Berry Tramel
NORMAN — The landline phone rang as Jim Nagy was scooting out the door to attend his graduation from the University of Michigan. Back in the 1990s, people had to make such split-second decisions. Go back and answer it, or worry about the call later and ensure a smoother ceremony experience.
Nagy did what most of us did in those days. He ran back and answered. It was a more adventurous time. Harder to screen your calls back then.
Calling was Lee Remmel, the Green Bay Packers’ legendary media coordinator, offering Nagy a summer internship. Funny how football careers are made.
Nagy sat in his expansive, Switzer Center office the other day, telling the story and the entire saga of how he landed at OU. Perched on a shelf of the Sooner football general manager were the National Football League helmets that represent Nagy’s career: Packers, Redskins, Patriots, Chiefs and Seahawks. Nagy wore none of that headgear. He worked public relations for Green Bay, then scouted for the others.
People are also reading…
Nagy says scouting football players is all he’s ever wanted to do. Some grow up dreaming of throwing touchdown passes. Nagy grew up dreaming of picking the guy that throws touchdown passes.
Several years ago, when ESPN’s iconic Mel Kiper came to Mobile, Alabama, to work Nagy’s beloved Senior Bowl, Nagy thanked Kiper for his career. Kiper helped ESPN turn the NFL Draft into a massive event, and even growing up in Traverse City, Michigan, Nagy wouldn’t miss it. He was one of the original draftniks, watching ESPN’s coverage in the early 1980s as a young boy with a notebook, taking notes and making his own picks.
“I always was glued to it,” said Nagy, 51. “Something about it, the team-building, really fascinated me. I just loved it.”
Nagy went to Michigan, foregoing a chance to play Division III football, with an eye on an NFL job. Showing remarkable discernment for a teen-ager, Nagy investigated the pro football job landscape and discovered scouting departments had no internships. So Nagy hooked on with Michigan’s sports information office, figuring that was a side door into the NFL. Even in college, though, Nagy sacrificed study time around finals, to watch the draft.
Good call. Nagy’s dedication to scouting led to key roles with some of the NFL’s most iconic franchises, then the Senior Bowl, which under his leadership has become synonymous with the draft. And now to Norman, where Nagy is one of the pioneers of new-age college football. NFL-like front offices have sprung up on college campuses, scouting and recruiting and retaining ballplayers. Negotiating contracts and building rosters, doing for the Sooners what Nagy once dreamed of doing for the Detroit Lions.
Dream come true
Traverse City sits hard by Lake Michigan, some 150 miles north of Grand Rapids. With a metro population of 150,000, Traverse City is the largest city in northern Michigan. Green Bay, Wisconsin, is some 120- miles to the west, across Lake Michigan.
But Traverse City is Lions country. Nagy had some explaining to do when he went to work for the Packers.
“Great place to grow up,” Nagy said. “It’s right on the lake. Great people, blue-collar town, tourist town. Don’t want to let the secret out. Water’s incredible.”
Nagy’s father was a high school football coach in Frankfort, Michigan, and when the family moved to Traverse City when Nagy was in elementary school, the son of the Traverse City head football coach became Nagy’s best friend. So he was around a lot of football.
But he never caught the coaching bug.
“I was enamored with the team-building part,” Nagy said. “I knew I wanted to work in the NFL, knew I wanted to scout from the time I was a little kid.”
Nagy was wait-listed at the University of Michigan, but he believed he needed to be in Ann Arbor. Michigan would expose him to a big-time program. And Nagy’s instincts paid off. As a Michigan senior, he fired off letters to every NFL franchise. Only Green Bay responded, but one was enough.
Nagy broke away from media relations as often as he could to hang around with the scouting staff. That Green Bay front office, led by Ron Wolfe, was an incubator for successful NFL executives: Ted Thompson, John Dorsey, John Schneider, Reggie McKenzie.
“Good learning time,” said Nagy.
The Packers kept Nagy employed for that 1996 season, and he ended up rooming with Green Bay tight end Jeff Thomason, who became one of his best friends and ended up in Nagy’s wedding party.
