The NFL isn’t bad at this, really, nobody does it better. How the NFL built this machine, and where it still breaks down, has something to teach everyone who makes high-stakes talent decisions.

The NFL wasn’t always this obsessive

Before 1982, NFL scouting was a mess. Teams ran their own evaluations independently including scheduling individual visits with prospects, flying scouts around the country, duplicating each other’s work with no shared infrastructure. The closest thing to organization came from three rival scouting cooperatives: LESTO (formed in 1963 by the Lions, Eagles, and Steelers), which became BLESTO when the Bears joined; Troika, launched in 1964 by the Cowboys, Rams, and 49ers (later renamed Quadra when the Saints joined in 1967); and National Football Scouting, Inc. Each ran separate camps, evaluating overlapping pools of players for their member clubs. Redundant, expensive, and inconsistent.

Then Tex Schramm—the Dallas Cowboys president and general manager who’d already pioneered computer-assisted player evaluation—proposed something obvious that nobody had done: put everyone in one room. In 1982, National Football Scouting held the first National Invitational Camp in Tampa, Florida. A total of 163 players showed up. Sixteen teams participated. The primary purpose was basic: share medical information on draft-eligible prospects so every team wasn’t paying for its own set of X-rays.

For the first three years, the rival camps kept running their own events. But in 1985, all 28 NFL teams agreed to merge into a single camp—splitting costs, pooling data, standardizing evaluation. After two years in Tampa, followed by New Orleans, Arizona, and New Orleans again, the Combine settled permanently in Indianapolis in 1987, where it’s been ever since.

What started as a cost-sharing arrangement for medical exams evolved into something no other industry has replicated: a centralized, standardized, four-day evaluation of the top ~300 prospects in a talent pool, attended by every hiring organization in the field simultaneously. Psychological testing, athletic measurables, formal interviews, informal hallway conversations, medical records shared through a unified electronic system. The Combine didn’t just change how NFL teams scout. It created an evaluation infrastructure that makes corporate hiring look like guesswork by comparison.

Which, to be fair, it mostly is.

What 319 prospects just endured

The Combine is just the showcase. The real evaluation started months ago.

Greg Gabriel, who spent nine years as Director of College Scouting for the Chicago Bears and more than three decades in the NFL, detailed the full cycle: six area scouts divide the country into regions covering roughly 15 major schools each, visiting each a minimum of three times per year. December meetings narrow over 1,000 names to 450–500 workable prospects. Cross-check scouts evaluate roughly 30 players each, watching four to six games per prospect. Then the character investigation, the pro day visit, the private workout. Gabriel’s standard: “I always told scouts that they could miss on the talent evaluation because we had others to cross check that area. They had to be completely accurate on character evaluation.”

At the Combine itself, each of the 32 teams conducts 45 formal interviews at 18 minutes each—a format updated in 2020 from the previous standard of 60 interviews at 15 minutes. Players undergo orthopedic exams, X-rays, MRIs, and specialist consultations. They run the 40-yard dash, bench 225 pounds, and sprint through position-specific drills while Sparta Science force plate technology generates “Movement Signatures” from a database of over two million scans.

Scouting departments run annual budgets of $2–3 million, according to agent Jack Bechta, with typical department sizes of 15–25 people. Former Washington and Houston GM Charley Casserly has noted that Green Bay’s scouts spend approximately 17 days reviewing three games on every single draftable player—something few teams match.

Forty-four years after Tampa. Hundreds of millions of dollars in cumulative investment. The most sophisticated talent evaluation apparatus any industry has ever built.

And it still whiffs constantly!

The busts that haunt the process

JaMarcus Russell. The Raiders selected him first overall in 2007 out of LSU. Six-six, 265 pounds, a cannon for an arm. He signed a six-year, $68 million contract with $31.5 million guaranteed. Three seasons later: 7-18 as a starter, 52.1% completion rate, released. Matt Millen warned Al Davis not to draft him: “Do not draft this guy. … I don’t think he is the guy who people believe he is.” Head coach Lane Kiffin wanted Calvin Johnson instead. Overruled by ownership.

Vernon Gholston. The Jets took him sixth overall in 2008 after he crushed the Combine: 37 bench press reps at 225 pounds, a 4.67 40-yard dash, a 35.5-inch vertical. At Ohio State, he’d racked up 14 sacks in 13 games. In the NFL he recorded zero sacks in 45 games. Rex Ryan later: “Well, then I failed as far as the numbers go.” A five-year, $32 million contract for a defensive end who couldn’t get to the quarterback.

