Ed “F******” Dodds - Falcons GM in 2020

[FalconsIn2012]

This is the fiery temperament and no nonsense attitude we need running things in Flowery Branch.  In fact, I’m sure he would rename it Fiery Branch since Flowery is too nice of a word

“You gotta be relentless. You can’t stop. I don’t’”

 

He was pissed off, tired of all the attention they were getting, tired of hearing how good they were and how great they were gonna be. The room needed some truth, some leveling, so eight days after it ended, emotions still raw, weeks and months of grueling work ahead, the **** Patriots punching anothertrip to the Super Bowl on the TV screen a few feet away, Ed Dodds gathered his scouts inside a bar in Mobile, Ala., and gave it to them.

“We ain’t done **** yet,” the Colts assistant general manager told them. “We won a ******* wild-card game.”

You don’t get trophies for AFC wild-card games, and Dodds didn’t come to Indianapolis to win wild-card games. But two years in, anyone could see: the rebuild was working. The Colts had flipped 4-12 into 10-6, won a playoff game and had a roster stocked with young talent. The pundits couldn’t help but praise. The Colts were coming. Soon.

But Dodds didn’t wanna hear it, and didn’t want his scouts thinking it. If there’s anything that scares the **** out of him, it’s complacency. He fears it. Fights it. To him it just felt like it needed to be said, then and there, the night before they went to work at the Senior Bowl in late January, the unofficial kickoff to an exhaustive three-month stretch that would ready the entire personnel department for that spring’s draft. So he lit into them.

“I just felt like everyone was jacked, we’re on this win streak, and I’m kinda like, what the **** does it matter?” Dodds said a few months later. “If we don’t go to a Super Bowl, so what? A couple of injuries, bomb a couple of draft picks, no one in the pipeline to replace the players you lost? You gotta be relentless. You can’t stop. I don’t.”

Rest of article below...but this is the attitude I want running my front office.  DANG

 

 

[FalconsIn2012]

Continued...

“Dodds has done this for a decade and a half, so he knows. He cut his teeth in Oakland, learning from Al Davis that B.S. won’t get you far in this league.

“With Mr. Davis, you learned quickly,” Dodds explains, “that if you don’t know the answer to a question, just say you don’t know and take your ***-beating right there. Don’t guess.”

His next stop was Seattle, where he climbed from low-level scout to front-office Swiss Army knife, helping build a monster that came a yard short of two straight Vince Lombardi Trophies.

Then, in the winter of 2017, the call came, the call he knew was coming. His friend of 25 years, Chris Ballard, needed help reviving the Colts.

Twenty-seven months in and Dodds’ fingerprints are all over Indy’s staggering turnaround, from the late-night claim of undrafted corner Kenny Moore to the free-agent push of line-wrecker Denico Autry.

He’s become known as one of the sharpest talent evaluators in football.

“A scout at heart,” more than one league source calls him.

Most figure he’ll end up a GM, and soon. Dodds, just 39, doesn’t blink when you ask about the next step – the biggest step. He knows it’s coming. He’s also not in a big hurry.

“You’re gonna get one chance to do it,” he said. “And I don’t wanna do it until I’m overprepared.”

But that decision will have to wait. The Colts aren’t there yet. All they’ve done is win a f***ing wild-card game.

“We’re not gonna just walk in and think we’re done,” Dodds said. “I’ve seen too many teams and places, like, you sense it, ‘OK, we’ve arrived, we had a good year.’ They just kind of sit on their laurels. Like, no, you gotta keep going. We’re gonna keep going.”

---

He grew up around the game, tagging along with his dad to practices at Texas A&M-Kingsville, which was just down the road. As a teenage intern in Oakland, he made coffee and fetched copies and tried to stay out of Al Davis’ doghouse. By the end of his four-year run with the Raiders, he was one of the few staffers Davis let in the weight room with him. They’d talk every day. Dodds watched and listened and mostly kept his mouth shut.

As a grunt on the coaching staff in Kingsville, he spent game days in plywood press boxes, trying to calm down the fiery defensive coordinator. Ballard rarely listened.