“So it was a really fun year,” Nagy said. “I was really fortunate.”
That 1996 season with the Packers led to an association with Dick Schaap, author of several Packers-related books. Schaap brought Nagy to New York in autumn 1996 to help with the latest project, Green Bay Replay, then Schaap’s player-representation agency hired Nagy.
Soon enough, Nagy was hired as a scout for the agency. He was 25 years old, traveling, analyzing players for a publication called the “War Room.” He and Todd McShay, who later became Kiper’s ESPN sidekick, watched tape and made recommendations on players.
But Nagy was biding his time. He knew he didn’t want to build a clientele. He wanted to build rosters.
And in 2001, Washington hired Schneider as its director of player personnel. Schneider and new coach Marty Schottenheimer hired Nagy as a Washington scout. That Traverse City dream was fulfilled. Jim Nagy was in the NFL.
Building relationships
Nagy knows he has been fortunate. He’s worked for Schneider in Washington and Seattle, plus Scott Piolo in New England and Kansas City. Two of the most successful front-office leaders of the 21st century.
Scouts can do a fabulous job, but without team success, their labors can go unrecognized. Nagy’s head coaches have included Schottenheimer, Mike Holmgren, Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll, on teams quarterbacked by Brett Favre, Tom Brady and Russell Wilson.
“I could have ended up a lot of other places, worked just as hard,” and not been successful, Nagy said. “I’m very grateful.”
Nagy figures he was a good NFL scout because he committed to going through a campus multiple times each autumn. There always are eyeballs watching tape of prospects. But the best information usually comes from the relationships built on-site.
“I was always fearful of a head coach pulling me aside and telling me, ‘Everything you said, that’s not who he is.’ That always drove me,” Nagy said.
And that never happened. He’s gotten players wrong, of course. Every scout does. But most of the time, when you miss on a player, you’re really missing on the person. And Nagy says you can’t learn about the person by watching film.
Was he ready to go on the road at age 25? No. But Nagy went full-speed on relationships.
“Because I was learning on the job, I knew that would give me some time on the evaluations, if I was really good at the background stuff,” Nagy said. “Working a building like this (Switzer Center). Being diligent, following up. Knowing the players.”
Pioli credits Nagy for finding and promoting Julian Edelman, New England’s seventh-round draft pick in 2009, out of Kent State. Edelman went on to make 620 catches, second-most in Patriot history, trailing only Wes Welker.
Years ago, Nagy tweeted out the Kent State staff comments he received about Edelman: “upper echelon worker, knows his physical limitations, likes to BS, wants ball in his hands, football instincts will help him at WR, has feet to play DB, most competitive guy I’ve ever coached.”
The Nagy/Edelman story mirrors the well-told tale of how then-Spurs employee Sam Presti campaigned for French teen-ager Tony Parker. But Nagy deflects credit for championing Edelman as a Patriot draft prospect.
“It seems so self-serving,” Nagy said. “When you draft a player, it’s rarely just one guy.”
The scouting business has changed in Nagy’s quarter century on the job. Technology makes the task much more efficient. Before the digital days, a scout would grind through seven or eight game tapes to see a receiver catch 30 balls. Now databases are abundant, providing 120 targets for a receiver in a half-hour’s time.
Also, there is much more cross-checking, with multiple scouts offering appraisals. Nagy recalls hearing that the Buffalo Bills sent seven scouts through Lenoir-Rhyne to view Kyle Dugger, who ended up being a 2020 second-round pick of New England.
And scouting has become a younger-man’s game. Nagy says that in his early days, he was around colleagues who were in their 60s and 70s. He enjoyed those times, asking for all kinds of career and life advice. And he remembers a sage piece of wisdom from a grizzled scout.
“Family time is precious,” he was told. That voice rang in his head when the Senior Bowl called.
In 2007, with a young family, the Nagys moved from the Cleveland area to Mobile, Alabama. His wife is from Alabama. At the time, his son was a year old, Nagy was away from home 200 nights a year and he knew that was not a great equation for family life.