Darrius Heyward-Bey. The Raiders—again—picked him seventh overall in 2009. Why? He ran a 4.30-second 40-yard dash, fastest at the Combine. Al Davis loved speed above all else. Heyward-Bey signed for $38.25 million with $23.5 million guaranteed and never became a number one receiver. Michael Crabtree, picked three spots later at No. 10, became a productive starter for a decade—637 receptions and 7,499 yards over 11 seasons.

Three different teams. Three different years. Three guys who dominated every measurable the Combine could throw at them. The scouting machine did everything it was designed to do—it measured what it could measure. The problem was in what it couldn’t.

And then there’s Brock Purdy

If the busts show the system failing at the top, Purdy shows it failing at the bottom—in the opposite direction.

The San Francisco 49ers selected him 262nd overall in the 2022 draft. Last pick. Mr. Irrelevant—a nickname the league has given to the final selection since 1976, because historically, that player almost never matters. Purdy’s father joked about it. His mother brought cake and balloons. He was ready to go undrafted entirely.

The same San Francisco 49ers had, one year earlier, traded three first-round picks and a third-rounder to Miami to move up to the No. 3 overall pick and draft quarterback Trey Lance out of North Dakota State. Lance was the prototype: young, athletic, enormous arm, limitless upside. The 49ers bet four draft picks—including first-rounders in 2021, 2022, and 2023—on Lance being their franchise quarterback. The ten picks taken after Lance in that 2021 first round included eight Pro Bowlers: Ja’Marr Chase, Kyle Pitts, Penei Sewell, Jaycee Horn, Micah Parsons, Patrick Surtain II, DeVonta Smith, Rashawn Slater.

Lance played eight games in a 49ers uniform. Four starts. Then injuries, then a demotion to third string behind Brock Purdy and Sam Darnold, then a trade to Dallas for a fourth-round pick. Three first-rounders in, one fourth-rounder out.

Meanwhile, pick 262 stepped in after Lance and Jimmy Garoppolo both went down with injuries in 2022 and won every regular-season start. Led the 49ers to the NFC Championship as a rookie. Led the league in passer rating (113.0) and yards per attempt (9.6) the following year. Took them to Super Bowl LVIII. Finished fourth in MVP voting.

In May 2025, Brock Purdy signed a five-year, $265 million extension with $182.55 million guaranteed—the largest contract in 49ers franchise history. He earned $2.6 million total over his first three seasons. His new deal pays him $2.9 million per week.

The scouting apparatus evaluated both players. It correctly identified Lance as an elite physical talent. It rated Purdy as the least valuable prospect in the entire draft class.

Steve Young (Hall of Famer, former 49er) explained what went wrong: “The [quarterback] position is really about guile and an innate gift from heaven, in some ways, to be able to have your heart rate go down when everyone else is in anxiety and pressure… The draft doesn’t understand that thing.”

A week into training camp in 2022, coach Kyle Shanahan told 49ers CEO Jed York he thought Purdy was their best quarterback. The third-string rookie, not the franchise investment. Shanahan saw it in practice. The Combine never measured it.

The data confirms what the stories suggest

RotoWire analyzed all 800 first-round picks from 2000–2024 and found picks 22 and 26 share the highest bust rate at 57%. Pick 32 sits at 50%. Even picks 1–10 produce Pro Bowlers only about half the time. ESPN’s Paul Hembekides analyzed 20 drafts—first-round quarterbacks hit at just 46%, wide receivers at 27%. The 33rd Team found only 31% of first-round picks from 2010–2017 signed second contracts with the team that drafted them.

Ravens GM Eric DeCosta, one of the sharpest evaluators in football, acknowledged on the Ravens’ team podcast “The Lounge” in May 2025 that some view the draft as “inherently sort of a luck-driven process.” He hedged, said he doesn’t fully believe that, but argued the only rational response is to accumulate more picks to get more at-bats against long odds.

Roughly 40–50% of first-round picks don’t work out. After 44 years of Combine evolution, billions in scouting investment, and technology that can measure the force a player generates when he pushes off the ground. The machine is extraordinary. And about half the time, it’s wrong.

So. Why does this matter if you’ve never scouted a football player?

The corporate parallel nobody wants to hear

Because your company fails at the same rate with a fraction of the effort. Which, is some small comfort.

