SUPER DAVE! Former Giant exec Gettleman makes impact as Panther GM:
Former Giant exec Gettleman’s long road to trip Super Panthers’ with off pays job GM
The old man had worn down. This is why Dave Gettleman was in John Mara’s office on that February afternoon four years ago, why he wasn’t reveling in the Giants’ Super Bowl XLVI win. He’d spent more than two decades working in NFL personnel departments, helped craft two Lombardi Trophy winners in East Rutherford, all the while chasing his dream of becoming a GM.
But after being passed over for four general manager jobs despite his strong track record, Gettleman, the Giants’ director of pro player personnel, was ready to give up. He was in Mara’s office asking for a demotion to player analyst, figuring he’d live out his NFL days in obscurity.
“I was to a point where if it wasn’t meant to be it wasn’t meant to be,” Gettleman says of the decision now. “You’d have had to be a fool not to step back and see where the industry was going: The younger guys were getting the jobs.”
“He actually got quite emotional,” adds Mara. “He really did not believe that he was ever going to get another chance. I think he was frustrated by how many times he had been knocking on the door to becoming a general manager.”
But the old man, who will be 65 next month, would get one more chance. And next Sunday at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., Dave Gettleman will finally get to show everyone he made the most of it, when his Carolina Panthers take on the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl 50.
It will be the culmination of what Gettleman jokingly refers to as his “meteoric 27-year rise.” After the Boston native had successful stints as the football coach at Spackenkill and Kingston, N.Y., high schools, Gettleman began his front office career as a Bills scout in 1986 and became resigned to his fate as a front office nobody in that meeting with Mara. But one year after that, in 2013, he finally got his chance, when Carolina owner Jerry Richardson, on the advice of DL Jared Allen Trade
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“He’s smart,” Accorsi says. “He’s a great evaluator. The thing about Dave, first of all, (is) he has an enormous capacity to do the work. A lot of people work hard, but he gets a lot done when he works.”
It was that ability and work ethic that made Gettleman so valuable to Accorsi, the Giants GM from 19982007. Accorsi recalls Gettleman as a personnel man who could break down the league’s most obscure talents without his computer, and he credits Gettleman with the Giants’ free-agent successes during their two Super Bowl runs.
“We hit on every free agent,” Accorsi says. “From Plaxico (Burress) to Antonio Pierce. To (Shaun) O’Hara to (Kareem) McKenzie. His evaluations were so sound ... right off the top of his head he would know everyone in the league.”
Gettleman took pride in that. He’d learned the craft in Buffalo under Bill Polian and developed a desire to run his own club during his three seasons as a Broncos scout in the late 1990s. To Gettleman, the 60-hour film weeks and the instant recall were part of his job if he wanted to develop into a GM.
He admits he sometimes worked too hard, maybe went overboard with his scouting. But he’d joined the Giants as an assistant to thenpro personnel director Tim Rooney in 1998, and been gifted the job when Rooney shocked everyone by stepping down in 1999. And Gettleman didn’t want to squander his chance to impress, so sure, he became a bit of a “workaholic,” he says, spending way too much time in the office.
“That’s what Ernie was paying me for,” he says. “When he walked into my office and asked about somebody, I felt I needed to have the answer.
“I’m old-fashioned,” he adds. “Put in the work and you’ll reap the fruits.”
Except that never seemed to happen. When Accorsi stepped down after the 2006 season, the Giants passed on Gettleman in favor of Jerry Reese. The Chiefs took Scott Pioli instead of Gettleman in 2009. Cleveland passed over him twice, once in favor of George Kokinis, in 2009. After a 1-7 start, Kokinis was escorted out of the Browns facility.
Only the Giants still have the GM they chose over Gettleman — Reese — still in place.
“All those teams have since fired the guy that they hired instead of Dave,” Mara says. “Because of his ability to evaluate talent and in combination with his work ethic and his integrity, he was made to be a general manager.”
Accorsi blames league-wide trends for delaying Gettleman’s arrival. Teams have increasingly chased younger, fresher minds, aiming to bring new ideas into the NFL, perhaps to better relate to a new generation of players.
