Armey has troops on both sides

Personnel czar builds winners

By Ron Borges, Globe Staff, 1/31/2002

EW ORLEANS - Charley Armey is like an old farmer who knows more than you think he knows and a lot more than you know, but he doesn't let on he knows anything at all, until one day he's plowing your best acreage while you're buying wheat in the grocery store.

By then it's too late, but you finally appreciate that he saw something you didn't see out there in the distance, which is what Armey does for a living. He looks at things in the distance and often sees what you do not.

He sees football players.

''When I first started working for Charley I thought he liked everybody, but I figured out he knew these players we were looking at better than we did,'' recalled St. Louis Rams scout Tom Marino, who has evaluated talent in the NFL for 25 years, the last two for Armey in St. Louis.

''He has a sharp mind. He plays it the other way, like he's your uncle Charley, but he remembers everything you say about a player and he'll call you on it three or four months later when you're trying to change your story.

''I worked for Jim Finks, who is in the Hall of Fame, and I worked for George Young, who will be in the Hall of Fame, and Charley is as good a general manager as either one of them. He's the best there is when it comes to evaluating personnel.

''He's got compassion and he's unassuming and people mistake that for weakness in this league, but I've worked for some great GMs, and he's as good as Finks and George. He exceeds them in some areas.''

Sunday, the Rams' general manager will face an odd situation. He will have had more than a little to do with building both of the teams playing in Super Bowl XXXVI, a claim few GMs or personnel directors could ever make.

With the Rams, he has worked closely with club president John Shaw, president of football operations Jay Zygmunt, former head coach Dick Vermeil, and present coach Mike Martz to create the closest thing to a dynasty you may see in the NFL for a long time, but across the field will stand Armey's former employers, the New England Patriots, and more than a few of the players he selected for them will be trying to prevent his Rams from winning their second Super Bowl championship in three years.

It is an odd confluence of past and present that began in 1991 and ran until '97. Armey was director of college scouting and assistant director of player operations in New England, and set the draft board for most of his time there. The one year he didn't was the year they took Chris Canty over future All-Pro cornerback Sam Madison, a disaster that could have been avoided if the Patriots had listened to him.

But by then they were not. He had a falling out with coach Bill Parcells and was usurped by his former assistant, Bobby Grier, who became his boss in an odd reshuffling of the Patriots' front office that led to one of the lowest points in Armey's 22 years in the NFL.

Watershed moment

As the '97 draft approached, he knew he was leaving New England for the Rams and so did the Patriots, but Armey refused to exit before the draft because he felt it would be unfair to have gathered information for one organization and then use it for the betterment of another.

So he stayed in Foxborough, where he would suffer the greatest indignity of his professional life when Grier sent him home each afternoon in the final days before the draft, implying if he were in those meetings the information discussed might be leaked. It is a slight Armey has never talked about but has never forgotten.

''I have nothing but good memories about New England,'' Armey said this week as the Rams prepared to give New England a bad memory Sunday night in the Superdome. ''I don't believe in getting bitter because if you do, you only hurt yourself. But certainly that was professionally insulting to me. It was the most insulting thing they could have done, to think that I would be dishonest.

''That was the most humbling thing. To be sent home each day during the draft meetings like a thief. It was a setback for me, but you don't dwell on it. I'm not the first guy that's happened to. I just figured I'd find a better situation for me and my family and make it work.

''But it was a difficult time. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. I didn't like what was done but I was not going to let them see me sweat. I was not going to show the emotions of that. In sports, there's always a time you have to move on. Players, coaches, personnel men. So being bitter about it is not a good choice. But I know if I'd been in those meetings they would have drafted Sam Madison.''

These days so does Patriot owner Robert Kraft, who sat on the sideline and watched Armey abused before he left and didn't do a thing to stop it. Then he watched a string of the worst drafts in the club's history decimate a Super Bowl team that had gathered enough extra draft picks for the loss of Parcells and Curtis Martin to have set them up for a long run near the top of the NFL had they been used wisely.

They were not, and that is well documented and needs no repeating. Neither does the fact Armey went to St. Louis, which had had eight straight losing seasons before he arrived, and in two years won the Super Bowl.

Armey takes no credit for that, but his first draft yielded Grant Wistrom and Leonard Little (they combined for 231/2 sacks this season), he signed an undersized free agent from John Carroll College named London Fletcher who will start Sunday at middle linebacker, and he took the advice of the first quarterback he ever coached when he was at a Graceland, Minn., high school, and brought in a kid named Kurt Warner who had been kicking around the fringes of football since 1995 without much of a chance to show what he could do.

Today Warner is the league's Most Valuable Player, Fletcher is a cornerstone of the Rams' defense, and guys Armey drafted like Wistrom and Little, Torry Holt in 1999, and Adam Archuleta last April all will start in Super Bowl XXXVI.

