Tribal Warfare
02-15-2009, 04:09 AM
Teams turn to secrecy in pursuit of success (http://www.kansascity.com/sports/chiefs/story/1035254.html)
By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star
The security guard in the booth hollers if you drive up too fast. They’re checking names and affiliations now, he’ll say, a new policy here at one of Kansas City’s most secure buildings.
You’re a reporter, huh? Out here every day during the fall? He steps back, writes something on a clipboard and then turns to you, his eyes more narrow now, and points toward a crowded parking lot.
It’s not the CIA or the line to claim a night in the Lincoln Bedroom. This is the sentry point to enter Chiefs headquarters, and the guard isn’t the only gatekeeper these days. There are locked doors and secret codes, off-limits hallways and parts of the new facility that even the regulars can’t visit without a team-employed escort. The third-floor executive offices? Forget that. Even a trip to the old restroom, the two-seater down the hall past community relations, will get you a talking-to after an executive complained that there was unauthorized activity in the southeast corridor.
“It’s definitely changed,” 20-year Chiefs public relations man Bob Moore says. “It’s so different now.”
Then: “The consequences are greater now than they were.”
The Chiefs aren’t charting any new territory with the protective sensibility, which has intensified in the last two months since chairman Clark Hunt vowed to keep the searches quiet for the general manager and, later, the head coach. Information is valuable, and mistakes can cost millions.
Kansas City is the latest sports team to adopt the notion that secrecy is an essential pathway to greatness. College athletic departments are concerned now with recruiting and marketing, and pro franchises worry about money, image and the belief that even minuscule details somehow give competitors an edge.
Regardless of the Chiefs’ reasons, they’re keeping things silent these days; following the curve set by successful decision-makers such as New England coach Bill Belichick and the University of Alabama’s Nick Saban, who believe that the only thing worth saying publicly is “no comment.”
During the two weeks between former coach Herm Edwards’ firing and the introduction of Edwards’ replacement, Todd Haley, even longtime team officials were kept in the dark — or at least that’s what they’d have you believe.
“They don’t tell me anything,” one employee said in a voicemail.
“I haven’t been told squat,” another said.
Others sound more official: “Not at liberty,” the man said in a text message. “I haven’t been authorized to say anything.”
The Chiefs hired a Belichick acolyte last month, GM Scott Pioli. He hasn’t said much during his five weeks in Kansas City, and he even instructed his friends and family to say nothing, if that much, should someone call to ask about something such as Pioli’s favorite rock band.
Pioli is upstairs now, dangerously close to those third-floor offices. Past the entrance keypad, the locked wooden door, the first wave of Chiefs staffers and the armed guard at the desk — there’s the staircase that’s accessible on this day only because it’s a special occasion: Pioli just chose Haley as the Chiefs’ coach.
Pioli is in a good mood. Now’s the time to ask: What’s with all the secrecy? What is the point, and what does it accomplish to treat sports information like missile defense secrets?
Pioli straightens, and his smile fades.
“What’s the point?” he repeats. “Well. Are we off the record?”
The tape recorder clicks off, and Pioli smiles again.
•••
The story goes that Bill Snyder was retired and on the golf course one week, laughing it up with a friendly reporter and telling stories about what went on behind the curtain, and the next week Snyder was Kansas State’s football coach again — and those golf outings and stories stopped.
It was last November. Snyder was the same person, but his attitude changed. Even during the Ron Prince years, Snyder was something like Wildcats coach emeritus; his title was gone, but his influence was not.
Before he retired in 2005, Snyder was known for lording over one of the Big 12’s most secretive programs; information was distributed on a need-to-know basis, and Snyder wasn’t interested in how his way was received. K-State was winning, and if that’s how he did things, well, whatever works.
But the old man was said to have softened. He was friendly and talkative. Then he got his old job back, and within days, the grandfatherly figure was gone and the ferocious coach was back. Details were hidden. Conversations were silenced. Even some relationships were terminated.
So why would a man change at age 66 and change again three years later? Why would he settle into one way, only to transform his personality for what he says is the greater good? You place a call and explain what you’re looking to ask: Why did Snyder see fit to leave a quiet life and re-enter a life shrouded instead in silence? Why does Snyder see a correlation between secrecy and success?
