GM Dimitroff looks to build on last year’s success
Falcons will grade prospects at combine on as many as 20 criteria in ‘scouting matrix’
By STEVE HUMMER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, February 21, 2009
The NFL combine is under way, the college draft is on deck, and free agents are just now ripening on the vine. There is no better time to be Thomas Dimitroff, Falcons stimulus planner.
“Obviously, I love the season, but this is the time of year when I really feel like rolling up my sleeves,” the Falcons GM said last week. How reassuring to find one person thriving in his job.
Dimitroff is coming off one of the great years in NFL staffing, where his every decision came up a royal flush.
The NFL’s Executive of the Year hired the Coach of the Year (Mike Smith) and drafted the Offensive Rookie of the Year (Matt Ryan). His prize free agent, Michael Turner, gained better than 1,600 yards and set a team touchdown record. His top four draft picks all started at some stage of the season, and two others contributed significantly.
It was just a year ago Sunday that Dimitroff walked into the league office in New York for a coin flip that eventually landed the Falcons the third overall pick in the 2008 draft. Joel Bussert, the NFL’s vice president of player personnel, took one look at the spiky-haired dude in the hip, rectangular glasses and asked, “Who are you?”
The football establishment has a little better idea who Dimitroff is now, as it awaits the next act of a 42-year-old whiz kid. He won’t have the benefit of that third-overall pick — the Falcons are scheduled to choose 24th in April. His team, theoretically, is better stocked than it was a year ago, with less room for dramatic change. So, what’s the encore?
Evaluation system
Some of the answers to that are on the big board that dominates one wall of his Flowery Branch office. With an outsider visiting last week, Dimitroff had closed the partition in front of the board. He is compelled to protect the hundreds of names of college players he has ranked there, just as Coke does its formula.
He is the son of a lifelong football guy, a Cleveland Browns scout. The late Tom Dimitroff is remembered as a “professional, quiet, hard worker, good evaluator, you know, just a real pro at what he did.” Those were the words of Charley Casserly, one of the most respected GMs in the business during 16 seasons in Washington and Houston. He now lends his expertise to CBS.
Casserly applies many of those same adjectives to the younger Dimitroff, even offering him the ultimate old school compliment of being “a grinder.”
It’s when Dimitroff starts throwing around such terms as “scouting matrix” and “system-specific scouting” that he betrays his thoroughly modern side.
Not about to give away too many specifics of the Falcons’ evaluation system, Dimitroff did offer some insight into what he most values in a player and how his decisions get made.
The Falcons’ personnel staff has graded out close to 3,000 college players, assigning each a value of between 1 and 9 based on as many as 20 criteria in its “scouting matrix.” By draft day, that list will be whittled down to a few hundred likely players.
Right now, the Falcons would love to land a defensive player in the 7 to 8 range.
In that process, then, what kind of player is a Dimitroff kind of player?
He is not one who will rise or fall greatly by his performance in the combine. Perhaps that will change the day the NFL makes the vertical leap one of its playoff tiebreakers.
“For me, [the combine] is a gauge, a highlight to revisit,” Dimitroff said. “In the end, it’s how the player performs on the field. It’s production. Is he a football player? I would much rather take a guy who is a half-inch short or a quarter of a step slow who is a passionate, tough, smart football player.”
Personal level
Based on one year of evidence, a Dimitroff player doesn’t require a lot of seasoning. Rookies such as Ryan, Sam Baker and Curtis Lofton displayed leadership and maturity beyond their years. No coincidence. There are a couple of components in the Falcons’ system designed to weigh a player’s mental strength and personality.
On intelligence: “You research it at many different levels through your contacts at the school, your actual interview with the player and discussions with other people,” Dimitroff said. “You analyze tape and determine how instinctive the player is, how he moves around the field, how he picks up his keys, how he reacts.”
On character and leadership: “You’re watching this player interact with his teammates on the practice field and on the game field. Then again, you follow up with the film work, how much is this player showing up on every play?”
Right instincts
Still, the bulk of the process comes down to judging the player’s athletic gifts and how he fits into a team’s needs.
“There is an ongoing debate in football [about] how to define athleticism,” Dimitroff said. He chooses not to rely heavily on the purely objective measurements of a 40-yard dash time or a bench press standard. Instead, it’s back to the game tape once more, looking for subtle differences in movement that might separate one player from another. In the Falcons’ matrix, those are some of the most elemental components.
“If you don’t have the fluidity, the ability to stop and start and redirect, to ad lib in certain situations, to recover from the ground, then you’re not going to be making plays on the field,” Dimitroff said.
In the end, talent evaluation still comes down to “a guy looking at a player and deciding if he can play,” Casserly said. “There’s no system that dictates whether a guy can play or not. There’s no statistical measurements, no computer measurements. It’s you looking at Matt Ryan and saying he’s good enough, and that’s all there is to it.”
That is Dimitroff’s fundamental strength — not the system, not the jargon, but a connoisseur’s eye for talent. Don’t get science and art confused. Some people just know what works on the canvas, in the wine glass or on the field.
And being Dimitroff could get even better.
How quickly he got the Falcons’ scouts and coaches working off the same evaluating template was one of the real behind-the-scenes successes of last season. Now they’ve had a year to refine to process.
