His first season was over, and thus commenced the second phase of Ron Rivera’s overhaul of Washington’s football operations. That meant completely reshaping the scouting department to align with the head coach and his staff, which started with finding the right general manager.
Rivera had a couple of easy connections he could pull on. One was to his GM in Carolina, Marty Hurney, with the Panthers and their long-time executive’s having parted ways. Another was to ex–Lions GM Martin Mayhew, who shares an agent with Rivera and is a longtime friend.
Both interviewed. Afterward the coach, torn, huddled with owner Dan Snyder.
“Do you like them both?” Snyder asked.
“I like them both a lot,” Rivera responded.
Snyder then looked at Rivera and asked, “Would you like to have them both?”
“Yeah, I’d love to have both,” Rivera said, “if we could swing that.”
It took some finagling with titles—Mayhew was named GM, Hurney EVP of football/player personnel—but that wasn’t what was relevant to Rivera. What was?
“It was about getting as many good people as possible,” Rivera said on Wednesday.
And he didn’t have to guess about what he’d be getting with either guy.
The crux of all this, for Rivera, is to keep the Washington Football Team moving forward, and not looking back to where it was when he got there. It was as big a rebuild as you’ll find in the NFL then, and that was before chaos truly ensued—with the name change, with reports detailing a toxic workplace environment and with Rivera’s own battle with squamous cell carcinoma, a form of cancer that Rivera’s docs found in August.
Through all that, Rivera and his staff won the NFC East, took the eventual world champion Buccaneers into deep water before bowing out in the wild-card round and changed the mentality of the locker room along the way.
And after all of it, he saw Hurney and Mayhew as the two best qualified to make sure there’d be no turning back. Four months after landing both, Rivera feels even better that he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.