“Because of the subject,” K-State sports information director Kenny Lannou says, “I would think that it really wouldn’t be on the top of his list. But I don’t know. I can submit it to him and see what he says.”
The phone never rings, and there’s another secret that goes unrevealed — just the way Snyder likes it.
Alabama associate athletic director for media relations Doug Walker has worked with two of the most guarded men in college football: Saban and Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis, both former Belichick disciples. Walker says there are no rules or instructions on how to deliver — or not deliver — information. But Walker admits there is a growing belief in sports: Success gives coaches the right to run an organization any way they want.
If Saban protects information and then wins a conference championship, others think there is a correlation — and are willing to follow Saban’s lead. The more Saban wins, the less he is questioned — by his peers, anyway.
“We’re going to let people know things when we’re ready to tell them,” says Walker, who’s worked in media relations nearly 20 years. “It’s just understood.”
Walker says the Internet and the public’s constant thirst for news has led coaches, administrators and spokesmen to appear withdrawn. The Chiefs’ new philosophy is to avoid answering one reporter’s question and not answer to 20 other reporters, so instead they do as other teams have done: answer no questions until they determine the time to be right.
Former K-State athletic director Tim Weiser says he learned the hard way that, even in sports, information is precious and people don’t always handle it correctly. He agrees that there are competitive disadvantages related to sharing secrets, even if those things wouldn’t have been considered secrets when Weiser entered administration in the mid-1980s.
“What a horrible way to live life, that you believe everybody is out to get you,” says Weiser, now the Big 12’s deputy commissioner. “Then you get burned, you get used, somebody that you thought you could (trust), you can’t, and then you develop this half-empty approach.
“Now, I’m not going to trust you until you prove to me that you can be trusted.”
Not when numbers like this are part of the discussion: $48 million. That’s how much money K-State’s athletic department earned during the 2007-08 school year. Just for kicks, Alabama’s earnings were $89 million, including a cool $14 million profit. The more money involved, Weiser and Walker said, the more is at stake. And the less anyone with any influence is willing to talk about it and risk jeopardizing even a few of those dollars.
“You have to behave a certain way,” Walker says, “and understand what matters.”
•••
The young protégé watched his mentor in the trophy-lined office, soaking it all in. Dayton Moore wanted to learn from John Schuerholz, then the Atlanta Braves GM, how to win on baseball’s highest level — and the 29-year-old scout noticed that the things Schuerholz didn’t say sometimes stored the greatest impact.
Moore watched as Schuerholz crafted winner after winner, 14 division championships, and revealed as few specifics as possible about how he’d done it. When Moore left Atlanta in 2006 and became the Royals’ GM, he brought with him a similar approach: If leaders share their intentions or plans, competitors will take advantage.
“The only way I’ve known,” Moore says now. “It’s common sense.”
Moore was learning so much in those days, and the Braves winning with such frequency, that Moore never bothered to ask what role secrecy played in the team’s success. He says now that he just absorbed it as the way it was done, and that’s why now Moore reminds his employees during every meeting that information is not to be shared — and jobs are at risk if it is.
“You continually preach,” Moore says. “I’m sure people get offended.”
Moore says he keeps most moves to himself, or shares them with only a handful of confidantes, so that if other Royals employees are asked about them, they won’t have to choose between sharing details or lying about them.
Before Moore hired Trey Hillman as manager in 2007, only owner David Glass and president Dan Glass were in on the secret. Before Kansas City drafted pitcher Joakim Soria in 2006, only Moore and the two scouts who’d discovered Soria knew of the Royals’ plans — until the morning of the draft, when then-manager Buddy Bell and several others were told.
Moore says the sports culture is changing, with less information made available. He says he’s comfortable with that approach, even if — and often because — fans want to know more.
That’s why Moore vowed, upon taking the Royals job, he would end the old way of secrets being leaked to the media. He says the openness did more harm to the Royals over the years than good, saying that, if nothing else, it gave other teams a look into Kansas City’s plans and gave the impression that team insiders were undisciplined and couldn’t keep matters within the Kauffman Stadium walls.
“Very, very frustrating,” Moore says.
So here’s that question again: What does it accomplish? Can secrecy directly lead to success?
“I think so,” Moore says. “That’s the philosophy that I’ve grown up in and developed under.”