CEB (now Gartner) studied nearly 30,000 leaders and found 50% of executive transitions underperform, 3% fail outright, and 47% fall short. That study includes both external hires and internal promotions into new roles. Leadership IQ tracked 5,247 hiring managers across 312 organizations: 46% of new hires fail within 18 months. The reasons: coachability (26%), emotional intelligence (23%), motivation (17%), temperament (15%). Technical competence—what interviews are supposed to test—accounted for just 11%. (Leadership IQ is a corporate training firm. Proprietary research, not peer-reviewed. Still widely cited.)

CareerBuilder’s 2017 Harris Poll of 2,257 hiring managers: 74% admitted to making a bad hire, average cost $14,900.

The NFL invests 10–20x more per hire, uses dedicated evaluation teams who do nothing but assess talent year-round, and deploys medical technology no corporation could justify. Corporate America runs unstructured interviews and gut-feel decisions. And the failure rates land in the same range.

That convergence has a mathematical explanation.

The ceiling nobody can break

Schmidt and Hunter’s 1998 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, synthesizing 85 years of selection research, established the benchmarks. General mental ability (GMA) tests predicted job performance at .51. Structured interviews: .51. The best combination of GMA plus integrity testing reached .65.

Then Sackett, Zhang, Berry, and Lievens published a reanalysis in 2022 in the Journal of Applied Psychology that shook the field. Validity had been “substantially overestimated.” Structured interviews emerged as the best single predictor at .42. GMA dropped from .51 to .31. Years of experience collapsed to .07.

A validity of .65 explains approximately 42% of performance variance. The majority of what determines whether a hire succeeds can’t be measured at the point of hiring. Sackett’s revisions push the ceiling even lower.

NFL draft bust rates: ~40–50%. Corporate executive failure rates: ~40–50%. Best-case predictive validity: ~42% of variance explained. Three independent lines of evidence, same range.

Steve Young nailed it without knowing the research. “The draft doesn’t understand that thing”—the intangible quality that separates Purdy from Lance, the trait no Combine drill captures. Selection science says roughly half of what determines success lives outside anything any evaluation process can reach. Young was describing the ceiling from the inside.

The organizations getting closest aren’t spending more

Google abandoned brainteasers in 2013 after Laszlo Bock told the New York Times: “Brainteasers are a complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything.” Internal data: four interviews capture 86% of the predictive value—the “Rule of Four” from Bock’s book Work Rules! After four rounds, you’re adding noise. Google uses hiring committees reaching decisions by consensus. The hiring manager can’t unilaterally approve.

Al Davis could.

Amazon’s Bar Raiser program, founded in 1999, puts an independent evaluator from a different department in every hiring loop—with veto power. Over 10,000 Bar Raisers and Bar Raisers in Training globally. An independent eye whose job is to challenge the primary assessors’ judgment.

Automattic—which runs WordPress.com—supplements standard interviews with a paid trial: 25 to 40 hours for most roles, at $25/hour. CEO Matt Mullenweg has described this as the closest thing to watching someone actually perform instead of listening to them talk about performing. That’s the closest thing in corporate America to what scouts do with game film.

The Cleveland Browns—rated the NFL’s most analytically advanced organization in ESPN’s annual survey—are the football version. GM Andrew Berry (Harvard economics and computer science, youngest GM in NFL history at 32) and former Chief Strategy Officer Paul DePodesta (yes, Moneyball Paul DePodesta) built the league’s largest analytics staff before DePodesta departed for Major League Baseball in late 2025. The Browns swept all three categories in ESPN’s 2024 analytics survey.

What do these organizations share? They didn’t add more hours. They structured evaluation differently: independent checks, work samples over interview talk, consensus decisions, systematic reduction of individual bias. They accepted the ceiling and focused on getting as close to it as possible.

The accountability gap is the real scandal

SHRM’s 2025 benchmarking survey found roughly one in five organizations track quality of hire. Dan Rymer, Executive Vice President at executive search firm Redgrave, wrote: “Few organizations invest even 10 percent of their search budget into ensuring a new executive’s success.”

NFL teams grade every draft class against projections. They know which scouts hit and which don’t. They run accountability loops through the entire process—and even with all that, they hover around 50%.

Most companies don’t track. Don’t measure. Don’t learn. No feedback loop. No post-hire audit. No systematic study of why hires fail. If you’re running a business, ask yourself: do you know the hit rate on your last five senior hires? Could your CHRO tell you? Is anyone feeding failure data back into your process?

The NFL can’t break 50% with obsessive accountability. Corporate America isn’t going to break it by not even keeping score.

A Raiders fan’s sidebar: the ghost of JaMarcus Russell

I’m a Raiders fan, the Combine just wrapped, and this franchise is staring down its past.

