As a veteran talent evaluator mentored by the masterful and cunning Ron Wolf, 49ers general manager Scot McCloughan is well versed in the art of pre-draft deception. For NFL decision-makers, the rules when it comes to talking about possible picks are pretty simple: Say as little as possible, and when you do reveal information to the media, dishonesty is the only policy.
So as I sat with McCloughan at lunch last Friday at a restaurant near the Niners' Santa Clara training facility and inquired about his dream scenario for the upcoming draft, I was naturally skeptical about the sincerity of his response, even though I'd assured him I wasn't writing about his team until after the fact.
"I know who I want, and it's Michael Crabtree," McCloughan had answered instantly. "To me he's a home run, an impact player who gives us something we don't have. Now, I realize he's not supposed to be there when we pick [10th overall], and I'm not going to trade up to get him. But this draft is so weird, and there are so many different scenarios floating out there, that I could see it happening."
McCloughan's reply had been so definitive, I decided to press him a little. Was his desire to select Crabtree so great that, if nine teams passed on the former Texas Tech receiver and the 49ers were on the clock, he'd immediately phone in the pick to the team's representative in New York City and land his man?
"Probably not," he answered, "because what I really want is to trade down and end up with another No. 1 for next year. And the reality is, if we're sitting there at 10 and he's still on the board, I think we're gonna get some calls. If a team wants to trade next year's [first-round pick] to get up to get him, that's gonna be awfully hard to turn down."
I'm sharing these details about our exchange because it reveals several important personality traits about the man trying to bring the 49ers back to prominence: First, unlike so many of his peers, McCloughan is not a liar. Second, whether he turns out to be right or wrong about Crabtree, he's a self-assured scout who, like Cheap Trick, knows what he wants and knows how to get it. And finally, during a frenzied but calculated stretch on Saturday, he was shrewd enough to exceed even his own wildest wishes by landing both Crabtree and a second 2010 first-round pick.
As McCloughan said Monday afternoon, "It's awesome how it turned out. If you'd have told me at lunch that I'd get Crabtree and a '1' for next year, I'd have laughed at you. Maybe one or the other, but both? No way."
Way. And the upshot is, in addition to finding a player projected to be the 49ers' first big-time wideout since Terrell Owens was traded after the '03 season - not coincidentally, that was the last time they had a receiver who had 1,000 or more yards in a season - this once-proud franchise may finally have solidified the power base (McCloughan, coach Mike Singletary and newly empowered team president Jed York) that can lead it back to the land of the functional.
San Francisco, the most successful franchise in major pro sports through the '80s and much of the '90s, may never again approach the standard forged during that Eddie DeBartolo/Bill Walsh era. Yet for the first time in a long time, it appears the Niners have a plan and are being directed by competent people with a chance of bringing it to fruition.
Like Wolf, the former Raiders personnel man who helped restore the Packers to prominence as the team's GM, McCloughan is not big on fanfare. He's a scout at heart who thinks about football an embarrassingly high percentage of his waking hours and is happy to let Singletary, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker he chose as his interim coach after firing Mike Nolan seven games into the '08 season, be the face of the franchise.
McCloughan also seems enthusiastic about the increased role Jed York is now playing. Jed, the son of owners John and Denise DeBartolo York, was elevated to the title of team president at age 27 last December, an acknowledgement that he has now succeeded his parents as the franchise's day-to-day head honcho.
Whereas John York was a drastic departure from Eddie DeBartolo, his emotional and gregarious brother-in-law - employees often described him as aloof and condescending - Jed has helped restore a sense of community within the building. He and his uncle speak frequently about the challenges of running a franchise, and it was not insignificant on Saturday that, for the first time ever, Jed was the executive who walked from the war room to McCloughan's office to speak to Crabtree by telephone before the pick was officially submitted.