“The second year together, they will be much more in sync as a group than they were in the first year. I know from experience that every year together you do a better job,” Casserly said, piling even more expectation upon Dimitroff’s stylish head.
http://www.ajc.com/sports/content/sports/f..._dimitroff.html
Falcons will grade prospects at combine on as many as 20 criteria in ‘scouting matrix’
By STEVE HUMMER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, February 21, 2009
The NFL combine is under way, the college draft is on deck, and free agents are just now ripening on the vine. There is no better time to be Thomas Dimitroff, Falcons stimulus planner.
“Obviously, I love the season, but this is the time of year when I really feel like rolling up my sleeves,” the Falcons GM said last week. How reassuring to find one person thriving in his job.
Dimitroff is coming off one of the great years in NFL staffing, where his every decision came up a royal flush.
The NFL’s Executive of the Year hired the Coach of the Year (Mike Smith) and drafted the Offensive Rookie of the Year (Matt Ryan). His prize free agent, Michael Turner, gained better than 1,600 yards and set a team touchdown record. His top four draft picks all started at some stage of the season, and two others contributed significantly.
It was just a year ago Sunday that Dimitroff walked into the league office in New York for a coin flip that eventually landed the Falcons the third overall pick in the 2008 draft. Joel Bussert, the NFL’s vice president of player personnel, took one look at the spiky-haired dude in the hip, rectangular glasses and asked, “Who are you?”
The football establishment has a little better idea who Dimitroff is now, as it awaits the next act of a 42-year-old whiz kid. He won’t have the benefit of that third-overall pick — the Falcons are scheduled to choose 24th in April. His team, theoretically, is better stocked than it was a year ago, with less room for dramatic change. So, what’s the encore?
Evaluation system
Some of the answers to that are on the big board that dominates one wall of his Flowery Branch office. With an outsider visiting last week, Dimitroff had closed the partition in front of the board. He is compelled to protect the hundreds of names of college players he has ranked there, just as Coke does its formula.
He is the son of a lifelong football guy, a Cleveland Browns scout. The late Tom Dimitroff is remembered as a “professional, quiet, hard worker, good evaluator, you know, just a real pro at what he did.” Those were the words of Charley Casserly, one of the most respected GMs in the business during 16 seasons in Washington and Houston. He now lends his expertise to CBS.
Casserly applies many of those same adjectives to the younger Dimitroff, even offering him the ultimate old school compliment of being “a grinder.”
It’s when Dimitroff starts throwing around such terms as “scouting matrix” and “system-specific scouting” that he betrays his thoroughly modern side.
Not about to give away too many specifics of the Falcons’ evaluation system, Dimitroff did offer some insight into what he most values in a player and how his decisions get made.
The Falcons’ personnel staff has graded out close to 3,000 college players, assigning each a value of between 1 and 9 based on as many as 20 criteria in its “scouting matrix.” By draft day, that list will be whittled down to a few hundred likely players.
Right now, the Falcons would love to land a defensive player in the 7 to 8 range.
In that process, then, what kind of player is a Dimitroff kind of player?
He is not one who will rise or fall greatly by his performance in the combine. Perhaps that will change the day the NFL makes the vertical leap one of its playoff tiebreakers.
“For me, [the combine] is a gauge, a highlight to revisit,” Dimitroff said. “In the end, it’s how the player performs on the field. It’s production. Is he a football player? I would much rather take a guy who is a half-inch short or a quarter of a step slow who is a passionate, tough, smart football player.”
Personal level
Based on one year of evidence, a Dimitroff player doesn’t require a lot of seasoning. Rookies such as Ryan, Sam Baker and Curtis Lofton displayed leadership and maturity beyond their years. No coincidence. There are a couple of components in the Falcons’ system designed to weigh a player’s mental strength and personality.
On intelligence: “You research it at many different levels through your contacts at the school, your actual interview with the player and discussions with other people,” Dimitroff said. “You analyze tape and determine how instinctive the player is, how he moves around the field, how he picks up his keys, how he reacts.”
On character and leadership: “You’re watching this player interact with his teammates on the practice field and on the game field. Then again, you follow up with the film work, how much is this player showing up on every play?”
Right instincts
Still, the bulk of the process comes down to judging the player’s athletic gifts and how he fits into a team’s needs.
“There is an ongoing debate in football [about] how to define athleticism,” Dimitroff said. He chooses not to rely heavily on the purely objective measurements of a 40-yard dash time or a bench press standard. Instead, it’s back to the game tape once more, looking for subtle differences in movement that might separate one player from another. In the Falcons’ matrix, those are some of the most elemental components.
“If you don’t have the fluidity, the ability to stop and start and redirect, to ad lib in certain situations, to recover from the ground, then you’re not going to be making plays on the field,” Dimitroff said.
In the end, talent evaluation still comes down to “a guy looking at a player and deciding if he can play,” Casserly said. “There’s no system that dictates whether a guy can play or not. There’s no statistical measurements, no computer measurements. It’s you looking at Matt Ryan and saying he’s good enough, and that’s all there is to it.”
That is Dimitroff’s fundamental strength — not the system, not the jargon, but a connoisseur’s eye for talent. Don’t get science and art confused. Some people just know what works on the canvas, in the wine glass or on the field.
And being Dimitroff could get even better.
How quickly he got the Falcons’ scouts and coaches working off the same evaluating template was one of the real behind-the-scenes successes of last season. Now they’ve had a year to refine to process.
“The second year together, they will be much more in sync as a group than they were in the first year. I know from experience that every year together you do a better job,” Casserly said, piling even more expectation upon Dimitroff’s stylish head.
http://www.ajc.com/sports/content/sports/f..._dimitroff.html