The Raiders hold the No. 1 overall pick and everybody, every executive ESPN polled, expects them to take Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza. GM John Spytek spoke at the Combine podium this week, saying he’s “not necessarily in favor of running him out there right away either” and would want to take pressure off a young quarterback as much as possible.

The last time the Raiders picked first was 2007. JaMarcus Russell. We know how that ended.

What haunts me about Russell isn’t the bust because busts happen, that’s the whole point of this piece. It’s how it happened. Millen warned Davis. Kiffin wanted someone else. The scouting reports flagged work ethic. No structural check on the owner’s preference existed. Al Davis wanted the big arm, and nobody could say no.

Google requires consensus. Amazon gives Bar Raisers veto power. JaMarcus Russell happened because one man could override every evaluator in the room.

Mendoza, Heisman winner, national champion, is the consensus pick. That’s not the risk. The risk is the structure around the pick. Does Spytek have genuine authority, or can ownership, including minority owner Tom Brady, override the room the way Davis did? That’s not a question about Fernando Mendoza. It’s a question about organizational design. And it matters more than any 40 time at the combine. We haven’t even dug in to the importance of the team around the quarterback.

The prediction problem doesn’t get solved. It gets managed.

Three hundred and nineteen prospects were in Indianapolis this week. Thirty-two teams deploying the most sophisticated talent evaluation apparatus any industry has ever built. And roughly half of the resulting first-round picks won’t earn a second contract with the team that drafted them.

The 49ers traded three first-round picks for Trey Lance and found their franchise quarterback with pick 262. The Combine measured Lance’s arm strength and Purdy’s 40 time and missed the thing Steve Young says actually matters—the ability to stay calm when everyone around you is panicking.

Better process matters. Picks 1–10 produce Pro Bowlers at roughly twice the rate of picks 21–32. Structured interviews predict at .42 versus .19 for unstructured. Google’s Rule of Four captures 86% of value. Those margins are real.

But the organizations that thrive, both in football and in business, aren’t the ones trying to crack the prediction problem. They build systems that assume roughly half their bets are wrong: fast identification of misses, rapid reallocation, cultures that treat evaluation failure as data rather than shame.

The scouting gap between the NFL and corporate America is real and enormous. The prediction gap is the same on both sides.

Have a take on the scouting gap, or a better example of structured evaluation done right? Let me know!

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This isn’t another coaching carousel story. It’s about how rejection signals work in talent markets. The person who doesn’t get promoted internally often becomes the hottest external candidate.

The Shanahan Pivot

When Robert Saleh left San Francisco for the Titans, everyone expected Bradley would slide into the coordinator role. Shanahan had hired him as assistant head coach for defense in 2024. He knew Saleh might leave quickly. At his end-of-season presser, Shanahan called Bradley “the obvious one to everyone and is to us, too.”

Then Raheem Morris didn’t get the Cardinals head coaching job.

The calculus changed instantly. Morris—recently available after Atlanta fired him following back-to-back 8-9 seasons—suddenly entered the market. The Cardinals had passed on him as a finalist, choosing Mike LaFleur instead. For Shanahan, who’d reportedly been trying to hire Morris since their days together in Tampa Bay, Washington, and Atlanta, this opened a door.

The 49ers pivoted. On February 1st, they announced Morris as defensive coordinator.

The Market Response

Within two weeks, both Tennessee and Arizona pursued Bradley aggressively. The Titans won, even though sources suggest the Cardinals offered him play-calling duties. Bradley chose less autonomy to reunite with his former colleague Saleh.

This pattern challenges conventional wisdom. Getting passed over publicly should damage your reputation. The market should discount you. Instead, Bradley’s value increased.

Damaged Goods or Undervalued Asset?

When examining organizational rejections, external observers face an interpretation problem. Is this person damaged goods? Or did they become available for non-performance reasons?

The 49ers inadvertently answered this through their public statements and timing. Shanahan calling Bradley “obvious” then hiring someone else sent a clear signal. This wasn’t about Bradley’s inadequacy—it reflected Shanahan’s specific preference.

External teams read this correctly. They saw a coordinator-quality coach available through organizational preference, not performance issues. It mirrors when companies pass over their CFO for CEO. Not because the CFO lacks capability—but because they found their ideal candidate. That CFO immediately attracts executive search firms.

Relationships Over Market Mechanics

Personal relationships shape these decisions. Shanahan’s connection to Morris went back years—they’d worked together at three separate stops. Bradley choosing Tennessee over Arizona despite less responsibility? He’d worked with Saleh before. These reflect relationship dynamics more than pure market mechanics.

