Business
What It Takes to Win in Business and in Sports: Jerry Reese Talks About What it Takes to Find and Keep Talent in a Competitve Environment
Since becoming named General Manager of the New York Giants in 2007, Jerry Reese has helped his team win two Super Bowl championships along with two NFC East championships and three postseason berths and have finished .50 or better in every season.
With a keen eye for talent, the players that he helped sign made pivotal plays in each of those Super Bowl victories thus making Reese the only African American General Manager in the NFL to ever win a Super Bowl. In this BLACK ENTERPRISE interview, Editorial Director Alan Hughes catches up with the 48-year-old Reese at the team’s offices to get his tips on what it takes to win. Please see interview below:
Whenever a team wins a championship, there’s always a hemorrhaging of talent—both players and coaches are lured away by other teams. What measures do you have in place to keep the team highly competitive, despite that reality?
Jerry Reese: We believe that you have to develop players. You can fix a few things through free agency, but we believe in drafting players and developing players. That’s kind of what our philosophy has been. We don’t have a template. Every year is different, so we use free agency.
We use the draft. We use trades. We use all different types of ways to get our personnel to where we want it to be and we never stop trying to upgrade the personnel as the year goes along. You can’t keep them all. With the salary cap as it is now, you can’t keep all the players and you know you’re going to lose some players, but you have to try to keep a good core of the players on the offense and defense and special teams.
If you can keep good core players, then you can fill in around them with draft picks and free agency, and I think we’ve been able to follow that a little bit and make it work for us.
You have a reputation as someone that’s got an eye for talent. What are some of the things that you look for when you say, ‘I can see this guy on my team?’
Reese: Well, first of all, we like guys who are going to play into our team philosophy. That’s what’s important to us. If you come here, you’ve got to play as a team. We don’t try to outshine each other. We shine together here.
That’s the first thing I talk to players about. This is how we do it here. We’re the Giants. We play together as a team. There are a lot of individuals, good individual talented people, but if you come here, you’ve got to leave your ego at the door and play as a team.
If you do those things, we’ll win and we’ll have a chance to win a Super Bowl, if you do those things. So I think we look for that first and we look for talent, just like everyone else. I don’t think we’re unique to any other personnel people in the National Football League. We look for talent. We look for height, weight, speed, intelligent players, tough physical players–just like everybody else.