But how?
“If information leaks out,” Moore says, “it jeopardizes the entire organization.”
Across the parking lot from Moore’s office, the Chiefs’ Pioli learned the same things in the same way. Pioli observed Belichick win championships and do it without revealing plans, intentions, thoughts or observations — and the winning was enough to keep Belichick’s peers and protégés from asking why the silence mattered.
Instead, that’s the way it was done, and now those protégés are influencing other NFL teams: Pioli, Denver coach Josh McDaniels, Cleveland coach Eric Mangini and Detroit coach Jim Schwartz.
Belichick learned from Bill Parcells, and those men have a combined five Super Bowl wins between them.
“People become so convinced that that one thing gives us an advantage over your opponents,” former K-State AD Weiser says. “I guess if you’re convinced it will give you the edge, it will.”
•••
Here’s someone who’s not convinced. He says the teams that focus hours, dollars and energy into over-the-top security, the guard gates and locked interior doors and tight-lipped officials, are interested in something similar to the people who suggested the president travel with a 30-car motorcade: a way to make the office appear intimidating and powerful.
University of Missouri AD Mike Alden says that sometimes concealment is a good thing. Most times, he says, it’s a charade orchestrated to distract the media and make administrators appear calculating and methodical. But about that other thing …
You again ask the question, and you hope for a clear answer this time: Does secrecy really translate into wins?
“No,” Alden says. “How’s that? I don’t know what it accomplishes.”
But this is MU, one of the Big 12’s best sports schools the last two years. It made nearly $50 million during the 2007-08 school year and seems to have as much to protect as any team at any level.
Alden says he thinks that the more energy and resources teams put into concealment, the more they’re ignoring other, more pressing needs. He says the real reason teams and officials are secretive is because they really just don’t want to be bothered with answering questions about their motives and how those motives have played out.
“As hard as you may fight to keep stuff away from people,” Alden says, “it takes so much more energy to do that than just be accessible. I mean: What the heck?
“Even if what you’re trying to keep under guard is something that you screwed up on, you’re better served to just go ahead and say it.”
Alden admits keeping some things to himself or to a select few: coaching searches, for one. He says it does no one any good for a potential coach to be linked with a different job, even if the public’s thirst for information and the 24-hour news cycle call for details.
He says those are rare instances, and he’s glad of that. Alden says that when he arrived at MU in 1998, the culture seemed geared toward secrecy and paranoia, and that made Alden uncomfortable.
“Not a productive environment for me,” he says.
Now he does it his way, different as it is from the norm. Alden says he realizes his leadership philosophy is among a shrinking minority that believes in transparency and that sports now seems to consider mystery a qualification. He says it’s not for him, and he believes that if other decision-makers were honest with themselves about that direct question — What’s the point? — they might be more productive in the long run.
“It’s just a philosophy,” Alden says. “I don’t know how you can turn your personality around. But you’re missing what you’re trying to accomplish.”
•••
Chiefs GM Pioli makes his points and then disappears up the stairs that lead to his office.
He has insisted that he’s not as strict with information as Belichick but that Kansas City will have one voice, new coach Haley’s voice, under Pioli’s administration.
“We’ll talk soon,” Pioli says, his broad shoulders leaning over the guard rail. “Before the draft, I promise.”
Then he’s gone, leaving still more questions than answers — and that appears to be how Pioli prefers things. Men like Pioli would rather some conversations remain off the record so that they can make their points without those points being shared. It’s how many team leaders prefer things, a culture the Chiefs seem later than most to implement.
It’s a combination, some say, of a torrent of media coverage, big money and the feeling that little good can come out of sharing what you’ve learned.
“Not when the stakes are this high,” former K-State AD Weiser says. “This business forces you to take that kind of approach. As much as we would like it to still just be a game, it’s not just a game. The issue of competing and trying to win is such that, to some it develops a way of paranoia.
“It’s sad that it has evolved to this. But I don’t see anything coming on the horizon to say that it won’t grow even more locked down. It must do some good or people wouldn’t continue to approach in the way that they do. In the end, does it? I don’t know.”
You head back down the staircase toward the first floor, past the security desk, through a back hallway and past the wooden door with a narrow window that provides a 4-inch-wide view into what the Chiefs are up to.