It’s a pattern that’s been on full display in the coaching carousel of this offseason, from the hiring of new Dolphins head coach Adam Gase, 37 years old, to Mara’s own decision to gently nudge two-time Super Bowl champion coach Tom Coughlin, 69, out the door and replace him with Ben McAdoo, 38, who has never been a head coach at any level. Meanwhile, fired Bucs coach Lovie Smith, 57, who once piloted the Bears to a Super Bowl, barely drew interviews, and Chuck Pagano, 55, just held onto his job in Indianapolis.
“Look at the ages of the GMs that are getting jobs now,” Accorsi says. “They’re all in their 30s, 40s. He (Gettleman) is kind of unique today, because you don’t see 60-year-old guys getting coaching or GM jobs.
“But he (Gettleman) toiled in the vineyards, and now he’s making the wine, which is a really wonderful thing to see.”
Not that it was an easy process to build the Panthers into a powerhouse. Yes, Gettleman already had the quarterback in Cam Newton and a strong defensive leader in linebacker Luke Kuechly, both drafted by former GM
Marty Hurney. But he also inherited a team that was $15 million over the cap, a situation that projected to grow worse with each passing season.
But that led Gettleman to put his stamp on the Panthers, in quietly Giants-esque fashion. In 2014, he severed ties with popular wide receiver Steve Smith and running back DeAngelo Williams — and their big contracts — in moves that got him skewered when the Panthers got off to a 3-8-1 start. Gettleman didn’t care.
“The bottom line for me is, I’m an old man, 64, going to be 65 in a month,” he says. “I’m not concerned with winning press conferences. I’m concerned with winning games.”
And when Carolina won its final four games to sneak into the playoffs, even advancing to the NFC divisional round, Gettleman’s moves didn’t look so bad — especially since they helped position the Panthers to wind up around $20 million under the cap this offseason.
“He got absolutely killed on Steve Smith, by everybody including Steve Smith,” says Accorsi. “But he fought his way through it, he kept his poise, he didn’t get defensive. It shows you the value of experience.”
Gettleman relied on that experience earlier this year, too, when Carolina lost Kelvin Benjamin, its most physically gifted receiver, to a torn ACL. Suddenly, what seemed like a thin crop of receivers was without a top target, down to the likes of Ted Ginn Jr. and Philly Brown. That led many to push for the Panthers to sign former Pro Bowlers Reggie Wayne or Hakeem Nicks.
Instead, much as the Giants did with the safety position this season (with far less impressive results), Gettleman stood pat. And he watched as Ginn, never a No. 1 receiver, scored a career-high 10 TDs. Brown, who struggled with drops in the preseason, was on the receiving end of Newton’s 86yard bomb in the first quarter of the NFC title game thrashing of the Cardinals.
“When Kelvin got hurt they wanted me to sign every 95-year-old receiver that ever put pads on,” Gettleman says. “But the people inside the organization know the team better than everybody. We trusted our evaluations on receivers.”
Gettleman hasn’t hesitated to lean on the experience of brighter minds, either. The first time he ran an NFL draft, in 2013, he drafted defensive tackles Star L ot u lelei a nd Kawann Short back-to-back in the first and second rounds, a strange move that had many wondering if he was overmatched. This season, Short had a team-high nine sacks and Lotulelei anchored a staunch run defense.
“People said, you have other needs,” Accorsi recalls. “That was the Giants’ way of doing things.”
More precisely, says Gettleman, it was the way of another old man, Coughlin.
“Tom Coughlin made the point, big men allow you to compete,” Gettleman says. “And I’ve never forgotten that. He said it so concisely ... This is a big man’s game.”
And it’s an old man’s perfect game of team management that has gotten the Carolina Panthers here, on the verge of their first Super Bowl title if they can knock off Denver. “More than anything, it’s a culmination of all the lessons I’ve learned, and just being in the right place,” Gettleman says. “The enjoyment for me is to be able to take all the things I’ve learned from my 27, 28 years in the industry, and put it into practice.”
It’s been a long time coming.