The NFL coaching market runs on personal networks. This pattern appears in tech, finance, and consulting. The “known quantity” hiring principle crosses industries.

The 49ers didn’t undervalue Bradley. They valued both him and Morris accurately. But Shanahan weighted his long-standing pursuit of Morris differently. The external market identified competent talent available for non-performance reasons.

Timing and Optionality

This reveals something about timing and optionality. Every internal promotion risks losing unchosen candidates. Every external hire signals that internal development has limits. Smart organizations anticipate this and create retention mechanisms.

When examining Bradley’s situation, I found no evidence suggesting hidden flaws. Every indication points to pure preference. Shanahan got his target when availability aligned.

The Cardinals reportedly offering Bradley play-calling duties reveals another layer. They weren’t just hiring the 49ers’ second choice. They offered what San Francisco couldn’t—actual coordinator autonomy.

Beyond Football: The Pattern in Tech

This pattern extends beyond football. Consider Microsoft’s 2023 reorganization. Panos Panay built Surface into a billion-dollar business. When Microsoft pulled back on experimental devices, he left. Within weeks, Amazon hired him to lead their entire Devices & Services business—overseeing Alexa, Echo, Kindle, Fire TV, Ring, and more. Not damaged goods—undervalued internally, recognized externally.

Disney showed similar dynamics in 2020. Bob Chapek was named CEO, passing over streaming chief Kevin Mayer—the dealmaker behind acquisitions of Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, and BAMTech. Mayer was thought to be the frontrunner. Instead of accepting diminished status, he immediately became CEO of TikTok. Internal candidates passed over for top jobs often land better external opportunities. The market interprets their availability differently than their rejection.

The Availability Cascade

This represents what I call the “availability cascade.” When high-quality talent becomes available for non-performance reasons, competition intensifies. External firms recognize the arbitrage opportunity. They’re acquiring undervalued assets, not damaged goods.

The next time someone gets passed over for their expected promotion, watch carefully. Focus less on what it says about them. Focus more on what opportunity it creates.

Sometimes rejection opens better doors. Ask Gus Bradley. Or ask the teams that competed for him two weeks later.

This wasn’t a firing. Twenty-four hours after a humiliating 30-6 playoff loss to Houston, with “Fire Tomlin!” chants still echoing through Acrisure Stadium, the coach called it quits himself. Art Rooney II’s statement practically begged him to reconsider, calling Tomlin’s record “likely never to be duplicated.” Yet Tomlin left anyway. A source close to him explained simply: “What is there left to chase?”

Three Coaches in Fifty-Six Years

The Steelers haven’t hired a head coach since 2007. They’ve employed exactly three coaches since 1969—Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, and Tomlin. That’s three coaches in fifty-six years, a stability that makes Supreme Court appointments look temporary. This organization doesn’t do coaching searches. GM Omar Khan is about to lead his first one, and as ESPN’s Marcus Spears noted, “Really, the pressure is on Omar Khan. Like, that’s the name that everybody should be paying attention to.”

But let’s examine what actually happened here through the lens of principal-agent theory. Different stakeholders wanted different things. Ownership valued stability and brand consistency—no losing seasons meant no embarrassment, no chaos, no rebuilding. Fans wanted playoff victories, not regular season competence. And Tomlin? He wanted a championship legacy that had slipped away after his early success.

The Numbers That Haunted Him

The numbers tell the story. Tomlin won five of his first six playoff games between 2007 and 2010, including a Super Bowl victory over the Arizona Cardinals. Then came the drought: 3-11 in his final fourteen playoff games, culminating in a seven-game losing streak that tied the NFL record. That’s not just bad luck. That’s a pattern that eats at a competitor’s soul.

Think about Marvin Lewis with Cincinnati—another defensive coach who couldn’t win in January. Lewis went 0-7 in the playoffs across sixteen seasons before the Bengals finally fired him in 2018. The difference? Lewis was pushed out. Tomlin jumped.

When “Pretty Good” Becomes Torture

This reveals something fundamental about how elite performers process plateau performance. When you’ve achieved everything except the thing that matters most, “pretty good” becomes psychological torture. Tomlin’s 193-114-2 regular season record meant nothing when January arrived. The Steelers would make the playoffs, lose immediately, and restart the cycle. Groundhog Day in black and gold.

Aaron Rodgers defended Tomlin this week, saying “Mike T. has had more success than damn near anybody in the league for the last 19, 20 years.” That’s true by one measure. By another—the measure Tomlin apparently cared about—he’d been failing for fourteen years straight.