“We created this,” Weiser says.
The door closes, the startling snap of the deadbolt engaging behind it.
By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star
The security guard in the booth hollers if you drive up too fast. They’re checking names and affiliations now, he’ll say, a new policy here at one of Kansas City’s most secure buildings.
You’re a reporter, huh? Out here every day during the fall? He steps back, writes something on a clipboard and then turns to you, his eyes more narrow now, and points toward a crowded parking lot.
It’s not the CIA or the line to claim a night in the Lincoln Bedroom. This is the sentry point to enter Chiefs headquarters, and the guard isn’t the only gatekeeper these days. There are locked doors and secret codes, off-limits hallways and parts of the new facility that even the regulars can’t visit without a team-employed escort. The third-floor executive offices? Forget that. Even a trip to the old restroom, the two-seater down the hall past community relations, will get you a talking-to after an executive complained that there was unauthorized activity in the southeast corridor.
“It’s definitely changed,” 20-year Chiefs public relations man Bob Moore says. “It’s so different now.”
Then: “The consequences are greater now than they were.”
The Chiefs aren’t charting any new territory with the protective sensibility, which has intensified in the last two months since chairman Clark Hunt vowed to keep the searches quiet for the general manager and, later, the head coach. Information is valuable, and mistakes can cost millions.
Kansas City is the latest sports team to adopt the notion that secrecy is an essential pathway to greatness. College athletic departments are concerned now with recruiting and marketing, and pro franchises worry about money, image and the belief that even minuscule details somehow give competitors an edge.
Regardless of the Chiefs’ reasons, they’re keeping things silent these days; following the curve set by successful decision-makers such as New England coach Bill Belichick and the University of Alabama’s Nick Saban, who believe that the only thing worth saying publicly is “no comment.”
During the two weeks between former coach Herm Edwards’ firing and the introduction of Edwards’ replacement, Todd Haley, even longtime team officials were kept in the dark — or at least that’s what they’d have you believe.
“They don’t tell me anything,” one employee said in a voicemail.
“I haven’t been told squat,” another said.
Others sound more official: “Not at liberty,” the man said in a text message. “I haven’t been authorized to say anything.”
The Chiefs hired a Belichick acolyte last month, GM Scott Pioli. He hasn’t said much during his five weeks in Kansas City, and he even instructed his friends and family to say nothing, if that much, should someone call to ask about something such as Pioli’s favorite rock band.
Pioli is upstairs now, dangerously close to those third-floor offices. Past the entrance keypad, the locked wooden door, the first wave of Chiefs staffers and the armed guard at the desk — there’s the staircase that’s accessible on this day only because it’s a special occasion: Pioli just chose Haley as the Chiefs’ coach.
Pioli is in a good mood. Now’s the time to ask: What’s with all the secrecy? What is the point, and what does it accomplish to treat sports information like missile defense secrets?
Pioli straightens, and his smile fades.
“What’s the point?” he repeats. “Well. Are we off the record?”
The tape recorder clicks off, and Pioli smiles again.
•••
The story goes that Bill Snyder was retired and on the golf course one week, laughing it up with a friendly reporter and telling stories about what went on behind the curtain, and the next week Snyder was Kansas State’s football coach again — and those golf outings and stories stopped.
It was last November. Snyder was the same person, but his attitude changed. Even during the Ron Prince years, Snyder was something like Wildcats coach emeritus; his title was gone, but his influence was not.
Before he retired in 2005, Snyder was known for lording over one of the Big 12’s most secretive programs; information was distributed on a need-to-know basis, and Snyder wasn’t interested in how his way was received. K-State was winning, and if that’s how he did things, well, whatever works.
But the old man was said to have softened. He was friendly and talkative. Then he got his old job back, and within days, the grandfatherly figure was gone and the ferocious coach was back. Details were hidden. Conversations were silenced. Even some relationships were terminated.
So why would a man change at age 66 and change again three years later? Why would he settle into one way, only to transform his personality for what he says is the greater good? You place a call and explain what you’re looking to ask: Why did Snyder see fit to leave a quiet life and re-enter a life shrouded instead in silence? Why does Snyder see a correlation between secrecy and success?
“Because of the subject,” K-State sports information director Kenny Lannou says, “I would think that it really wouldn’t be on the top of his list. But I don’t know. I can submit it to him and see what he says.”
