In February 2020, during a dinner at the annual NFL Scouting Combine, a team executive reached into a bag and slid a binder across the table.
It wasn’t filled with draft grades or scouting reports. It was something far more revealing. Inside was a detailed catalog of spreadsheets containing data on many of the league’s other general managers — their draft histories, the types of players they gravitated toward, the height, weight, and speed traits they valued, the positions they prioritized, and even the rounds in which their tendencies began to emerge over time. It was years of institutional memory distilled into a single resource, built to help one front office better understand the other 31.
I remember flipping through those pages and realizing I wasn’t looking at a draft guide. I was looking at a map.
For most fans, the NFL is one league. Over time, I’ve come to think of it differently: it’s 32 different countries sharing a schedule.
Every franchise has its own ideology, history, customs, language, and power structure — its own way of seeing football. The longer I’ve covered this league, the more convinced I’ve become that if you really want to understand why teams win, lose, rebuild, rise, fall, or stubbornly stay the same, you have to understand the people who are making decisions long before kickoff. The people who are focused on both the inches in front of them and what the operation looks like at 20,000 feet and 10 miles out.
That dinner stayed with me, even if the binder couldn’t. The idea for NFL Blue Book was born that night.
It just took more than six years to find the right moment to step into it.
For the past 25 years, I’ve had the privilege of covering the National Football League. I started on the Detroit Lions beat in 2001, eventually joined Yahoo Sports in 2004 as a national NFL writer, and spent nearly 22 years there reporting on nearly every aspect of the league’s orbit — from coaching searches and ownership battles to drafts, free agency, scandals, labor negotiations, and Super Bowls.
Along the way, though, I always found myself drawn back to the personnel side.
General managers. Assistant general managers. College scouting directors. Pro personnel executives. Area scouts.
The people whose names casual fans may never know, but whose fingerprints are all over every roster in the league.
Those conversations have always been my favorite part of the job. Not because they produce the biggest headlines — although sometimes they do — but because they often explain the ‘why.’
Why one team refuses to draft certain positions early. Why another keeps chasing the same athletic profile. Why two organizations can watch the same player and arrive at completely different conclusions. Why some franchises seem to build contenders over and over while others spend decades simply trying to resolve a quarterback problem that won’t go away.
That’s the territory I want to explore here. NFL Blue Book won’t just be about transactions. It won’t just be about news and features. And it certainly won’t be about pretending every rumor deserves a headline.
Instead, I want to spend time focused on the machinery of the league. I want to explore how front offices think. How philosophies evolve. How decisions are made. How disagreements happen. How organizations change — or refuse to.
Most importantly, I want to learn alongside you. Think of it as a town hall meeting or an ongoing conversation between the curious. That’s what I would like NFL Blue Book to become.
We’ll begin with notebooks from training camps. As time goes on, there will be features, news, and explanatory reporting. Eventually, I will add podcasts, livestreams, and videos. There will be mailbags because many of the best questions often come from readers — people who love the game enough to wonder why something happened instead of simply accepting that it did.
I also suspect NFL Blue Book will evolve over time. I know where I want to begin, but I don’t know exactly where this endeavor will end up. And I think that’s a good thing. Some of the best work I’ve ever done started with a question I didn’t know I should be asking — until someone else asked it first.
So I hope you’ll ask your questions and challenge mine. Tell me where you think I’m missing something. Help shape what this becomes.
When I have described NFL Blue Book to people around the league, I have often borrowed an analogy about just needing to start somewhere, even if it’s small. I tell them I can’t worry about how much acreage this will eventually cover — that right now, it’s just about working a patch of grass.
That patch is me getting out onto the road for the camp tour that will help launch this undertaking. Eventually, I hope to expand to acreage that includes the league’s 32 front offices. I think that’s where we can find some of the NFL’s most interesting stories.
Now I’d like to spend the next chapter of my career exploring them with you.
Welcome to NFL Blue Book.
This is such an interesting take and I am excited to read more! My boyfriend is notorious for loving his teams but always being mad at a manager or a decision made by an owner, excited to learn why!!
I like the concept of 32 individual countries sharing a schedule. And people will always be interesting. This seems like a cool concept and best wishes in your publication!!