At that point, about halfway through the team's allotted 10-minute window, McCloughan had finally given up on trading down. Having watched nervously as the teams in front of him (Oakland at 7, Jacksonville at 8, Packers at 9) selected other players - the Raiders, in what seemed to be an instance of Al Davis playing to his own stereotype, took speedy but inconsistent ex-Maryland wideout Darrius Heyward-Bey, a Christmas-in-April gift to their Bay Area rivals - McCloughan had locked in on Crabtree, unless another team were to make an extremely enticing offer.
To that point, the only call he had fielded was one from ******** vice president Vinny Cerrato a couple of picks earlier, "and that was just them futzing around," McCloughan says. "Our thought was that if our guy's there, someone had better blow our socks off, 'cause I'm taking the big SOB who can score touchdowns."
In evaluating Crabtree, McCloughan decided that productivity (41 touchdown receptions in two years at Tech) and his own impressions from face-to-face meetings at the NFL scouting combine and the Niners' facility overrode the perceived negatives - that the receiver lacked blazing speed and, because of a stress fracture in his foot that was surgically repaired in March, was unable to submit an official 40-yard-dash time during the evaluation period. The GM wasn't dissuaded by reports that the Browns were turned off by Crabtree's entourage and regarded the receiver as a diva; in McCloughan's eyes, Crabtree is a committed player who grows uncomfortable outside the football environment.
McCloughan wasn't surprised that the Raiders passed, given Davis' desperate and unwavering need for speed. "It's important to him," McCloughan says of Oakland's owner. "Crabtree's not a sprinter, which is what they're looking for. But I'm not in this to get sprinters. I'm in this to get football players. T.J. Houshmandzadeh's not a sprinter, but he's productive. The same goes for Anquan Boldin and Larry Fitzgerald. We think this kid can do the same types of things. If we were at 5, we would've taken the same guy."
It was that type of conviction that led McCloughan to make the call on Crabtree with several minutes left on the clock. The GM reasoned that "if anyone wanted him that badly, they'd have called in the first 10 seconds. Finally I thought, 'Fill out the card and turn the son of a gun in. He's our guy. Let's let everybody know.' "
Rather than celebrating - McCloughan's not a big high-five-in-the-war-room guy - he immediately turned his attention to the second round. As the 49ers' pick (43rd overall) approached, there were two players the team was targeting. Each of them, however, was snapped up with one of the five picks that immediately preceded San Francisco's. (McCloughan wouldn't say which players he wanted, but Matt Maiocco, the superb writer who covers the team for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, speculated that linebacker Rey Maualuga and cornerback Darius Butler were the likely targets.)
Now McCloughan was willing to trade down, and to his surprise he quickly fielded calls from five teams who wanted to move up to the Niners' slot. The last of those calls was from Carolina Panthers general manager Marty Hurney, whose job security has been the subject of much media speculation. With star pass rusher Julius Peppers' future in Carolina uncertain, Hurney really wanted to move up to take Florida State defensive end Everette Brown.
"What are we talking about?" McCloughan asked Hurney, who answered, "Next year's 1 for this and your 4 [San Francisco's fourth-round pick in '09]."
McCloughan was so happy, he was tempted to make the deal on the spot. Instead, he said to Hurney, with as much nonchalance as he could muster, "OK, I'll get back to you."
It was halfway through the team's seven-minute window, and there were a lot of nerves in the draft room as McCloughan hung up the phone and did absolutely nothing.
"That's the part of the draft I love," he says. "It's like a chess match. When I hung up the phone, everyone in the room was looking at me, and I just stared up at the ceiling. They're going, 'What are we gonna do?' I'm there thinking, 'Hmmm, Carolina's got the toughest schedule in the league next year. [Jake] Delhomme's a pretty good quarterback, but if he gets hurt … that pick could be pretty high.' "
About two minutes passed before McCloughan reached for the phone. Instead of calling Hurney, however, he added to the tension by "purposely dialing the wrong number first. Finally, I dialed again and tried to get more out of Marty - 'Can you throw in your [sixth-round pick]?' I had to try it. He said no, and I said, 'OK,' and made the trade."