Living in Mobile, Nagy jumped from the Patriots to the Chiefs for a promotion, then to the Seahawks to reunite with Schneider. His family never had to move. His children never had to switch schools.
But Nagy’s son was entering the ninth grade in 2018, about to begin high school sports, and Nagy knew staying in NFL scouting would mean missing a big chunk of his son’s life.
The Senior Bowl was looking for an executive director. The annual college all-star game had morphed into a week-long NFL festival, a virtual early combine, with teams sending scouting departments and coaching staffs to Mobile to check out the prospects selected to play.
Leaving the Seahawks was not easy.
“Great organization, great culture, such an awesome environment,” Nagy said. “Had a good team.”
But the Senior Bowl offered a prestigious scouting job coupled with a family life.
When Nagy took over, there was talk of moving the Senior Bowl to Orlando, despite a 67-year history in Mobile. Nagy put on his old PR hat and stumbled into a slogan that stuck: The Draft Starts in Mobile. He and his Mobile comrades staved off the idea of moving the game.
Nagy’s funnest part of the job was picking the rosters. He didn’t have a big budget, but he hired out-of-work scouts to canvas their local areas, building his own front office. With multiple levels of crosschecking, and scouts seeing double-digit games per year, the Senior Bowl’s evaluation department was as legitimate as it could be without NFL-franchise payrolls. Nagy built a big board, just like the ones used in Seattle and Kansas City, and a natural progression from those notebooks he scribbled on so many decades ago in Traverse City.
NFL scouting departments would share some information, prospects they might like to see in Mobile, but Nagy wanted his own list compiled first. The Senior Bowl rose in stature with franchises and agents.
“Great thing about the Senior Bowl job, it really allowed me to broaden my skill set,” Nagy said. “I had to wear a lot of different hats. Doing on air stuff. Totally uncomfortable. It was a great job. I don’t regret leaving the NFL.”
Hello, Norman
Taking the OU job was not the perfect timing that taking the Senior Bowl had been for Nagy. His daughter is about to enter her junior year of high school. Nagy had built deep roots and friendships in Mobile.
But college football had come to a crossroads. Almost overnight, it had become like the NFL, with free agency and paying players. College football scouting was more important than ever, and was adding the financial piece that made payroll caps and negotiations as much a part of the process as 40-yard dash times and bench-press repetitions.
College football roster-building had become as complex and challenging as the NFL.
“It was an opportunity to put in a new structure in college football,” Nagy said. “Build something new. Just another challenge, I guess. Coming out here to Oklahoma — I wasn’t going to do it for any team — I knew we could win at the highest level, if we did it right.”
Nagy never had thought about college football, not since getting out of Michigan back in 1996. The job he had wanted to do since he was a kid never existed on campuses.
“I never saw my skillset fitting,” Nagy said. But he came for an interview with Sooner leadership and realized he was exactly what a college football program needed.
Nagy knows there are differences. He never before had to watch high-school tape. And he assures us that high-school video is not nearly as pristine as college video.
But the content hasn’t changed.
“Motor is motor,” Nagy said. “Effort is effort. Physicality is physicality.
Instincts. Do they know how to play the game? Do they read and react well? Those things don’t change.”
He equates watching high-school video to small-college video. The difference-makers should jump off the screen; especially in certain states, they need to be men among boys.
Contract negotiations have been an adjustment, as he tries to build a championship roster. Nagy had limited experience with haggling over contracts. But he falls back on his reliance on relationships.
“Not being afraid to have hard conversations,” Nagy said.
In some cases, he’s negotiating with certified NFL agents. In others, friends or even family members. His NFL general manager friends are mortified at the thought of having to dicker with family members.
But it’s all part of building a roster, which he’s been doing professionally for a quarter century and even longer in his mind, going back to the notebook days in Traverse City.
berry.tramel@
tulsaworld.com
0 Comments
Be the first to know
Get local news delivered to your inbox!