One memory: Tight game, fourth quarter, and they need a stop to seal the win. They don’t get it. While the opponent’s video crew is cheering wildly a few feet away, Ballard is fuming.

“He throws a chair against a wall,” Dodds remembers, chuckling at the memory, “and tells them not to cheer or clap anymore, otherwise he was gonna make them stop. Then he sat down next to me and said, ‘Well, I’ll probably hear from the NCAA on that one.’

“And he tells me I’m too emotional sometimes.”

As an area scout scouring south Texas for talent, he learned to be blunt with prospects – “if I don’t like a guy, I tell him why,” Dodds vows – and in Seattle he watched John Schneider build and Pete Carroll lead. Dodds found a home, climbing to the role of senior personnel executive by the time the Seahawks were making two straight Super Bowls. Teams would call, begging to interview Dodds, and Schneider would turn them down.

But when Ballard did, Schneider knew he couldn’t. These two, they went back two decades, back to plywood press boxes in Kingsville. Ballard had told Dodds for years that if he ever got the chance to run a team, he wanted him there with him. Here it was.

“You have to at least give me an opportunity to counter,” Schneider told him. Dodds nodded.

He flew to Indianapolis, he interviewed, then he told his friend to wait. Dodds mulled his options on the flight back to Seattle. The building’s not very impressive, he thought. The roster needs a lot of work. That place has a ways to go.

He’s right – it did. The defense was old, the QB hurt, the depth thin. The Colts were a mess. Dodds wrestled with the decision for over a week: Leave a good thing in Seattle, working for a boss he loved and a coach he admired, and move to Indianapolis, where a fresh start and mammoth challenge awaited? When he returned to Seattle, he told Schneider he was torn.

Colts assistant GM Ed Dodds in the team’s war room during the 2019 NFL Draft. (Courtesy of Indianapolis Colts)

“Let’s go have a beer,” Schneider told him.

The more they talked, the more Dodds couldn’t shake these two words from his mind. It’s what Carroll told his players every day:

Always compete. Always compete. Always compete.

Later that night, Dodds’ then-fiancée and now-wife put it this way: “You’re gonna be pissed off every day if you don’t do it.”

He called Schneider and Carroll a few days later.

“If I don’t go, I’m not competing,” he told them. “I’m taking the easy way out.”

They got it. They hated it, but they got it.

Dodds wanted the hard way, wanted to compete, even if it meant a roster teardown, uncertainty over Andrew Luck’s shoulder and a build that would need years. He moved across the country, reunited with his old friend from Kingsville and dug in.

“How do you get up and look at yourself in the mirror, just making the comfortable choice?” Dodds says now. “You just bet on yourself, and the way you work. Even if they fired us all two years in, the experience of having to build from the ground up, installing the system, getting people to buy in, all of that, and then learning how to do it in less than ideal conditions. …”

The challenge of it all, he’s saying, has made him better.

Hired as one of two vice presidents of player personnel after Ballard’s first draft in 2017, Dodds was promoted a year later to assistant GM. (The other VP of player personnel, Rex Hogan, left the Colts to become the Jets’ assistant GM earlier this summer.)

Dodds isn’t a household name, and isn’t a former player – two factors that could hurt his GM candidacy – but he’s known around the league as a no-frills exec with a shrewd eye for talent who’s direct with players. And he knows what the backend is supposed to look like: He helped build a championship team in Seattle, and he might be doing the same thing in Indianapolis.

If the Colts keep winning, Dodds won’t have to wait long.

“He’s unbelievable when it comes to communicating with coaches and seeing the fit of the player,” Ballard said. “Being able to watch the tape and know, ‘that guy is gonna fit.’ Ed’s a huge asset to us. He’s pretty good at his job.”

Asked if it’ll be hard to keep him, Ballard grins.

“We’ll see.”

---

It’s the third day of training camp and Dodds is lugging around a bulky knee brace on the sideline like he’s a fifth-string safety coming off an ACL tear. Old football injury? Nah. Dodds didn’t play a down of college ball, something he regrets to this day.

“Pickup basketball game back in Kingsville,” he said, shaking his head. “Hurts if I stand on it too long.”

