In the midst of talking about how much he has changed since taking over as Bears general manager in June 2001, Jerry Angelo started using his hands for emphasis as he sat at a sturdy oak table inside his Halas Hall office.
“I’ve had a metamorphosis,” Angelo said.
He gestured down toward the practice field where, through a huge window, Angelo could see the 6-0 Bears team he crafted by complementing a defense heavy on draft picks with an offense loaded with high-priced free agents.
He motioned at the giant board where hundreds of college prospects’ names only Mel Kiper Jr. could love are arranged on the wall the same way diamonds in the rough Mark Anderson and Danieal Manning were a year ago.
He knocked over a bottle of water onto the carpeted floor and just kept talking.
There was a time when the Bears’ GM might have apologized, wondered whether somebody might make fun of him or stopped to dwell on the spill. But with that insignificant office mishap, Angelo unwittingly drove home the point he was trying to make:
The man who used to sweat the small stuff no longer allows little things to blur the big picture as he sees it.
Angelo has stopped letting previous missteps–and he has made them in Chicago– affect the next move forward. He started drawing his own modern blueprint for an NFL team instead of following the dated specifications he used to help build winners in Tampa Bay, New York and Dallas.
For example, he signed a backup quarterback, Brian Griese, after seeing in 2005 how his failure to do so limited the Bears for a second straight season.
He still operates by the book. Only he expanded the glossary.
“As you get older you go one of two ways: Your blinders go like this (turning his hands in) or like this (opening them),” Angelo said. “You have to ask yourself, am I going to stay this course and take not necessarily the path of least resistance but [an easier one]? Or are you going to turn over those rocks?”
Angelo’s eyes squinted, as if he were looking into the past at something he didn’t really want to see.
“I didn’t always understand the big picture until I got here and was thrown into situations,” Angelo said. “I could have stayed that course. Or I could have said, `I have to find alternative ways,’ and that personally is what happened.”
Adjusting strategy
Sometime in the year before Angelo replaced Dick Jauron with Lovie Smith in January 2004, he remembers a conversation with a former NFL general manager he did not name. It turned into some of the best advice anybody ever gave him.
“I asked, `What did you learn?’ He said, `I didn’t take advantage of the free-agent market based on what I see going on now,'” Angelo said. “That kind of stuck with me.”
Angelo’s reputation for working on draft-driven teams helped him land the Bears’ job in 2001. He spent 14 years in the front office at Tampa Bay where drafting Warren Sapp, Mike Alstott and John Lynch, among others, changed the direction of the franchise. Before that Angelo spent his formative years scouting for the Cowboys and Giants when building via the draft was the only option before free agency changed the league in 1993.
“We are all by-products of our past and Jerry and I and Tim Ruskell (president of the Seattle Seahawks) found out working together in Tampa how much bad can happen through poor drafting and poor development of draft picks,” said Atlanta Falcons President-general manager Rich McKay, who was Angelo’s GM in Tampa. “All of us have evolved from that. I don’t think it’s necessarily hard to change, but it is against our natural inclination.”
McKay admires a current Bears roster that reflects both Angelo’s evolution into a modern-day NFL GM and the devotion to the draft he developed early in his NFL career.
Eight of 11 starters on the Bears’ offense were signed either as restricted or un-restricted free agents, the most notable being left tackle John Tait and running back Thomas Jones in 2004 and receiver Muhsin Muhammad and right tackle Fred Miller in 2005. The draft picks are impact ones: receiver Bernard Berrian and quarterback Rex Grossman.
Conversely, nine of 11 defensive starters are Bears draft picks. But defensive end Adewale Ogunleye, who arrived in a complicated trade with the Miami Dolphins a few weeks before the ’04 season, might have been the boldest move of Angelo’s tenure.
“When I look at our football team, I see we didn’t stay down a chosen path and that shows strength,” Angelo said.
Working hand in hand
It also shows a compatibility between the college scouting side that handles the draft and the pro personnel side that evaluates free agents, a marriage that can be rocky in some organizations.
To describe best how friction could exist, imagine if director of college scouting Greg Gabriel were pressuring behind the scenes for more playing time for running back Cedric Benson to see one of the team’s high draft picks succeed. If director of pro personnel director Bobby DePaul kept pushing for free-agent signee Thomas Jones to be the featured back, a potential rift could create organizational discord and filter into the locker room.
Angelo has seen such squabbles ruin enough teams to realize how fortunate he is that it hasn’t happened yet in Chicago. He considers himself the bridge between the two sides of the building.
“If we win, there’s enough credit to go around for everybody,” Angelo said. “The only way you can keep from falling into a dark hole is everybody understands what their roles are and what the plan is. It doesn’t have to be genius. In fact, the simpler it is the easier it is to communicate and pull in the same direction.”
To Angelo, a Bears roster mixed with free-agent steals and draft-day finds reflects organizational progress as much as anything. But nothing confirms it more than Arena Football League reclamation project Rashied Davis.
“If you want to look at one player who best exemplifies who we are as an organization, use him,” Angelo said. “If somebody would have brought up an Arena League player to me 10 years ago, I would have laughed. I would have said we have enough to do without looking at a foreign league that doesn’t play our brand of football. But we looked at him, brought him in and treated him like a draft pick. The guy has turned into a pretty good player.”
Getting to know you
Gil Brandt has known Angelo since the day he walked into his office in 1980, unannounced and uninvited, looking for a job. They remain friends. Brandt, an architect of the great Cowboys teams of the 1970s, still follows the Bears as NFL.com’s senior analyst.
As much as Angelo says he has changed in recent years, Brandt notices some similarities to the young, brash fellow he hired 26 years ago.
“He has some of the most tremendous work habits you’ll ever see,” Brandt said. “He’ll . . . do whatever it takes to know a player.”
That approach trickles down to Angelo’s staff of six college scouts. A former scout himself, Angelo initially structured his scouts’ schedules the way his used to be: Get to a school, get out and go see as many prospects as possible. But over time, Angelo saw more value in having his scouts stay as long as necessary to get to really know a player, even if it meant seeing fewer prospects.
“I tell them I’m not worried about the player you miss,” Angelo said. “Make sure you know him.”
Brandt points to two impact players the Bears may not have had without that philosophy.
Before the 2004 draft, Brandt remembers Bears scout Chris Ballard asking more questions than anybody of cornerback Nathan Vasher’s “Pro Day” at Texas after Vasher ran slower than expected. Armed with information, Ballard asked to come back a week later for an individual session with Vasher that included a faster 40 time. That extra visit made the Bears believe they were committing draft-day robbery when Vasher was still on the board in the fourth round.
Similarly, Brandt and Angelo both mentioned how scout Ted Monago spent enough time on the Alabama campus before last April’s NFL draft to make a hearty endorsement of defensive end Mark Anderson, so far the steal of the draft.
“It’s easy to tell who the best 10 percent of players are going to be and the worst 10 percent,” Brandt said. “But it’s those 80 percent in the middle where Jerry excels.”
Angelo linked the Bears’ success through the draft and free agency with an exhaustive off-season self-evaluation process that involves interviewing coaches on the type of players they want.
“We break it down so there’s a clear picture in every scout’s mind what a Bear looks like,” Angelo said.
The look of the Bears organization seldom has been in sharper focus.
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dhaugh@tribune.com