The phone never rings, and there’s another secret that goes unrevealed — just the way Snyder likes it.
Alabama associate athletic director for media relations Doug Walker has worked with two of the most guarded men in college football: Saban and Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis, both former Belichick disciples. Walker says there are no rules or instructions on how to deliver — or not deliver — information. But Walker admits there is a growing belief in sports: Success gives coaches the right to run an organization any way they want.
If Saban protects information and then wins a conference championship, others think there is a correlation — and are willing to follow Saban’s lead. The more Saban wins, the less he is questioned — by his peers, anyway.
“We’re going to let people know things when we’re ready to tell them,” says Walker, who’s worked in media relations nearly 20 years. “It’s just understood.”
Walker says the Internet and the public’s constant thirst for news has led coaches, administrators and spokesmen to appear withdrawn. The Chiefs’ new philosophy is to avoid answering one reporter’s question and not answer to 20 other reporters, so instead they do as other teams have done: answer no questions until they determine the time to be right.
Former K-State athletic director Tim Weiser says he learned the hard way that, even in sports, information is precious and people don’t always handle it correctly. He agrees that there are competitive disadvantages related to sharing secrets, even if those things wouldn’t have been considered secrets when Weiser entered administration in the mid-1980s.
“What a horrible way to live life, that you believe everybody is out to get you,” says Weiser, now the Big 12’s deputy commissioner. “Then you get burned, you get used, somebody that you thought you could (trust), you can’t, and then you develop this half-empty approach.
“Now, I’m not going to trust you until you prove to me that you can be trusted.”
Not when numbers like this are part of the discussion: $48 million. That’s how much money K-State’s athletic department earned during the 2007-08 school year. Just for kicks, Alabama’s earnings were $89 million, including a cool $14 million profit. The more money involved, Weiser and Walker said, the more is at stake. And the less anyone with any influence is willing to talk about it and risk jeopardizing even a few of those dollars.
“You have to behave a certain way,” Walker says, “and understand what matters.”
•••
The young protégé watched his mentor in the trophy-lined office, soaking it all in. Dayton Moore wanted to learn from John Schuerholz, then the Atlanta Braves GM, how to win on baseball’s highest level — and the 29-year-old scout noticed that the things Schuerholz didn’t say sometimes stored the greatest impact.
Moore watched as Schuerholz crafted winner after winner, 14 division championships, and revealed as few specifics as possible about how he’d done it. When Moore left Atlanta in 2006 and became the Royals’ GM, he brought with him a similar approach: If leaders share their intentions or plans, competitors will take advantage.
“The only way I’ve known,” Moore says now. “It’s common sense.”
Moore was learning so much in those days, and the Braves winning with such frequency, that Moore never bothered to ask what role secrecy played in the team’s success. He says now that he just absorbed it as the way it was done, and that’s why now Moore reminds his employees during every meeting that information is not to be shared — and jobs are at risk if it is.
“You continually preach,” Moore says. “I’m sure people get offended.”
Moore says he keeps most moves to himself, or shares them with only a handful of confidantes, so that if other Royals employees are asked about them, they won’t have to choose between sharing details or lying about them.
Before Moore hired Trey Hillman as manager in 2007, only owner David Glass and president Dan Glass were in on the secret. Before Kansas City drafted pitcher Joakim Soria in 2006, only Moore and the two scouts who’d discovered Soria knew of the Royals’ plans — until the morning of the draft, when then-manager Buddy Bell and several others were told.
Moore says the sports culture is changing, with less information made available. He says he’s comfortable with that approach, even if — and often because — fans want to know more.
That’s why Moore vowed, upon taking the Royals job, he would end the old way of secrets being leaked to the media. He says the openness did more harm to the Royals over the years than good, saying that, if nothing else, it gave other teams a look into Kansas City’s plans and gave the impression that team insiders were undisciplined and couldn’t keep matters within the Kauffman Stadium walls.
“Very, very frustrating,” Moore says.
So here’s that question again: What does it accomplish? Can secrecy directly lead to success?
“I think so,” Moore says. “That’s the philosophy that I’ve grown up in and developed under.”
But how?
“If information leaks out,” Moore says, “it jeopardizes the entire organization.”