Pathological Stability

The organizational dynamics here fascinate me. Pittsburgh’s institutional inertia is legendary. They don’t make rash decisions. They don’t chase trends. They definitely don’t change coaches every few years like the Jets or Browns. This conservatism served them well for decades. Three coaches since Nixon was president? That’s not normal. That’s pathological stability.

But stability can become a trap. When “never having a losing season” becomes your organizational identity, you optimize for floor instead of ceiling. You draft safely. You coach conservatively. You avoid the kind of risks that either flame out spectacularly or win championships. You become the NFL’s most successful mediocrity.

Khan’s Impossible Choice

Khan now faces an impossible choice. Does he maintain the Steelers’ traditional approach—hire a defensive-minded coach who embodies “Steeler football” and promises another two decades of competent stability? Or does he break the mold, bringing in an offensive innovator who might deliver either a championship or chaos?

The candidates being floated tell the story. Brian Flores fits the traditional mold—defensive expertise, Steelers ties through his Pittsburgh roots. But names like Ben Johnson (Lions OC) and Joe Brady (Bills OC) represent something different entirely. Young, offensive-minded, unproven as head coaches. High ceiling, low floor.

This is where principal-agent theory gets interesting. Whose preferences win when the principals disagree? The Rooney family has traditionally valued institutional stability above all. But what happens when your steady-hand coach walks away? When the agent (Tomlin) rejects the principal’s (ownership’s) definition of success?

Mutual Imprisonment

We don’t know what internal conversations preceded this decision. Maybe Rooney pushed harder than his statement suggests. Maybe Khan whispered doubts about roster construction versus coaching. Maybe Tomlin simply looked at his seven-game playoff losing streak and decided he’d rather leave a legend than become a punchline.

Here’s what I think happened: Tomlin recognized that organizational inertia had become mutual imprisonment. The Steelers wouldn’t fire him—nineteen winning seasons bought infinite job security. But that same security prevented the bold moves needed for championship contention. Can’t rebuild with a Hall of Fame coach. Can’t take massive risks when you’re winning nine games every year. Can’t blow it up when it’s not really broken.

So Tomlin did what the organization couldn’t: he blew it up himself.

The Counter-Argument

The counter-argument is obvious. Maybe Tomlin was pushed. Those “Fire Tomlin!” chants meant something. The twenty-four hour gap between playoff humiliation and resignation suggests external pressure. Khan might have delivered an ultimatum we don’t know about. Voluntary resignations often aren’t.

But the evidence points toward genuine choice. Rooney’s statement reads like a eulogy for someone who’s still alive. No organization lets a coach with Tomlin’s record walk without trying to keep him. The “nothing left to chase” quote from Tomlin’s inner circle rings true—when you’ve done everything except the thing that defines greatness, what’s left?

This exposes a brutal truth about elite performance: sometimes good enough really is the enemy of great. Not because it fails, but because it succeeds just enough to prevent the painful changes necessary for transformation. Tomlin’s Steelers were a Fortune 500 company with consistent profits but no growth—respectable, reliable, and going nowhere.

What Happens Next

What happens next will define the Steelers for a generation. Khan faces his first real test as GM. Does he play it safe with Brian Flores and another twenty years of defensive stability? Or does he roll the dice on offensive innovation and accept the possibility of actual losing seasons?

I think Tomlin’s departure forces their hand toward risk. When your “safe” coach voluntarily abandons ship, maintaining status quo becomes impossible. The organizational inertia is broken. For the first time since 2007, everything’s on the table.

Watch what Pittsburgh does next. If they hire defensively—another Tomlin, another two decades of nine-win seasons—they’ll have learned nothing. But if they swing for the fences? If they embrace the possibility of failure in pursuit of greatness?

Then maybe Tomlin’s greatest gift to Pittsburgh wasn’t nineteen winning seasons. Maybe it was knowing when to leave.

Aikman sat in every interview. Made calls around the league doing background research. Discussed strategy with ownership. And according to The Athletic’s Dianna Russini, he became Jon-Eric Sullivan’s “biggest supporter” entering the process—advocating for a specific candidate based on his own independent judgment rather than blessing a predetermined choice.

But Aikman had no vote. No equity. No formal decision-making authority. He was there to audit how Ross thinks about the hire—not to think for him.

The arrangement was entirely informal. No press release. No disclosed compensation. No defined scope of work. News broke January 1, 2026, through league reporters citing anonymous sources, and the Dolphins never publicly confirmed the details. ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that “Miami ownership wanted an outside respected perspective from someone who had strong relationships across the league.”