To say McCloughan was thrilled would be an understatement. With cap space and a pair of 2010 first-rounders, he now has the ammunition to make a big move if he decides there's an impact player worth acquiring via trade, either during next April's draft or at any time before it.
"I got on the computer and checked the numbers" of the widely used chart that assigns points for draft picks, McCloughan says, "and the thing that's interesting is that first-round picks the next year are only half as [valuable] as this year's No. 1. I realize you don't know where the team you trade with will finish, which affects the value, but it really makes no sense.
"Having two No. 1s gives us tons of leverage. We got huge value, not just for next year but if we decide to make a trade. We've got tons of cap room, so nothing's holding us back."
All of this made the draft's second day a far less stressful exercise for McCloughan. While failing to land an offensive lineman or pass rusher in the later rounds, he took several complementary players who could fill key backup roles. He also seemed to be channeling Wolf, whose philosophy was to draft a quarterback every single year, when he took Ball State's Nate Davis with a compensatory pick late in the fifth round.
"We had him rated a little bit higher than that, and he intrigued me quite a bit," McCloughan says of Davis. "He [says he has a] learning disability, so he's slow in picking stuff up. But you watch him on tape, he's the best player on the field every game he plays, and he's got the skills to be a first-round pick. I look at him as a Matt Hasselbeck/Aaron Brooks-type pick, a guy who you wait on and he might be very good a few years down the road."
McCloughan is a realist, too, about the state of the Niners. Just as he understands that the team's return to its classic, cherry-red uniforms won't automatically bring back the glory days, he gets that it all comes back to the quarterback spot. This year's training camp competition between resourceful career backup Shaun Hill, who played well as the stopgap starter in the second half of '08, and Alex Smith, the humbled No. 1 overall pick in '05, won't remind anyone of the Joe Montana/Steve Young battles. And McCloughan knows that until someone steps up to lead the offense, even a player with Crabtree's skills won't be truly transformative.
"For us to contend, the quarterback situation has to be taken care of," McCloughan concedes. "Whoever wins the job has to be a confident and consistent player who executes the offense the way we want him to and who gets what we're trying to do. We need to get solidified at that position, without a doubt."
As a longtime personnel man, first under Wolf in Green Bay and later as the Seahawks' director of college scouting (under current Packers GM Ted Thompson), McCloughan has been through enough drafts to know that even picks he considers can't-miss, like Crabtree, aren't infallible. That's why, rather than gloating over a draft that played out beyond his expectations, he's getting revved up for the remainder of an offseason that might still feature a surprise acquisition or two.
"I'm very logical about what we did in the draft," McCloughan says. "We added a very, very good football player - a college football player - who hasn't done a thing in the pros yet. Is he the answer to put us over the top? No. But he can help us get there.
"I realize that the only reason he made it to us was that he hurt his foot, didn't work out at the combine and had some bad reports about [his character] circulating. It also helped that because so many college teams are running the spread offense, you have all these productive receivers coming out who are filling everybody's draft boards up. So teams figure, 'We don't need to get this guy up high when we can get one of these other guys in a later round.' That helped, too."
All of which explains why McCloughan, after a very happy and casual Monday, was to be back working the phones Tuesday in an effort to see if there's another move he can make on the chess board.
"My head is always spinning," he says. "Now, with the second first-rounder next year, I'm thinking, 'Can we trade for somebody? Should we investigate this stuff that's out there about the Cardinals moving Boldin?' Even though this is supposed to be a slower period, my thoughts are dominated by, 'How do we improve this roster?' It's kind of sad, but that's the truth."
On that count, I absolutely believe him.
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the cowboys didn't even get a 1st day pick and the 9ers get crabby, Smh I hope crabtree is a bust
