It’s mid-June, which means — usually — that teams have pretty much set the course for their scouting departments for the next draft. We’ve been waiting on a few teams (Eagles, Rams, Redskins, Jets mainly) to make official pronouncements and finalize things, but we’ll move forward without them for now.

What follows is our take on the changes several teams have made in the past month-plus, what and who we like, and where we see things going for each of them.

• 49ers: It’s hard to know what to make of the Niners right now, with new GM John Lynch a total wildcard. What they have going for them is that they have ex-Lions GM Martin Mayhew around to help steer him; new V.P. of Player Personnel Adam Peters in from the Broncos, who’ve done a pretty good job in recent years; and most of the core staff of scouts that has done a mighty fine (and underrated) job of late.
• Bills: I like the amount of talent Buffalo accumulated for its front office, with several annual candidates for GM jobs across the league. But that’s also the problem: with that many up-and-comers, the scouting department might be a little top-heavy.
• Browns: Speaking of top-heavy, the Browns, despite presumably heading down an analytics-laden path, have eight (8!) people with either ‘director’ or ‘Vice President’ in their title, and that doesn’t even include the team’s de facto GM, Sashi Brown (Executive V.P., Football Operations) and Paul DePodesta (Chief Strategy Officer). There are also 13 scouts (thought at least two listed are no longer with the team) and eight ‘scouting assistants’ (and by the way, the Browns are known to be interviewing others). Despite the multiple layers of management and evaluators, I’ve spoken to several scouts who say they’re really impressed by the Browns’ draft this year.
• Colts: I’d have to say Indianapolis has been the runaway winner this offseason. New GM Chris Ballard has a great resume and great energy, and I think he’s made some great moves so far. Not only do the Colts have some great new people in the front office, but they also have a clear chain of command, and maybe the move I like most is their hire of Player Personnel Strategist Brian Decker. More and more, it seems to me that diagnosing how a player handles when he’s drafted, and how he reacts to making big money, is mega-critical to the process.
• Titans: I have to admit that the changes Tennessee made caught me off guard. After a few bumpy years, the team seems to have built a talented core and is on the way up. With that said, the area scouts the team has added (Mike Boni and Tom Roth) have been universally applauded by all the scouts I’ve spoken to. 

That’s all for now. Hopefully in a week a few more loose ends will be tied up and we can look at five more teams’ moves.

With the dust settling in NFL front offices, I thought it would be interesting to look at the general managers hired in the last three years. Where do they come from? What do they have in common? What do NFL teams seem to be looking for in the best candidates?

To answer these questions, we came up with this graphic comparing the 10 GMs hired in the last three years. The 10: Ray Farmer (Browns) and Jason Licht (Bucs) in 2014; Mike Maccagnan (Jets), Scot McCloughan (Redskins) and Ryan Pace (Bears) in 2015; and Sashi Brown (Browns), Chris Grier (Dolphins), Bob Quinn (Lions), Jon Robinson (Titans) and Howie Roseman (Eagles) this year.

Here’s what we came up with:

Finished at 50: The oldest GM hired in the last three years is Maccagnan at 47, and his hiring comes with a bit of an asterisk because his relationship to the man conducting the Jets’ search (former Texans and Redskins GM Charley Casserly) was central to his selection. Second-oldest is new Fins GM Grier, and like Maccagnan he’s a bit of an outlier because the real iron in Miami’s front office belongs to Mike Tannenbaum, the team’s Executive Vice President of Football Operations. Toss out those two, and average age of the last six GMs hired is 40. In fact, all four GMs hired this year (except Grier) have been 40.

Patriotic: Four of the 10 on the list had experience at New England on their respective resumes. Two others, Farmer and Pace, had the Belichick ‘scent’ as Farmer worked under ex-Pats executive Scott Pioli during his time in Kansas City while Pace was schooled in the Parcells way in New Orleans by head coach Sean Payton. The other four are outliers for different reasons. Brown and Roseman both earned the trust of ownership and worked their way into the GM position from within, while Maccagnan benefitted from his time with Casserly and McCloughan had a different, though substantial, pedigree from his status as a Ron Wolf protege.

Some experience necessary: Though all 10 could be considered experienced in league circles, none could be considered an old hand, per se. Only four (Grier, Licht, Maccagnan and McCloughan) had more than two decades in NFL front offices when they were hired. On the other end of the spectrum, the Browns hired not one, but two, GMs in the last three years who had 14 years or less in pro football management. Farmer and Brown combined for 26 years’ experience. That’s just two more years than Maccagnan and McCloughan each had (24) when they were hired.

There’s plenty more to know about the men who are being hired as general managers these days. We develop it a bit more in our Friday Wrap, a free weekly newsletter that goes out to more than 3,000 people all around the game. Want in? Register here.

I spent a lot of time last week talking to some friends of mine who were recently in scouting. In our conversations, one topic came up, and it goes hand in hand with what we talked about last week regarding NFL executives and the media.

In the last two years, two GMs that got the axe, the Jets’ John Idzik and the Dolphins’ Jeff Ireland, were not the kind of administrators who were constantly quoted in blogs and interviewed on ESPN. In fact, I remember when Ireland was let go in January 2014. I think I was on the treadmill, and the initial NFL Network report couldn’t even run file footage of Ireland where his face was visible. They ran film of him congratulating players with his back to the camera and one where he was standing with Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and his face was obscured. I remember thinking how comical it was that they continually ran it when it was so bad.

We can argue about the results on the field, the controversies that took place, the bad hires, or whatever that determined their fate. The bottom line is that both of them had very short leashes; three years (for Ireland; Idzik got only two) is a much shorter grace period than many (most?) general managers get, but both of them were on the unemployment line rather quickly.

With Idzik, it’s easy to see why. He doesn’t even have an agent, which means there was no one there to burnish his reputation with New York’s often hostile writers and no one to urge him to be less restrictive about information flow. With Ireland, it seems to be his ‘upbringing’ in the NFL as a member of the Bill Parcells tree. Parcells has always been adversarial and less than accommodating with writers and Ireland maybe took a page from that book. I’m told that people close to him, especially in the wake of the Jonathan Martin/Richie Incognito fiasco, urged him to ‘give something’ to Miami writers so their knives might be less sharp. He apparently refused on principle, making it much easier for Ross to look elsewhere.

The fallout is pretty easy to gauge. Google ‘John Idzik Jets’ and you get 10 entries on the first page, including a condescending article on NJ.com, a link to FireJohnIdzik.com, and a post from a Jets fan site that is the usual rip job you find in such places. The Web is kinder to Ireland, perhaps because Fins fans and media are distracted by the fun of South Beach, but I remember that there were few columnists and beat writers expressing dissatisfaction with his ouster.

I’m not at all saying that coaches, GMs and others with NFL teams are fired, or not fired, mainly because of how they get along with media. But to say that it’s not a big part of things would be, to me, ignorant of the way things work in football, and the world, today.