This isn’t executive search. It’s something closer to what happens when a surgeon asks for a second set of eyes. Aikman’s job was to tell Ross if he was asking the wrong questions, weighting the wrong signals, pattern-matching on things that sound convincing but don’t predict success.

Sullivan Is Traditional—but from a System That Earns the Label

Sullivan’s credentials are unambiguous. He spent his entire NFL career with Green Bay, beginning as a training camp intern in 2003 and working full-time from 2004 through 2025—rising to VP of Player Personnel through the Ron Wolf scouting tree that has produced multiple NFL GMs including John Schneider (Seahawks) and Brian Gutekunst. His philosophy is explicitly old-school: “The draft is your lifeblood. You build through the draft. It’s a young man’s game.”

According to Albert Breer at Sports Illustrated, Sullivan was the first Packers scout on Jordan Love at Utah State and became Love’s biggest advocate as the 2020 draft drew closer—a conviction call that rankled Aaron Rodgers and turned out to be exactly right.

What separates Green Bay’s “traditional scouting” from the generic version is systematic intensity. The Packers are known for their exhaustive evaluation process, with GM Brian Gutekunst calling film study “the most important” part of their evaluation. The organization managed the Rodgers-to-Love transition without a significant drop-off—Love led the team to the playoffs in his first full year as starter, improving on Rodgers’ 8-9 final season—though the franchise did endure a 6-10 record in 2008 when Rodgers first replaced Favre. Sullivan was present for all of it.

Ross didn’t hire innovation. He hired proven organizational DNA. Sullivan is “traditional but institutionally competent” rather than “traditional but failed” (Grier) or “analytically revolutionary” (what Cleveland and Minnesota have pursued).

The Road Not Taken

Before getting to Aikman, it’s worth sitting with what Ross could have done.

Josh Williams, the 49ers’ Director of Scouting and Football Operations, was the analytically-oriented finalist—a Columbia grad who played wide receiver for the Lions and worked as a business analyst at TD Ameritrade before entering football. He was a finalist for Jacksonville’s GM job in 2024, has deep relationships from San Francisco’s dynasty run, and would have been a genuine philosophy shift. His connection to Mike McDaniel—they overlapped in San Francisco—likely became a liability once Ross decided to move on from the coach.

Chad Alexander, the Chargers’ AGM, came from the Baltimore “20/20 Club”—a traditional scouting pedigree similar to Sullivan’s. He spent 20 years in Baltimore’s front office, roughly 10 of those overlapping with John Harbaugh’s tenure as head coach. Selecting Alexander might have signaled intent to pursue Harbaugh. Passing on him suggests Ross decided against that path.

Champ Kelly, the interim GM, brought a compelling personal story—rose from extreme poverty in rural Florida to IBM software engineer to NFL executive—but had served as interim GM twice before (Raiders 2023, Dolphins 2025) without landing the permanent role. He was a transition figure, not a long-term answer.

Ross chose continuity with proven organizational models over analytical disruption or coaching-search implications. That’s either wisdom or pattern repetition—and it’s too early to know which.

Aikman Wasn’t There to Rubber-Stamp Anything

The Aikman role is where the business parallel gets sharp. Unlike Tom Brady’s ownership stake in the Raiders—which creates permanent conflicts of interest and structural decision-making authority—Aikman was a temporary consultant. He participated in interviews, made background calls, and pushed for a specific candidate based on his own assessment.

The connection came through Jimmy Johnson. Armando Salguero reported that “the Dolphins discussed it with Jimmy Johnson, and he suggested they speak with Aikman”—Johnson coached Aikman to two Super Bowls in Dallas and later served as Miami’s head coach from 1996 to 1999.

Critics questioned whether the move undermined Dan Marino’s existing consultant role. Boomer Esiason on WFAN: “They’re hiring him as a consultant as opposed to Dan Marino, who is already there... if I’m Dan Marino, I’m like, ‘What are we doing?’” The implied message was clear: Aikman was brought in specifically to provide a perspective different from the existing inner circle.

One complication: Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald reported that Aikman was asked to continue advising through the coaching search as well—meaning the “temporary and done” framing needs an asterisk. His involvement outlasted the GM decision, though he still holds no ownership stake or permanent organizational role.

The Difference Between Hiring a Thinker and Hiring a Trophy

The Aikman arrangement maps onto a distinction that shows up constantly in corporate governance—the difference between process auditing and bringing in gravity.