Across the parking lot from Moore’s office, the Chiefs’ Pioli learned the same things in the same way. Pioli observed Belichick win championships and do it without revealing plans, intentions, thoughts or observations — and the winning was enough to keep Belichick’s peers and protégés from asking why the silence mattered.
Instead, that’s the way it was done, and now those protégés are influencing other NFL teams: Pioli, Denver coach Josh McDaniels, Cleveland coach Eric Mangini and Detroit coach Jim Schwartz.
Belichick learned from Bill Parcells, and those men have a combined five Super Bowl wins between them.
“People become so convinced that that one thing gives us an advantage over your opponents,” former K-State AD Weiser says. “I guess if you’re convinced it will give you the edge, it will.”
•••
Here’s someone who’s not convinced. He says the teams that focus hours, dollars and energy into over-the-top security, the guard gates and locked interior doors and tight-lipped officials, are interested in something similar to the people who suggested the president travel with a 30-car motorcade: a way to make the office appear intimidating and powerful.
University of Missouri AD Mike Alden says that sometimes concealment is a good thing. Most times, he says, it’s a charade orchestrated to distract the media and make administrators appear calculating and methodical. But about that other thing …
You again ask the question, and you hope for a clear answer this time: Does secrecy really translate into wins?
“No,” Alden says. “How’s that? I don’t know what it accomplishes.”
But this is MU, one of the Big 12’s best sports schools the last two years. It made nearly $50 million during the 2007-08 school year and seems to have as much to protect as any team at any level.
Alden says he thinks that the more energy and resources teams put into concealment, the more they’re ignoring other, more pressing needs. He says the real reason teams and officials are secretive is because they really just don’t want to be bothered with answering questions about their motives and how those motives have played out.
“As hard as you may fight to keep stuff away from people,” Alden says, “it takes so much more energy to do that than just be accessible. I mean: What the heck?
“Even if what you’re trying to keep under guard is something that you screwed up on, you’re better served to just go ahead and say it.”
Alden admits keeping some things to himself or to a select few: coaching searches, for one. He says it does no one any good for a potential coach to be linked with a different job, even if the public’s thirst for information and the 24-hour news cycle call for details.
He says those are rare instances, and he’s glad of that. Alden says that when he arrived at MU in 1998, the culture seemed geared toward secrecy and paranoia, and that made Alden uncomfortable.
“Not a productive environment for me,” he says.
Now he does it his way, different as it is from the norm. Alden says he realizes his leadership philosophy is among a shrinking minority that believes in transparency and that sports now seems to consider mystery a qualification. He says it’s not for him, and he believes that if other decision-makers were honest with themselves about that direct question — What’s the point? — they might be more productive in the long run.
“It’s just a philosophy,” Alden says. “I don’t know how you can turn your personality around. But you’re missing what you’re trying to accomplish.”
•••
Chiefs GM Pioli makes his points and then disappears up the stairs that lead to his office.
He has insisted that he’s not as strict with information as Belichick but that Kansas City will have one voice, new coach Haley’s voice, under Pioli’s administration.
“We’ll talk soon,” Pioli says, his broad shoulders leaning over the guard rail. “Before the draft, I promise.”
Then he’s gone, leaving still more questions than answers — and that appears to be how Pioli prefers things. Men like Pioli would rather some conversations remain off the record so that they can make their points without those points being shared. It’s how many team leaders prefer things, a culture the Chiefs seem later than most to implement.
It’s a combination, some say, of a torrent of media coverage, big money and the feeling that little good can come out of sharing what you’ve learned.
“Not when the stakes are this high,” former K-State AD Weiser says. “This business forces you to take that kind of approach. As much as we would like it to still just be a game, it’s not just a game. The issue of competing and trying to win is such that, to some it develops a way of paranoia.
“It’s sad that it has evolved to this. But I don’t see anything coming on the horizon to say that it won’t grow even more locked down. It must do some good or people wouldn’t continue to approach in the way that they do. In the end, does it? I don’t know.”
You head back down the staircase toward the first floor, past the security desk, through a back hallway and past the wooden door with a narrow window that provides a 4-inch-wide view into what the Chiefs are up to.
“We created this,” Weiser says.
The door closes, the startling snap of the deadbolt engaging behind it.