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Gettleman's path to the draft

Posted 2 hours ago

Joe MenzerCorrespondent

 

 

After years of teaching and coaching and holding football camps at the high school level in a seemingly never-ending cycle to try and make ends meet, Dave Gettleman, now general manager of the Carolina Panthers, considered pursuing his master's degree in sports administration shortly after getting married in December 1984.

Shortly thereafter his wife, Joanne, became pregnant with the first of what would be three Gettleman children.

"We wanted her to be an at-home mom," Gettleman remembers. "I was a high school teacher at the time, I was the head football coach, I was umpiring baseball, I was running the camp - and I'm still not making any money."

Thus began a long and arduous road to the lofty NFL position Gettleman holds today. It wasn't easy, it was never guaranteed, and it may never have happened without the intervention of Bill Polian, who later became the Panthers' very first general manager.

The journey began one morning as Gettleman read The Sporting News and saw that Polian had just been hired as pro personnel director for the Buffalo Bills. Working in the National Football League seemed to Gettleman, at the time, little more than a distant dream.

But Gettleman knew Polian. He had asked Polian, then a scout with the Kansas City Chiefs, to speak at a football camp Gettleman had helped organize years earlier in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

"This was back in the day before the Internet and all that. So I wrote Bill a letter," Gettleman said.

The letter would change the course of Gettleman's life. In it, he reminded Polian who he was - Polian remembered well - and told the new Bills' personnel man what he planned to do. Gettleman said he already had applied to master's programs at the University of Massachusetts and St. Thomas University in Miami, Fla., and both schools would require him to serve an internship to earn his degree. Would it be possible to get an internship with the Bills?

"Come on up and see me," Polian replied.

When they met, Polian was willing to offer an internship where Gettleman scouted pro games for the Bills.

"It doesn't make any difference to me where you go. If you're at UMass, I'll send you to the Patriots' games and if you're at St. Thomas I'll send you to the Dolphins' games," Polian said.

So Gettleman chose the warmer climate of Miami and the Dolphins' games, and quickly set about impressing Polian with his tireless work ethic and attention to detail.

"I saw very quickly that he was an absolutely 100-percent, solid-gold football man," Polian says now. "He had great instincts, understood talent, understood the game - and he had the ability to annunciate his feelings quite well. And he obviously was dedicated."