Mellinger:Reid, Dorsey put friendship to work in first draft with Chiefs

[Tribal Warfare]

Reid, Dorsey put friendship to work in first draft with Chiefs
By SAM MELLINGER
The Kansas City Star
Andy Reid is with his buddy Dorse, so of course they’re laughing. They can’t help themselves, really. They study football, watch football, talk football, and laugh. Sometimes, they go eat together. At dinner, between bites, they talk football and laugh.

“Our wives aren’t in Kansas City yet so it’s like we’re back in college,” Reid likes to say. He pauses, just for a second. Slaps Dorse on the leg. Here comes the punchline.

“Well, maybe not exactly like college.”

Then the two men laugh again. Soon, they will be off to study and watch and talk more football together. Nearly always, together.

Dorse is Chiefs general manager John Dorsey, of course. He and Reid have been in charge of their new team for less than four months but they’ve known each other for 20 years. You can tell. They are more than co-workers.

There is a friendship and mutual respect underneath nearly everything they do. Dorsey trusts Reid’s coaching as much as Reid trusts Dorsey’s scouting. After years of the Chiefs’ leadership being marked by behind-the-scenes back-stabbing and different personal agendas, it’s a nice change. And as the 2013 Chiefs come into focus after Dorsey and Reid’s first draft, it’s a major part of what’s shaping the new franchise.

Reid and Dorsey met in Green Bay in 1992, working for Mike Holmgren. Reid had just been hired as an offensive assistant, and Dorsey was a college scout. This was the first NFL job for each man, grunts in the pro football power structure. That was just the beginning of the connection.

Dorsey is a former linebacker and special-teams ace, Reid an old offensive lineman. From the beginning, they learned the nuances of the other side of the ball together. Both would need that perspective as they climbed up the professional ladder. They also found something rarer, a sort of work-life simpatico where they breeze back and forth between detailed football preparation and guy humor.

Reid is the more outwardly funny one, the self-deprecator who says he’s careful around the ocean “because I’m a buffet for a shark.” Dorsey plays up an aw-shucks, simple-football-guy angle that keeps Reid’s jokes coming and the ultimate focus on work. Reid says he doesn’t know much about Kansas City aside from his home and work and the route in between; Dorsey’s more familiar and is showing him around.

To explain the dynamic, Reid might open both hands and interlock his fingers — the perfect fit.

“When you have that, that’s good stuff,” he says, his sort of all-encompassing description that Dorsey has probably heard a million times.

The NFL is an obsessively secretive business, proprietary information often guarded like it’s the Defense Department instead of just football. But guys tend to have a small group they feel comfortable with, regardless of current circumstance, and so it was that Reid and Dorsey continued to talk regularly even after Reid left the Packers to coach in Philadelphia.

In separate conversations, without prompting, both will say they always wanted to be reunited. Dorsey and Reid were raised in the pro game at the same time, by the same people, in the same place. That creates a similar worldview. You can see it in the pair’s first major decision together — Reid trusted Dorsey’s early scouting opinion that there would be no great quarterback option in the draft, and Dorsey trusted Reid’s long-held admiration of Alex Smith.

You can also see it in their first draft pick. Ask 10 NFL personnel men to choose between left tackles Eric Fisher and Luke Joeckel, and you might get five votes for each. Joeckel is a technical master who was a five-star recruit and three-year starter at Texas A&M. Fisher is an athletic phenom who grew into the position and will only get better.

Dorsey and Reid don’t always agree — who does? — but they see football through the same lens. These are sure men who take their jobs seriously but not themselves, and maybe they like a little bit of that in their players. Be confident in yourself, while still knowing you need to get better.

They also started from the bottom. Reid was a good player at BYU, not a great one, and worked five college coaching jobs in 10 years before breaking into the NFL. Dorsey was an ordinary NFL player for five seasons before a knee injury put him into scouting. They both worked their way up, in other words, and they like players willing to do the same.

Maybe that’s part of what attracted them to Fisher, a two-star recruit out of high school who used to leave campus some weekends to chop logs with his mother. Fisher plays with a mean streak, open about wanting to prove an overlooked recruit from Central Michigan can play with those guys from the bigger schools.

Clark Hunt talked a bit about this the other day. It was at a news conference, so keep that in mind, but he talked of a bigger confidence in this first-round pick than in years past. He didn’t know exactly how to describe it, just that it “felt different.” You can hear the same thing from others inside the Chiefs offices. Differing viewpoints can be a productive thing, but differing agendas cannot.

This was part of the plan all along. From the very beginning of this offseason’s front-office makeover, Hunt made not-so-subtle references to his desire for a more cohesive operation.

Dorsey’s and Reid’s history together is part of what brought them both to Kansas City, then, and on a few levels. They wanted to work together. Hunt wanted them to work together.

So that’s what they’re doing, in between laughs.