Let's Buy an NFL Team Part 3 - The Executive

Who's going to run our new franchise?

We’ve bought a team and we’ve fixed our brand. Now it’s time to start the actual business of football.

As an intelligent billionaire, I’m smart enough to know where my expertise ends, so one of the most important things I’ll need to do is hire savvy and experienced people to handle things that I can’t do myself. And since I didn’t make my (regrettably imaginary) billions as a football executive, that means we’re going to have to hire one.

But honestly, I think this would be a good idea anyway. As the owner of an NFL team, you have a lot on your plate, overseeing (at least, in theory) both the football side and business side of the organization. Ideally, you’d hire someone to oversee both sides, addressing their concerns as necessary.

Whoever we hire to oversee the football side of things is going to have a lot on their plate, functionally building an entire personnel department and all the supporting pieces that go with it. They’ll be in charge of hiring a coach, who will subsequently hire his own staff. They’ll also have to build out our technology department, which will handle things like analytics and the computer infrastructure we need to make it go.

As I said, it’s a lot. Finding the right person for the job will be a challenge, but there are plenty of capable people out there. We just have to choose one, and hopefully, the rest of the pieces fall into place from there.

How do you find the right person for the job? Well, that’s anybody’s guess, but I have a few parameters that I think will get us pointed in the right direction.

First, and this is probably obvious, I want our candidate to have a progressive track record of experience in a successful front office. I want someone who has climbed the ranks through a variety of roles and now holds a position just below the level of general manager.

They should primarily have a scouting background, but I would not be opposed to adding a candidate from outside the scouting fraternity. A comparable blend of other kinds of experience would be just as intriguing.

It would also be nice if our candidate had some kind of finance experience, though a scout with experience on the financial side of an organization is rare. Really, I’m just hoping for a guy who has some kind of firsthand knowledge of how the cap works.

Finally, given the current league trends, I wouldn’t mind hiring someone from a team who has had success running an offense from the Shanahan tree. If that’s how the league is going to play offense right now, it seems like it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hire someone with at least some experience building a roster that’s well-suited to that style of play. I don’t think this should be a primary qualification, but it can’t hurt.

What’s that get us? I sorted through some of the front offices that seem to align with some of these values and came up with the following list of candidates.