Management decisions

Armey is quick to point out that Zygmunt was behind the deal that brought All-Pro cornerback Aeneas Williams in last spring, and that Shaw orchestrated the club's most important trade, which was the acquisition of Marshall Faulk three years ago. He insists all the decisions in the organization end up being collective ones, and Zygmunt agreed, saying yesterday, ''We have some pretty loud debates, but in the end we respect each other's opinion. No one is focusing on getting the credit for what goes on. We all focus on the same thing - which is building a winning team.

''Charley has been a big part of that. He's done a good job for us. His opinion is well respected by everyone in the organization.''

That includes Martz, despite a well-publicized spat during the season in which the local paper in St. Louis wrote that he and Armey were feuding over control of personnel. Martz went so far as to show a reporter his contract, which said he answered only to the club president.

Asked about that this week, Armey said, ''I don't have any problems with Mike. I have great respect for him. The guy is a very smart coach. My job is to help get him players he wants, players he can use, who fit his system. That's what my job is.''

Certainly Martz, Zygmunt, Shaw, and anyone who's been paying attention can see Armey has done that job. Since his arrival before the 1998 season, his drafts have produced six starters and he can rightfully claim he was the first guy to see Warner's potential and was instrumental in bringing in Fletcher and free agent guard Adam Timmerman.

In fact, following a 32-18 win over the Patriots Dec. 13, 1998, Armey had dinner with an old friend from New England and warned that while the Rams might be struggling (4-12 that second season under Vermeil), they were close to being competitive. When asked who his quarterback was going to be because he'd never win with Tony Banks, Armey said that night, ''We got a kid. His name is Warner. I just got to convince people he can play.''

That took some doing because a trade was made to bring in Trent Green, but when Green went down the next summer with a knee injury, the Rams finally turned to Warner, and he's passed for more than 11,000 yards the last three seasons and become a poster boy for lost causes after his odyssey through football's minor leagues.

They've got a system

Armey knows such things are hit and miss. He knows you will often be wrong evaluating young men coming into the National Football League. But Marino says he's created a system that prevents most mistakes because it eliminates the emotions that often cause teams to take a Canty over a Madison.

''I didn't know much about his grading system until I got here from the Saints,'' Marino said. ''It's unique in that it keeps your instincts in the evaluation, but if a player has a certain letter grade, he can only go so high with his number grade.

''It doesn't let you make picks on emotion. You have to pick on the facts. It's a system that would eliminate your brother if he didn't fit. Everything we do is done on size, speed, and production. One can upgrade you if you're lacking in another, but you can't eliminate a weakness because a guy is fast or big or athletic.

''In an unscientific business, it's as close to science as you can get. He doesn't compromise on the numbers whether he likes the guy or not. If you're steadfast to his system, you'll eliminate a lot of mistakes. He doesn't try to control the [draft] board. He lets the grades set the board.''

It is a system that was working well in New England until Armey lost his power, and it has been working well in St. Louis in conjunction with Zygmunt, Martz, and Shaw. It works, he says, because his scouts get good information and evaluations are made only after everyone's opinion has been heard.

''My grandmother always taught us that if you want to be respected, you have to respect other people's opinions, even if you don't agree with them,'' Armey said. ''I've tried to remember that. What's rewarding to me is that John, Jay, and Mike respect the job we do in the personnel department for them.

''I believe in the scouting system we put in here. I believed in it in New England, too, because of the discipline of that system. When I left I knew they'd use something different. All of us have pride. I'd like to think if I'd stayed in New England and we had all those extra picks we could have continued to build the team and not see it sink so low for a while, but I know I was lucky to come to St. Louis. I was lucky to come into this situation.

''I'm at a place where people believe what I believe. I don't care if I ever see a guy work out. I don't care if he can jump 38 inches in the vertical leap unless he does it in a game to catch a pass. I believe in game speed and production. I want to see guys play in competitive situations.''

Armey learned that lesson long ago, when he was scouting a kid from Grambling named Everson Walls. Walls ran a 4.72 at a workout, but he had intercepted so many balls in college Armey assumed the clock was wrong. He ran him again and got a 4.74. That made him think.

''I kept figuring how could he make all those interceptions if he's that slow,'' Armey recalled of Walls, who would sign with Dallas as a free agent and become a perennial All-Pro cornerback. ''He taught me there's a hell of a lot of difference between timed speed and playing speed. People say we have a speed team in St. Louis. We do. But it's a speed team, not a track team.

''Speed is a relative thing. A guy may run 4.39 or 4.4, but he doesn't play as fast. Other guys, like Troy Brown, are the opposite. When we scout, we grade off limitations. Other guys base everything on athletic ability. They let that override other things. We don't have anything that can override a significant weakness. It's a system based on checks and balances.''

It is a system that has worked well for Armey and for the Rams. It once worked for the Patriots, too. How well it's worked for both teams will be in evidence when St. Louis and New England square off Sunday.

High above the field, Charley Armey will be sitting in the Superdome watching it all like the wise old farmer who knows what he's put out in the field.

In his case, a pretty good crop of football players ... on both sides of the line of scrimmage.