It figures that when Bobby Beathard retired recently after 37 years spent scouting talent and building Super Bowl teams around the NFL, he was not replaced in San Diego by his longtime personnel assistant Billy Devaney, but rather by Ed McGuire, the Chargers’ capologist.
Such is the nature of the NFL in the new millennium. Accountants are more important than talent scouts today. Even great ones like Beathard.
That’s not why one of the great football scouts in the sport’s history decided to retire at the age of 63, but it’s a sad sign of how the NFL has changed during the nearly four decades in which he helped build Super Bowl teams in Kansas City, Miami, Washington and San Diego. The cap is more important these days than the people deciding who wears the caps. Or, in this case, the helmets.
That is not to say a fed-up Bobby Beathard walked into the California sunset he loves so much in protest of pro football’s new reality. That is not even close to the truth, but it is a simple fact that the NFL has lost the kind of person it can ill afford to lose.
It lost the kind of guy you find less and less frequently in NFL front offices in these days of computer printouts, tight-fitting salary caps and lanky bean counters making decisions based on salaries rather than production.
The NFL lost a football guy.
It’s easy to understand why Beathard finally decided to retire to his surfboard, his wife, Christine, a beautiful new house above the beach in San Diego and his many grandchildren after 37 years chasing talent from one end of the country to the other. But he will still be sorely missed. Not only in San Diego, where he had been general manager since 1990 and built a Super Bowl team in the 1994 season, but throughout the insular world of professional football.
Once considered a drafting guru, Beathard never got too full of himself during those years when he served as an integral part of seven Super Bowl teams with the Chiefs, Dolphins, Redskins and Chargers. Because of that, he never got too down during the last few years, when his drafting acumen was called into question by people who knew far less than he did. The Chargers failed to return to the Super Bowl and were plagued by more than a few drafting gaffes of his making.
The last big name he picked may prove to be his biggest bust, in fact. Ryan Leaf has shown nothing but immaturity and a bad temper since coming into the NFL in 1998. Although he may be a bust, drafting Leaf was not a mistake in judgment, and Beathard went out knowing it.
Although he may have traded away his team’s future to get Leaf with the second pick of the 1998 draft, it was not a mistake. It was the wrong guy, but there was no other guy with the talent of Leaf except the guy taken ahead of him, Peyton Manning. Although he never said it publicly, if Beathard had his druthers, he would have taken Manning. If that had happened, he’d probably still be working in San Diego.
Bobby Beathard did the right thing the day he traded up to grab Ryan Leaf, just as he did the right thing most of the days he was running NFL war rooms. Beathard was not right all the time, because nobody is. But he was right most of the time. Few personnel men can claim that, so he goes out with his head high, facing the sun and the waves he still loves to ride.
He also goes out the way he acted most of the time he was in power — with unerring grace.
When asked about Leaf in March at the annual owners’ meeting in Florida — as rumors of his impending retirement were already circulating — Beathard said, "I’m rooting for him to pull it together. Not for me. For himself and for the Chargers."
He said this about an infantile, petulant twentysomething multimillionaire who had not done a thing for Beathard and the Chargers but make them look foolish. This was typical of Beathard, who was no Pollyanna but no Hannibal Lecter either.
So don’t believe the stories that Leaf’s failures and lousy personality drove Beathard to despair and departure. Don’t believe that the multitude of future No. 1 picks Beathard traded during his time as San Diego’s general manager for players who seldom worked out did it either.
It simply was his time to leave, and so he left. He left with a few tears in his eyes during his final press conference, but his head was held high.
As it should have been, because the next time it surfaces, it should be to accept a bust of himself at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
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