He’s got a cushy office at the Colts’ West 56th St. facility he never uses; he prefers grinding out most of the season on the road, seeing prospects in person, chatting with coaches face-to-face – a scout at heart, remember. As soon as the season ends, the entire staff shifts into draft mode, huddling at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, then the combine in Indy, then breaking off to hit pro days across the country.

In the four months leading up to the draft, Dodds lives in the film room. His staff rips off 17 straight 12-hour workdays in February, poring through thousands of hours of tape, whittling each position down from hundreds to dozens. They do 15 straight more in April as the draft inches closer. It’s demanding, it’s exhaustive, it’s necessary. Dodds loves it. It’s his favorite part of the job.

“You always talk about how players miss the locker room?” he said. “Well, that’s our locker room. We get pissed off with one another. We laugh and joke with one another. We bond in there.”

That’s one thing Dodds loves about Indy: the staff Ballard has put together. Get him going, and he’ll rave about everyone who shuffles into that draft room, from the area scouts (“those guys kick-***”) to head coach Frank Reich (“he’s phenomenal”) to the Colts’ analytics experts, John Park and George Li.

“John will make you feel stupid,” Dodds said, “and George has forgotten more about football than I’ll ever know.”

The risk Dodds took two years ago? It worked. Competing worked. The Colts are coming, coming soon, and he’s one of the biggest reasons why. You won’t see him behind the microphone, you won’t read his name in the headlines, but in two years on the job, Ballard’s No. 2 has quietly and effectively helped construct one of the best young rosters in the NFL.

Next up: Win more than a f***ing wild-card game.

A week after the divisional playoff loss in Kansas City, this is what Dodds told his scouts before his candid closing words: “We’re all tired. We’ve all been out a bunch. We all got **** going on, but lemme tell you: it’s gonna be worth it.”

He’s lived it. He knows. The way Ed Dodds sees it, there’s only one barometer in this league.

If you don’t go to a Super Bowl, so what?

[kiwifalcon]

Sounds quiet familiar to what the GM we had now did to the Falcons in 08 going forward.

[FalconsIn2012]

1 minute ago, kiwifalcon said:

Sounds quiet familiar to what the GM we had now did to the Falcons in 08 going forward.

It’s the personality that I love.  The no nonsense approach.  The current Falcons seemed content to read their press clippings on how great they are.  Mr Dodds is the exact opposite.  
 

As a talent evaluator, he has few if any peers. Whether or not he can handle contract negotiations is the unknown.

[Francis York Morgan]

23 minutes ago, FalconsIn2012 said:

It’s the personality that I love.  The no nonsense approach.  The current Falcons seemed content to read their press clippings on how great they are.  Mr Dodds is the exact opposite.  
 

As a talent evaluator, he has few if any peers. Whether or not he can handle contract negotiations is the unknown.

Glad to see Dodds getting more hype on TATF. Been banging the table for him. The issue is prying him away, convincing him to take a GM spot since he'd be in the limelight...not an easy thing.

[MSalmon]

29 minutes ago, kiwifalcon said:

Sounds quiet familiar to what the GM we had now did to the Falcons in 08 going forward.

It does. I’m in a minority on this mb, but I’m nit quite as ready to dump TD. He’s been highly successful. It’s clear that there are obvious coaching issues, what’s not so clear is if the talent is sufficient. I’d argue that it is a very nicely assembles roster

[FalconsIn2012]

2 minutes ago, MSalmon said:

It does. I’m in a minority on this mb, but I’m nit quite as ready to dump TD. He’s been highly successful. It’s clear that there are obvious coaching issues, what’s not so clear is if the talent is sufficient. I’d argue that it is a very nicely assembles roster

It’s a valid point.  In 11 years he has built a SB worthy roster 4 times.  Yes, I count 2018 as a SB worthy roster.  Almost everyone in football circles considered our roster a top five roster last year

 

But he deserves serious criticism for our current CAP situation 

[kiwifalcon]

40 minutes ago, FalconsIn2012 said:

It’s the personality that I love.  The no nonsense approach.  The current Falcons seemed content to read their press clippings on how great they are.  Mr Dodds is the exact opposite.  
 

