All of the work experience in the world and learning from the best mentors in the business sometimes isn’t enough to fully prepare even the most qualified candidates to take over the big chair in an NFL front office.
There are certain ingrained qualities that really can’t be taught. That couldn’t be found on even the most impressive résumé. That must be possessed by someone who is ultimately able to take all of the scouting and personnel expertise and become a great general manager.
The difference between being a great lieutenant and a great general.
One of those is the ability to make a firm decision with the full understanding that it could be wrong. That even the best-informed choices with all of the evidence you have been able to gather over the last few months and opinions considered from everyone in the building just aren’t going to be right all the time.
In fact, it’s inevitable.
And that’s OK.
The trick is understanding that and being able to not waffle on your convictions knowing that as long as you can move on, learn from the mistakes, get the next decision right and be correct significantly more often than not, you will succeed.
John Spytek believed he had that trait. So did those of us who felt he was the best candidate for the Raiders general manager job the previous two times it was open and it went to someone else.
But you never can be sure until you’re actually in the spotlight and under the pressure of making the final call instead of just offering your opinion to the one who’s going to face the heat or get all the credit.
That came this week for Spytek. While he thought he already knew it about himself, he thinks he passed his first exam with a trial by fire on his first cutdown day.
“I’m OK living in that space, that hard decisions are OK,” he said. “I wanted this job for a lot of different reasons, but it’s because I’m not afraid to make tough and critical decisions, and I don’t think that I’m going to get them all right.
“I’ve lived through getting things wrong, and the older you get, I think you all realize you get things wrong but that you’ll be OK. But to make tough choices with conviction and then be self-critical and open-minded and aware enough to realize, like I got this one right, and this is why I got it right, and this one wrong, and this is why I got it wrong.
“I’m sure we got some wrong over the past month, and we’ll see, but I can promise you I’ll learn from those and I’ll only get better because of that.”
He understands how important it is to do so. Spytek doesn’t take lightly the task of returning a once-proud franchise to sustained excellence. He’s committed to it, and believes he has all the skills required to make it happen.
That includes finding the balance between decisions that are best for the team in the short term with what might be best for the future of the organization.
It’s a constant struggle for a general manager, especially one in the job for the first time with a coach who has made it a priority to win right away.
But Spytek, largely through mentors like Tampa Bay’s Jason Licht, embraces that challenge. Raiders coach Pete Carroll’s experience also helps.
“You don’t want to wake up a month, two months, a year from now, and not have pieces in place in the future too,” he said. “But you can’t do that and just plan for the future and neglect today, and the next week, and the next game. I think as you have more experience in the job that I have, and Coach Carroll obviously has been doing it for a long time, and the people we have around us, there’s just a gut to it.”
Spytek says there’s a feel for how much a young player is ready for, particularly in terms of his ability to handle adversity and push through it, as opposed to how much a veteran presence could help at a certain position.
“It is a nuanced challenge every year,” he said. “But it is one that we have to be really good at, because we want to win today and win tomorrow and the next year.”
Spytek got through his first offseason with no major hiccups. Now, he will find out how many mistakes he made as the test of the regular season plays out.
He’s certain to have made a few. And that’s OK.
He knows he’ll be better for it.
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