Intangibles of game honored
a sprawling narrative arc across a chronically unappreciated aspect of Steelers excellence.
I’m talking about scouting, and by broader definition, pro personnel. Two of the five people in the second Steelers Hall of Honor class are scouts — Art Rooney Jr. and Bill Nunn, and the other three — first-round draft pick and likely Hall of Famer Alan Faneca, Buddy Dial, and Bleier are inextricably linked by the development of the scouting/personnel operation throughout the ancient franchise’s thick history.
“Nunn did so many things in addition to scouting — he was training camp manager for years, he had phenomenal contacts with black colleges; Bill was a really a sharp guy,” Art Jr. said this week. “He’d say to me, ‘You know you’re a pretty smart guy for a rich kid. You know, street smart.’ I’d say, ‘What are you talkin’ about, we don’t have that much money,’ because my dad (team founder Arthur J. Rooney) kept beating it into our heads that we didn’t have money, but to Bill we did. He’d say, ‘Don’t give me that crap, you’re real rich.’ I’d say, ‘Well I might be what you think is a rich guy, but I grew up on the North Side with all the poor guys.’”
When Dan Rooney, the Steelers’ late chairman, decided in the late ‘60s that Nunn, the nationally revered editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, simply had too much valuable information on black players not to work for the Steelers, the immense scouting aptitudes of Nunn and Art Jr. began to change an organization famous for its personnel pratfalls.
The Steelers of yore passed in the draft on Jim Brown, cut Johnny Unitas, traded Len Dawson, and then, in 1964, shipped All-Pro wideout Dial to Dallas.
“Dial was terrific and he drew double coverage, which made the other wideout, Gary Ballman, a terrific player,” Art Jr. remembered, “like now with (Antonio) Brown and (JuJu Smith-) Schuster.”
A prolific pass catcher who was gaining 1,000 yards in a run-oriented NFL, who averaged 21.6 per catch in 1963, Dial went to Dallas in exchange for nothing in 1964. Not for essentially nothing, not for a player or players who’d wind up delivering next to nothing. I mean plain old nothing. Technically, he was traded for the draft rights to defensive tackle Scott Appleton, but when Appleton instead signed with the rival AFL, the Steelers got … yeah.
That trade was engineered by then-coach Buddy Parker, a skilled strategist but a terrible personnel man owing mostly to his own erraticism, described thusly in Art Jr.’s 2008 book “Ruanaidh, the story of Art Rooney and his clan”:
“Parker had many idiosyncrasies … his despair after defeats, even after defeats in exhibition games, often seemed almost psychotic. First he would look for a bottle, or a bar. Then came the ranting. Then, alone or with only his coaching assistants nearby, he would find a knife or a pair of shears, lie flat on his back, and cut off his necktie directly below the knot. Finally, re-playing the lost game in his feverish mind, and assessing blame, he would shake up the team, threatening cuts, trades, or lineup changes, and even, on occasion, putting them into effect.”
Today, Parker would be a talk-show caller, obviously. But in his era, he was not exactly the lone eccentric in the Steelers front office.
“Fido Murphy was one of the biggest nuts going,” said Art Jr., who was employing Mr. Murphy as a scout at the time, “but he just had a feeling for (scouting) quarterbacks.”
For all of meticulous reportage involved with modern scouting, it still often pivots on feel. If that weren’t true, Bleier might never have been a Steeler.
In that era, assistant coaches were sent out as scouts on Saturdays, and a backfield coach named Don Heinrich was being sent to Notre Dame now and again. Just about anyone in 1967 America could tell you that Irish captain Rocky Bleier was a nifty player, but the pro game had assumed certain physical requirements with which Bleier was not blessed. He was 5-9½ for one, and for another, he was, um, not fast.
“I had a knee operation in November of ‘68 after a ligament tear against Georgia Tech,” Bleier said. “I was rehabbing when the draft came around. That’s why nobody wanted to take a chance. They didn’t know how bad it was. Until Heinrich pushed and said, ‘You really gotta take this kid. He has good fundamentals. He can catch the ball. Plays slot back. If you’re just throwing darts up there, he’s a kid you should look at, you should take.’”
So they did, in the 16th round, so the importance of scouting was never lost on old No. 20.
“Heinrich was the guy, but I also thought it was because of Bill Nunn and Art, the other two reasons I was on this team,” he said. “I truly believe I got a shot because of them.”
Less than a year later, Bleier was drafted again, this time into the Army, sent to Vietnam, shot, had his foot nearly torn off by a grenade, and returned to near-impossible odds against playing again. At one point during his rehab, Art Jr. used him in the scouting department.
“(Rocky) was my assistant and he was wonderful; he was really good,” Rooney said. “He’d go out on Saturdays. He wrote good reports. And what a representative! He came up to my office and I’d say, ‘Rocky, you’re gonna be a general manager. You’ll be a good scout, and you’ll be a general manager,’ like (current GM Kevin) Colbert has done. So Rocky comes in one day and says, ‘Good news, they’re going to activate me.’ I said, ‘Rocky, I told you, stay with me and you’ll be a general manager. He turns around and takes off running, calling back to me, ‘I don’t wanna be a damn general manager. I wanna be a player.’”
Art Jr.’s department would soon enter its golden era, culminating in a 1974 draft that snagged four future Hall of Famers. His everevolving scouting philosophy had included a significant structural change.
“Chuck Noll always said about scouting, ‘Well I have to have my coaches involved.’” Rooney said. “Well, a lot of time the coaches — there were some who were really involved with scouting and there were others who didn’t care. I wanted a guy whose job depended on what kind of a scout he was, not what kind of coach he was.
“You can lose with good football players, you can screw them up or whatnot, but you’re never going to win without good football players.”
The best scouts all seem to have an earnestness about the job that’s hard to get out of the bloodstream.
I was with Colbert, now 61, now Steelers vice president, now Steelers GM, on a flight this week from Charlotte to Tampa. He’d been scouting. Champaign, Ill., Friday night, Knoxville, Tenn., Saturday. On his way to Steelers at Buccaneers. He was flying coach.
“Being out on the road, watching a game or watching practice, talking to people, it’s all part of the evaluation process and I still enjoy it very much,” said Colbert, who’s been in scouting/personnel for 35 years, first with BLESTO scouting service and then with the Dolphins, Lions, and, for the last 18 years, with Pittsburgh. “As long as I’m involved with the team, I never envision myself not doing it. It’s not that I don’t trust our scouts that are out there. I need to see things. I can’t form an opinion without that.”
Steelers scouting today remains essentially rooted in methodologies that extend back to Art Jr., who first computerized the department, and even to The Chief himself, the ultimate people person.
“As I tell our people all the time,” Colbert said, “Look, guys, until we learn how to measure intangibles, we’re going to believe what we see and what we learn when we talk to people. All of the analytics and information have to be utilized, but it will never outweigh what we learn by just talking to people.”