“Bringing in gravity” is what happens when organizations hire famous advisors or board members hoping their reputation transfers to company credibility. This is usually governance theater. WeWork’s board included SoftBank’s famous investors and couldn’t prevent Adam Neumann’s excesses because the governance structures themselves prevented real challenge. After acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk dissolved the entire board and made himself the sole member—removing every structural check at once.

“Process auditing” looks different. The canonical example is Uber’s Holder Report in 2017: the board commissioned former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct an independent review after workplace culture scandals. His team conducted over 200 interviews and reviewed more than 3 million documents. The report recommended reallocating CEO Travis Kalanick’s responsibilities, appointing a COO, installing an independent board chair, and fundamentally overhauling company culture. Kalanick resigned under investor pressure; Dara Khosrowshahi was hired to implement the transformation.

Research by Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony—published in McKinsey Quarterly—found that the quality of decision-making process matters more than the quality of analysis. Good process surfaces bad analysis. The reverse doesn’t hold: good analysis can’t save a broken process. Their work on “behavioral strategy” showed that structured debate and formal dissent mechanisms significantly improved outcomes on major strategic bets.

What Made It Work, and What’s Still Missing

Academic research on the “devil’s advocate” approach (Schwenk, 1984) identifies what separates genuine process auditing from expensive validation theater. The effective version requires formal role assignment rather than informal disagreement, genuine independence from the decision-maker, limited duration so the auditor can’t be captured, and actual authority to challenge assumptions rather than just offer opinions. When it fails, you see homogenous advisors deferring to the CEO’s existing preferences, famous names without functional authority to push back, and misaligned incentives where the advisor’s future depends on keeping the decision-maker happy.

Private equity firms have built the most systematic version of this. Executive search firms recommend hiring experienced industry veterans not to make hires but to reality-check them—using proven executives as advisors and sparring partners during transitions. PE boards that operate as what researchers call “cooperative skeptics”—asking probing questions while defending against errors—consistently outperform passive or rubber-stamp boards. M.G. Siegler at TechCrunch argued that every company needs a “Vice President of Devil’s Advocacy,” noting that Steve Jobs served this function at Apple—killing ideas and canceling launches when something felt wrong.

The Aikman model sits in a productive middle ground. It wasn’t a full Holder Report—Aikman didn’t conduct 200 interviews or review documents for months. But it also wasn’t Brady/Raiders-style gravity-seeking. He had no permanent stake, his role was initially defined as ending when the GM was selected, and he advocated for a specific candidate based on independent judgment rather than rubber-stamping a predetermined choice.

The structural elements that worked: temporary duration, no ownership stake, independent network access (Aikman could make his own background calls through 25 years of broadcaster relationships), an external perspective uncaptured by Dolphins groupthink, and specific advocacy for Sullivan rather than a generic blessing of the process.

What could have made it stronger: more formal structure, clearer evaluation criteria established upfront, explicit methodology for candidate assessment, and defined authority to challenge owner assumptions directly. The informality that made it feel organic also made it impossible to evaluate rigorously.

The Question Ross Probably Isn’t Asking

Here's the uncomfortable part. Sullivan looks almost identical to Chris Grier on paper—a longtime scout from a respected organization, promoted through traditional personnel ranks, hired to build through the draft. The difference is organizational pedigree (Green Bay's system has produced more successful GMs than Miami's) and structural authority (Sullivan has full control in a way Grier never did, given that Ross installed Mike Tannenbaum as EVP above his GM from 2015 to 2019).

Whether Sullivan succeeds depends on factors largely independent of how he was selected: cap management, draft luck, the coaching hire, player development. The Aikman intervention can’t control for any of that.

But for anyone watching the NFL as a laboratory for high-stakes decisions, the interesting question isn’t whether Aikman’s involvement produced the correct candidate. It’s whether bringing in a temporary outside perspective actually changed Ross’s thinking—or just made him feel better about the same instincts that produced a 25-year playoff win drought.

External auditing of major decisions works when the auditor has independence, limited duration, and genuine authority to challenge. It fails when it’s designed to validate choices already made. The Aikman arrangement had most of the right structural elements. What it didn’t have—and what no single intervention can provide—is a mechanism for Ross to recognize his own patterns. One good process doesn’t fix a decade of broken ones.

The right question isn’t “Did I hire the right GM?” It’s “Did I build a system that will tell me when I’m about to hire the wrong one—and will I listen when it does?”

Aikman’s involvement suggests Ross at least asked the first question. Whether he’s built the system to sustain it is a different matter entirely.

Have a take on the Aikman model, or a better example of process auditing in a corporate context? Reach out and let me know!

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