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Perhaps this article should be sub-titled "Ortmayer's Follies".
You remember Steve Ortmayer, the first GM of the St. Louis Rams.
Ortmayer made his mark in the area of talent evaluation and special teams while serving as one of Al Davis' many acolytes.
That reputation got Ortmayer his first GM job (in San Diego)...but he and Chargers' owner Alex Spanos didn't see eye to eye and Ortmayer returned to the Raider cocoon for awhile...before generally managing the Rams in their first two seasons in St. Louis.
An overview of Ortmayer's two years in St. Louis must begin by looking at his 1995 hire of Rich Brooks.
You can't fault Ortmayer entirely for hiring Brooks, since more than one NFL guru (including Pro Football Weekly's Joel Buchsbaum) had been singing the praises of Brooks for years.
But three impressions of Brooks' tenure as Rams head coach stick out--impressions that strongly suggest that Brooks was in over his head as an NFL head coach.
Impression #1: the performance of the Rams' offense during Brooks' two years as head coach suggested that twenty years away from the pro game left him unprepared as far as devising a winning 1990's NFL offensive scheme with the talent on hand in St. Louis.
Evidence? Brooks' comments about his most important 1995-1996 free-agent acquisition, QB Steve Walsh (remember him?): "Steve Walsh understands how to win football games. He reads [defenses] quickly, he makes decisions quickly, and I believe that he will make fewer mistakes than some of the other [available] quarterbacks."
Impression #2: Brooks was unprepared and/or unwilling to deal with problematic professional athletes in the persuasive way that NFL coaches must, as opposed to the dictatorial way that college coaches can.
Evidence? Brooks' facial expression and body language (the word constipated comes to mind) while sitting next to Lawrence Phillips during an August press conference devoted to Phillips and some of his off-the-field problems said it all...
Impression #3: Brooks' twenty years at Oregon indicated that wasn't that good of a coach to begin with.
Evidence? Two long-time readers of St. Louis Sports Online, both of whom live in Oregon, shared that view with yours truly a not long after Brooks was hired.
But still...the nagging suspicion lingers that Brooks was playing with cards dealt to him mostly by Ortmayer and Rams president John Shaw...a suspicion reinforced by Dan Reeves' decision to hire Brooks as his assistant head coach in Atlanta last winter.
In any event, Ortmayer's tenure as Rams GM is easier to evaluate.
In addition to hiring Brooks (probably a bad decision), Ortmayer proved that he was no more capable of stocking a mid-1990's-era NFL roster with quality personnel than his former boss Al Davis.
Especially since the apparent outcomes of his personnel moves remind many St. Louisans of Mike Keenan's tenure as Blues GM.
Note that as this is written (July '97) neither Ortmayer nor Keenan have found other GM jobs.
Of course, the jury is still out (literally) on perhaps Ortmayer's most daring acquisition, 1996 first-round pick Lawrence Phillips.
But one set of trades that Steve Ortmayer orchestrated while serving as Rams GM is, upon reflection, hard to comprehend.
Namely, when Ortmayer came on board prior to the '95 season, arguably the three biggest stars on the Rams roster were Jerome Bettis (a two-time Pro Bowl RB), Troy Drayton (the first alternate 1994 Pro Bowler at TE), and Sean Gilbert (a 1993 Pro Bowl DE at age 22).
But when new Rams football honcho Dick Vermeil came on board after the 1996 season, none of those players were on hand.
Now, it was widely speculated that all three players were unhappy in St. Louis...and would leave as soon as they became free agents. But aren't those the kinds of problems that an adept GM can solve?
All three had been traded by Ortmayer, who, in return for Bettis (the 17th best player in the whole of the NFL, according to Buchsbaum's 1997 player ratings), Drayton (Buchsbaum's pick as the fifth best TE in 1997), and Gilbert (Buchsbaum's seventh-best DT), received a '97 late-round draft choice from Pittsburgh (and a swap of early-round '96 picks), offensive lineman Billy Milner (a first-round Dolphins draft choice in 1995), and the Redskins' first-round pick in '96, which the Rams used to select Phillips.
In what many view as a salary-cap move,Vermeil recently announced plans to release Milner.
So Lawrence Phillips is pretty much all that's left from the Bettis, Drayton, and Gilbert troika of stars that lit up the Rams' 95 roster when Ortmayer came to St. Louis.
Which means that the final judgement of Steve Ortmayer's tenure as Rams GM resides on the shoulders of one Lawrence Phillips.
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