As a talent evaluator, he has few if any peers. Whether or not he can handle contract negotiations is the unknown.

So we move the no nonsense rah rah from the sidelines to the FO.

Gotta say that hasn’t worked too well on that front for the HC.

Question now beckons is it going to work in the FO and he’ll have a specific HC in mind to I bet.

[Charles Wright]

45 minutes ago, FalconsIn2012 said:

It’s the personality that I love.  The no nonsense approach.  The current Falcons seemed content to read their press clippings on how great they are.  Mr Dodds is the exact opposite.  
 

As a talent evaluator, he has few if any peers. Whether or not he can handle contract negotiations is the unknown.

 I'm not at all sure TD can handle contract negotiations any more. We're in cap heil here whether by his will or AB's, it's still a fact. We keep rewarding players that haven't really done jack shist.

[kiwifalcon]

6 minutes ago, Chaz said:

 I'm not at all sure TD can handle contract negotiations any more. We're in cap heil here whether by his will or AB's, it's still a fact. We keep rewarding players that haven't really done jack shist.

What are you talking about TD has mentioned years in advance that the cap situation was going to be a challenging one the idea that he can’t handle negotiations and the cap situation is false.

If you were around a decade plus ago that’s exactly the situation he had when the team was still paying Vick’s money 07-09 and still built a winner.

He has capable guys like Nick Polk who help him with this and they’ve done a fine job.I think too many just look at these cap websites and think oh well we are done.You watch regardless whoever is running this thing next year there will be ways around it.There always is.Draft worry about the draft.

[RazorWing]

Give me dobbs

[Smiler11]

If we go in a different direction, Dodd's would be top of my list

[Zeke_iBuyiSellHomes]

Ed Dodds, Indianapolis Colts

If you ask 10 front-office people around the league who the best scout in the NFL is, chances are you're going to hear Ed Dodds' name the most. The current assistant general manager with the Indianapolis Colts, no one in the league is more widely acknowledged as the top scout, which is why Ballard poached Dodds from Seattle and gave him a right-hand seat to his throne in Indianapolis.

Why isn't Dodds a household name? As I've been told, he doesn't particularly like the attention that comes with being a decision-maker and might not even have the desire to be a general manager. That would be great news for the Colts, but Dodds should start getting calls soon to interview for top jobs.

 

 

He's got my vote!!!

 

[FalconsIn2012]

37 minutes ago, Zeke_iBuyiSellHomes said:

Ed Dodds, Indianapolis Colts

If you ask 10 front-office people around the league who the best scout in the NFL is, chances are you're going to hear Ed Dodds' name the most. The current assistant general manager with the Indianapolis Colts, no one in the league is more widely acknowledged as the top scout, which is why Ballard poached Dodds from Seattle and gave him a right-hand seat to his throne in Indianapolis.

Why isn't Dodds a household name? As I've been told, he doesn't particularly like the attention that comes with being a decision-maker and might not even have the desire to be a general manager. That would be great news for the Colts, but Dodds should start getting calls soon to interview for top jobs.

 

 

He's got my vote!!!

 

Yup

[Atl Falcon]

Unproven...but sounds exactly what we need. Right now I can’t think of one better than Dodds. 

Sorry but it’s time for TD to move on. He did some good things but he couldn’t finish the job. I m tired of hearing it was Mike Smith’s and DQs fault. And all the talk about TD being a great salary cap manager....ok give him credit when we didn’t have the star power but once we did he and AB screwed it up. Plus we had some bad drafts until the restructuring of the FO and TD duties. Just me, but I think Pioli was a huge asset and gets my vote for those drafts. 

TD should have been fired a long with Smith IMO. It’s time for change and Dodd’s is our f****** man.

[lju713]

He knows talent and I know he will build the OL/DL. I also know we will out of the PAC 10 and Mountain West time zone drafting players. And he won't draft anymore of his buddies son's (Harlow, Oliver) and we can stack our roster with young talent again.

[Beast-N-Da-Sheetz]

Ok I'm sold. Dump TD on his *ss and bring in Dobbs!!! Or Dodds or whatever.