somewhat unique position of overhauling the coaching staff and front office following a season in which they made the playoffs. So, unlike most teams in this situation, they aren’t looking to start over from scratch and rebuild. They think they can continue winning and hope to do so with the help of the Raiders draft this offseason.
The familiarity between coach and GM removes one possible stumbling block, but there’s a lot more to the job than that.
Ziegler and McDaniels entered the building at the beginning of February needing to build an entire new coaching staff, personnel department, and front office while simultaneously scouting potential free agents and draft prospects. That’s just over a month to free agency, and less than three months to the draft. That’s a lot to have on his plate all at once.
“The new pressures I think center around running the entire organization in terms of the scouting and personnel side,” Ziegler said. “And, so there’s that pressure. And I would say the pressure of developing your philosophy, developing your scouts, getting everybody trained and ingrained on how you want to approach not just the draft, but everything. The draft, scouting in general, our grading scale, when we work out players how we want to handle player workouts, all these individual things that you want to make perfect right now that you can’t make perfect right now because you have other things become a higher priority.
“I’m always thinking about the here and the now, what we have to do now to be as well prepared for the draft. But then you are always thinking about these things that are on the peripheral about how we’re going to develop scouts, all the things we want to accomplish from May to June, how we’re going to organize the preseason process, we have to get our advanced scouting reports in order.
“You know, so there’s all these things that you want to check off your list that you can’t check off your list. So, there’s a level of stress. Not bad stress, just good stress of wanting to attack all these other things but focus on the here and now. . . We embrace that pressure, we enjoy it, it’s part of the allure of this profession for a lot of people that get into it. You thrive on it and you want that pressure because it’s exciting.”
Oh, and the draft is being held in Las Vegas this year too. No pressure, Dave.
GM of an NFL team is certainly a position a lot of people would love to have. Though probably not an enviable level of work that is needed at this particular moment.