Rick Snider noted it in his latest column for Audacy DC: Bobby Beathard was fired in 1999 at the very start of the Dan Snyder era, and that was the last time the Commanders had a true president of football ops/GM/whatever structure overlording a head coach without meddling from above or aside.
And Grant & Danny love it, and loved it even more after hearing Peters' intro presser Tuesday.
"Because the structure's now sound and correct, you have the opportunity that has eluded you for a long, long time. Josh Harris is going to help get everything set up this off season, he'll help find the coach and right the checks and be a phone call away – but then he just becomes a normal owner," Grant said. "Then, they go to work on other stuff. How do we make our fan experience at the stadium not awful? How do we get some of the visiting fans that have no problem getting tickets on the secondary market to have a harder time getting their hands on those tickets? You do all those things, while the football person that you've just implemented into your front office and installed to run everything, Adam Peters, will begin to do so."
Of course we got a Ben Johnson alert as GP then waxed on his ideal head coaching scenarios, but that's beside the point: you want a structure like Johnson has in Detroit, where GM Brad Holmes and head coach Dan Campbell work together in lockstep and have helped the Lions back to prominence.
"That's the dream. It's all we've ever wanted, and they've got the structure now," Grant said. "There is officially a chance, if you squint your eyes a little bit, look out toward the horizon…there's a gleam, men."
"Now, at what point in that process does somebody that hasn't done any studying, hasn't really done anything other than had like a son that went to high school with the player, come off of a vacation and then dictate what we're doing in the draft?" Danny snarked back before his actual reply: "The beautiful part here is, you're not sitting there worried that if something doesn't work – which, by the way, this is football – we don't immediately go to cover your butt mode, where, 'well, the first lever I could pull who liked him was that guy' and there's a scapegoat. We don't have that. We got synergy now; everybody here belongs to this organization, it's not a private contractor with the organization blaming a different private contractor when something goes awry. You have an empowered, cohesive group that is basically allowed to swing and miss a couple of times, because that's inevitable."
So great that Grant now can re-live Ben Standig's recent story in The Athletic that revealed that an agent actually asked STANDIG who he should be calling in the front office about things, because no one knew – and put that as a memory, not a template.
"You're going from a veteran NFL agent telling a beat reporter they don't even know who they're supposed to be calling, to this is the Adam Peters show now," GP said. "And whoever the head coach is, they're gonna work in tandem – he mentioned that a couple of times, which I loved, that he wants to work side by side. He's seen it in San Francisco, with him and Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch."
