Bears add scouts, expand personnel department

Bears add scouts, expand personnel department
By Dan Pompei, Tribune reporter

11:56 a.m. CDT, June 5, 2012
The Chicago Bears have completed a long-anticipated, major overhaul of their personnel department under new general manager Phil Emery, adding eight scouts and promoting six others.

The most significant moves were the promotions of longtime area scouts Marty Barrett and Chris Ballard. Barrett will serve as the director of college scouting and Ballard will be the director of pro scouting.

The Bears had been operating without pro and college scouting directors for more than two years.

The highly respected Barrett has been an area scout in the West region for the Bears for 15 years, having worked for Mark Hatley, Jerry Angelo and now Emery. He previously was with the Saints.

Ballard long has been considered a rising star in the Bears organization. As the Bears' Southwest area scout, he has had considerable sway in the draft process for a number of years. He has been with the organization since 2000.

Ballard does not have experience on the pro side, but in a statement released by the team, Emery indicated that was not an issue.

"The focus during the selection process for the directors’ position was not whether the scout came from a pro or college background, rather it was their level of skill as communicators and evaluators," Emery said. "We were also looking for people with a successful background in coaching, organizational and administrative experience.

"Chris and Marty’s abilities in these important areas really stand out. Their high level of skill in these areas is why we placed them in these leadership roles."

Emery also shifted one of his pro scouts to the college side, naming James Kirkland to Atlantic area scout. Kirkland, who has been with the Bears for three years, previously was a pro scout for the Browns.

Replacing Kirkland will be former Bears cornerback Dwayne Joseph, who had been a pro scout with the Dolphins. Joseph played for the Bears for two years, and then worked for them as director of player development.

Kevin Turks also remains as assistant director of pro scouting.

On the college side, Emery promoted four scouts.

Midwest area scout Jeff Shiver, in his 26th year with the Bears, was named executive scout/assistant director of college scouting. His focus will be the Big Ten.

Rex Hogan and Mark Sadowski were promoted to national scouts. Hogan will focus on the West region, and Sadowski will focus on the East.

Ted Monago was promoted to executive scout with a focus on the critical Southeast Conference.

New area scouts are Kent Kahl (Central States), Francis Saint-Paul (West) and Sam Summerville (East). Kahl had been a regional scout with the 49ers. Saint-Paul comes to the Bears from Northern Arizona, where he was the wide receivers coach. And Summerville previously was a player personnel assistant with the Browns and Eagles.

The Bears also added Breck Ackley, Bobby Macedo, Zach Truty and David Williams as scouting assistants. Ackley had been a grad assistant coach at Southern University. Macedo was the running backs coach at Millikin University. Truty was director of player personnel for the Arizona Rattlers of the Arena League. Williams worked with Emery as player personnel assistant with the Chiefs.

This is by far the largest scouting staff the Bears ever have had. The 2012 Bears personnel staff will have 18 scouts, six more than the 2011 staff.




http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports...,2483992.story

That guy Emery...... He seems to be the perfect man for the job. Perhaps he should go teach JA how to run a football team.

This explains the misses in the draft, the misses in FA (guys like Orlando Pace), and the flow of mediocre talent. It also explains why we based draft picks on jumping out of a swimming pool.

I saw something about 4 years ago that related great drafting teams to the size of their scouting department, this can only help move things in the right direction.

I think JA let Greg Gabriel and Bobby DePaul go in order to make them the scapegoats for his lack of expertise with personnel issues. I never thought that was the right thing to do. Gabriel writes a column for NFP now and I post his articles regularly. He's a very intelligent and perceptive guy and I'm sure our college scouts missed his leadership.

The longer we travel away from the Angelo era and into the Emery era the more I see about Angelo becoming much like Mikey McCaskey was during his years of running the Bears. Both made some absolutely horrible personnel decisions and both had a way of trying to insulate themselves from the fall out by blaming coaching for not being able to get the needed performance out of guys.

Well when you're constantly looking only at guys with high floors what you get is exactly what we got. He drafted decent journeymen players like Alex Brown but with the exception of Briggs never really struck gold with outstanding talent. It was like he expected Lovie and his guys to turn dependable Chevy's into Cadillac's. I'll give him credit where credit is due as far as having the guts to go out and get Pep and to pull the trigger on the Cutler trade but lets' not forget that it was his failures to draft well that made both of those moves necessary. I'm not complaining though.

There's no doubt about which direction Emery intends to go. I think our days of lining up for expensive FA's is over or at the very most limited to finding young players who can come in and compete for starting positions like Geno Hayes. He'll upgrade that way and he'll take more chances on finding top talent than JA ever did. His first four picks this year all have tremendous physical skills and a huge upside to them if they all pan out.

I'm glad to see the scouting department expand and the obvious respect Emery has for those guys. I think that's something that was very lacking in Angelo.

In Emery I trust.