Let's just the two of us not engage on this topic anymore, since I obviously don't put much weight on your gameday assessments of anything. Or on your guesswork re: who does what in preparation for the Dallas draft.
The year McClay was promoted is irrelevant to my point re: how to separate out who gets credit for the decisions, for the record. I mentioned McClay only because he's the other guy besides Stephen Garrett haters point at when they want to shortchange the HC re: changes in how the organization has been running since he took things over. You're not blowing anything away. You're chasing your tail again.
This takes out the guess work. Here is Garrett himself and others telling you EXACTLY who runs the show for the draft. Dont blame me for trying to educate you. Time for you to stop spewing nonsense about Garrett and McClay and their roles when its quite clear you dont know what you are talking about. McClay was brought in 3 years after Garrett was head coach SPECIFICALLY to change the way things are done around here with the draft and personnel. Read it and weep.
Do the Joneses sometimes want things that McClay doesn’t want?
Yes. Of course. But these aren’t “problems” because of the way Will McClay brings all the wings of the building together. He is more than a scout, more than a coach, more than an ex-player. He’s “The Unifier.” That should really be Will McClay’s title with the Dallas Cowboys.
And Jason Garrett gave a very similar description to Jon Machota of the
Dallas Morning News two years ago.
“Will does a really good job facilitating all of that communication and making sure we’re all on the same page about how we see the player and what his role will be and that’s invaluable. Making sure everyone is aligned is critical and communicating, overcommunicating, challenging each other, that’s all part of the personnel process, and he does a really good job in his role.”
To understand how much this means to the Cowboys, you've got to understand where the Cowboys are coming from. The following quote is taken from a
very interesting look at the Cowboys’ draft room put together by Calvin Watkins and Matt Mosley while they were both still covering the Cowboys for ESPN.
Larry Lacewell, the Cowboys’ former director of scouting, said the team used to take pictures of the draft board to make sure nobody would touch it because sneaky coaches would surreptitiously move players around. “It was always coaches vs. scouts,“ Lacewell said. “If a coach liked a certain player, then he might move him from a fifth-round grade to a third-round grade on the board overnight. We get in the next morning and we weren’t sure if the board was right. So we started taking pictures of it every night just to make sure it wasn’t touched when we got in the next day.”
When I first read this, my head almost exploded. How can you let organizational infighting degenerate to such a level that nobody trusts their coworkers anymore? In most companies, behavior like that would be grounds for immediate termination.
The quote references Lacewell, who retired from the Cowboys in 2004, so you would think Lacewell's departure and Bill Parcells' arrival in 2003 would have fixed those issues between coaches and scouts in Dallas. Well, you'd be wrong in thinking that.
McClay was promoted to his current role after the 2013 draft, and popular Cowboys lore holds that the promotion was a direct result of the decision to pass on DT
Sharrif Floyd.
During the 2013 draft things came to a header when the pro guys made it clear they had no intention of drafting
Sharrif Floyd, regardless of how high the scouting department had graded him.
After the draft, the Cowboys were happy with their draft haul, but unhappy with the process that got them there. They had chosen not to draft Floyd because some of the coaches felt he wasn’t the right fit for the Cowboys, even though the Cowboys’ scouts had ranked him fifth on the Cowboys draft board. That disconnect between the scouts and coaches led to the promotion of Will McClay to the most important position in the organization that can be manned by somebody not named Jones.
McClay is now in charge of the draft board, and from what we've gleaned over the years since, the board is no longer constructed “on pure talent,” but designed to deliver the best possible players that fit the Cowboys system - something McClay has demonstrated he can do by bringing in street free agents that contributed but also by finding talent on all three days of the draft for the Cowboys in the drafts he's managed.
