How the Bengals’ six-person scouting staff built a Super Bowl team, plus much more to get you ready for the big game in AlbertBreer's bye week MMQB column
“The biggest thing that’s important to us is organizing the info and the schedule,” Tobin said. “As long as you’re organized, we get multiple looks on guys. But we rely on our looks, we rely on quality over quantity. And the longer you work with guys, the more you know how they grade and get a feel for what they see. And our guys are all very consistent in how they view players. And so we feel really good about the looks that our guy gives, and then you don’t get it muddied by eight opinions.
“The easiest way to describe our department is everybody works some in every area,” Tobin continued. “The reason I do that is because I want them to be fresh in, A) knowing what’s playing in the NFL, and then B) having a context for grading college guys. All our guys have to have an awareness of A) what’s in the NFL and B) what’s coming from the colleges. And I think that gives them a great context when they’re looking at a college player, knowing what’s in the NFL.
Also, all of them live in Cincinnati, which may make the travel more arduous at times, but is something that Tobin, even in today’s Zoom–centric world, views as key to all of it. And as to Burrow specifically, Tobin conceded, “It’s a little different. You want him to understand the why’s about it, especially on offensive players that we bring in. And you want him to see the reasons and you want him to have some voice in it:. The great thing about our players is when we ask them, they’re not expecting to be decision-makers, they’re information sources for us. If we can use that information source, then that’s great.
Doing that in Cincinnati first required an honest assessment for the team on where it was on that side of the ball, and that meant taking a cold look at the Bengals’ own free agents versus the others out there. That led to the decisions that Trey Hendrickson would be better for them than homegrown Carl Lawson and that letting William Jackson go could create room to bring in multiple corners.
“The thing that we’ve hit on is players that love to play football,” Tobin said. ‘They love what football brings them, but that’s not their motivation. And if you can avoid the players that are just motivated by what football brings them and buy into players who love the actual football, love the preparation, love the grind, love the locker room, love being around teammates, love being coached, that’s the biggest thing.
“The belief on our team was that we had what we needed and so really, the camaraderie was still there,” Tobin said. “We weren’t winning, but the belief was there. And the camaraderie was still there.” How much do the scouts in Cincinnati count? It’s proven every time a player walks in the building, in how much has been invested in each of them.
Demoff mentioned then how he was seeing more Rams jerseys at his kid’s school. The kids who were in middle school then are in high school now, elementary schoolers are middle schoolers, and the work’s been steady in trying to ingrain the team in the community. This is the second consecutive year that’s happened, after 54 Super Bowls without it happening once. So while it’s no longer unprecedented, it’s still pretty rare, and the rarity of it has its plusses and minuses. To prepare for that, the Rams did talk to the Bucs, who went through this last year.
• There were issues that arose during the playoffs. In a normal year, the NFL would take over the Super Bowl stadium right after the regular season. This year, with the Rams in the playoffs, that was impossible. But they still started chipping away, and there were things that were unavoidable—a third of the team’s parking at SoFi was gobbled up for the NFC title game as the league worked on building its security perimeter for the Super Bowl.
With that, Demoff doubled back to the overwhelming positive here, and cited that the NFC title game was the most-watched local sporting event since Lakers-Celtics Game 7 in 2010, as a measure of how far the Rams have come. “The Dodgers and Lakers are where they are,” he said, “because they had sustained championship success. It’ll help us continue to grow.”“Sometimes you say something is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” Demoff said.
“Now, you don’t do that unless you are where your feet are planted. But there’s a belief, there’s a confidence in the people you’re around. And when you enjoy that? We’re not gonna ask anybody to do anything that’s more than they can actually accomplish. And there’s a real peace of mind that accompanies that if you know,
“You have eight jobs open, six of them are going to offensive guys, that’s already a given,” Eberflus said over the phone on Saturday. “So you have to be spot on when you’re doing your interviews to make sure that you have a plan in place for the offense. And I wouldn’t say that’s No. 1; I would say that’s No. 2. Because what’s really going to be the one that gets you the job is the type of man you are and the type of leader you are.
Which is to say, yes, even though Eberflus is a defensive coach, he not only knows how important Fields’s development will be, he’s also not afraid to get in the weeds of it.• The Bears also immediately landed Packers pass-game coordinator Luke Getsy, then got most of Eberflus’s defensive infrastructure, led by new DC Alan Williams, out of Indy. And that’s a pretty good sign for how things are getting off the ground.
The one thing I really like about how Josh McDaniels approached this year’s coaching carousel, and really the hiring cycles of the last few years, is that he wasn’t trying to convince anyone that he was something he’s not. • We can call this what it is: Most people look at Davis and can’t see past the haircut. McDaniels saw something different—an owner who desperately wants to win, who could offer a first-class work environment and who was going to go all the way in on the coach he hired. “He cares about really supporting his coach, his team,” McDaniels said. “He made it very clear to me that he wants me to come out and try to build the team the way that I feel like is best to build it.
• AFC exec No. 2: “It was an average showing all the way around. No one really stood out as a top-level guy. Malik showed the most athleticism and arm strength. You just question how ready he is, coming from the offenses [at Auburn and Liberty] he is.”
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