INDIANAPOLIS — Dave Ziegler hasn’t had much time for rest. For the past month and change, he’s spent almost all of his time at Raiders headquarters and the room he’s living in at the M Resort hotel down the street. Alongside coach Josh McDaniels, the first-time general manager has been working incessantly to put together the personnel and coaching staffs, evaluate the roster and plan for the offseason. He has some new scenery this week — he and McDaniels are in Indianapolis for the NFL Scouting Combine — but the grind hasn’t slowed.
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“Not a lot of sleep, that’s for sure,” Ziegler said with a smile while sitting in front of a group of reporters at the Indiana Convention Center on Wednesday.
He’s not complaining. This is what it takes to implement the culture Ziegler plans to instill in Las Vegas. He wants the Raiders to be an organization that harps on the details and overlooks nothing. He intends to hire team-oriented individuals and invest in their growth in the same way they do players. Through every department, he wants clear, thorough and frequent communication. The environment will be demanding, but he doesn’t want it to become abrasive and uncomfortable.
“The fabric of our culture will be to evaluate and evolve consistently and constantly our processes and our people to make sure that we are always operating at a championship level,” Ziegler said in his introductory news conference in January. “Being committed to the standard of excellence is going to occur from the top down, and it’s what it will take to build this organization into an organization that consistently competes for championships.”
Those words have to be met with action, but Ziegler hasn’t gotten here by making empty statements. From a Division III college football player to an NFL executive, he’s backed them up.
“Dave took the stairs, not the elevator,” McDaniels said Wednesday. “Every task he was given, Dave embraced it and then excelled at it. I think that’s the only thing you can ask of a young man when he comes in at a young age and he has a bunch of low-level responsibilities: Do them the best you can. And if you do them well, then you’re going to get some more responsibility added to your plate.
“Dave has always done that. Dave will continue to do that. Dave has no ego. Dave’s a guy that if he has to drive his own car through the car wash every day, he’s going to go do that. If he has to pour his coffee, he’s going to do that. He’s not going to ask somebody else to do all those things. That’s not Dave Ziegler.”
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Ziegler’s football journey has been unusual. He’s played, coached and been an executive. He’s worked at high schools and colleges and for professional teams. He’s now had eight titles in 11 years in the NFL. Now, he’s the man the Raiders hope will take them to the next level.
The foundation of Ziegler was forged through sports growing up in Tallmadge, Ohio. The Akron suburb of about 20,000 people had an obsession with athletics, and he happily adopted it. Playing football, basketball and baseball wasn’t just something he did for fun; it was part of who he was.
“That’s what your identity was about,” Ziegler said. “And that’s where I really learned to compete.”
Ziegler was a standout at Tallmadge High, but an average-sized receiver from a small town in Ohio didn’t draw a ton of recruiting attention. He landed at Division III John Carroll, just 30 miles north of his hometown. He shined on the field — he was a three-time first-team All-Ohio Athletic Conference selection as a return specialist — but he also made a lasting impression on those around him off the field.
“He really was a leader on our team,” Chargers assistant Tom Arth, who was John Carroll’s quarterback during Ziegler’s final season in 1999, said last month. “He was a guy that I really had incredible respect for and somebody who I really trusted and somebody that I knew cared so much about our team. He would always have all of our best interests at heart. We struck up a pretty good relationship pretty early on. … If there were ever any kind of issues that I was having, whether it was just difficulty being away from home for the first time or struggling just to make your way as a new college student-athlete, Dave was always the guy that I really relied on and trusted in to be able to go to.”
People gravitated toward Ziegler, and he had a way of bringing out the best in them. He had a laid-back demeanor, but his presence was felt.
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“Boy, just competitive,” Arth said. “And I look at him the same way now in what he’s accomplished in the NFL and certainly in this role as a GM. You just know he’s going to be amazing. He’s going to do an incredible job. He’s just got that killer instinct. He’s so smart, he’s so hardworking and he’s so competitive. You just know that anything that he does he’s going to put his full heart into it and he’s going to find a way to be the best he can be at whatever he’s doing.”
Before he was an executive, though, he was a teacher. He graduated with an education degree in 2000 and started working at a local high school, but he wasn’t happy. Football was his passion, so he moved to Arizona and worked as a substitute teacher while volunteering to try to get his coaching career started, which he viewed as his best chance at staying connected to the game.
“I grew up in Northeast Ohio,” Ziegler said. “I knew about football. I’d been around football coaches my whole life. And that was really the scope of my knowledge about the bigger picture. To remain in football, I knew I had to coach.”
Ziegler landed back at John Carroll as a graduate assistant in 2004 before going to Iona College, where for a three-month stretch he dabbled in acting on the side. His highlight was a small role in an episode of “Law & Order.”
“It wasn’t very serious,” Ziegler said of the brief acting career, “once I actually got out there and did it and saw how hard those people have to work. And those aren’t big paydays, either. Being on a set for 16 hours and then seeing what those paychecks are … those people were committed to acting.
“I was committed to try and make a little money on the side and do something different. It was a short-lived vision.”
Ziegler returned to Arizona to coach at Scottsdale’s Chaparral High after Iona, a former FCS program, stopped sponsoring football. In addition to coaching, he worked as a teacher and guidance counselor.
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“(I learned) how to deal with different people, how to relate to different people, how to communicate at a high level, how to show empathy, how to problem-solve,” Ziegler said. “A lot of those lessons outside of football that have been really valuable to me.”
Although Ziegler had a passion for coaching and enjoyed what he did, he soon had to start thinking more practically. Finances were an issue. He and his wife, Carissa, wanted to have a family — they now have three children — and he needed a career capable of supporting them long-term. He soon found out that playing and coaching weren’t the only ways to stay in the game: McDaniels offered him an opportunity to become a Broncos scouting assistant in 2010.
“To be honest with you, I didn’t even know scouting existed at that time,” Ziegler said. “When Josh gave me the opportunity to come up and interview for a scouting assistantship, that’s really the first time. I mean, you hear scouting, but I really didn’t know what it was and what it entailed. I had some opportunities to go back into coaching when I started my career in scouting, but I just really fell in love with it. I started to have success in it. I started to get more responsibility and learn more about what it entailed and the whole team-building process. I fell in love with that process, and that allowed me to separate from the coaching world.”
Josh McDaniels, Mark Davis and Dave Ziegler at the introductory news conference. (Matt Aguirre / Las Vegas Raiders)McDaniels was fired the same year Ziegler was hired in Denver. Ziegler stuck around and worked as a pro and college scout, but after the Broncos fired then-GM Brian Xanders after the 2012 season, Ziegler was left without a job. It was a failure from a football standpoint, but Ziegler’s time in Denver proved to be the launching pad for his career.
In his first season with the Broncos, he had menial tasks such as picking up people from the airport and putting cards on the draft board, but he didn’t view them as beneath him. He kept the same attitude and approach. That stuck with McDaniels, who returned to the Patriots as their offensive coordinator in 2012. McDaniels and then-Patriots director of player personnel Nick Caserio — who was teammates with McDaniels and Ziegler at John Carroll — connected Ziegler with Bill Belichick and vouched for him before he was ultimately brought on as the assistant director of pro scouting in 2013.
“Dave is very smart,” Caserio, whom Ziegler reported to from 2013 to 2020, said Wednesday. “He’s got a very wide-ranging background and a lot of diversity in terms of his experience. … His ability to kind of connect with people and see things through a different lens is something that’s unique to Dave.”
Ziegler was promoted to director of pro personnel in 2016 and assistant director of player personnel in 2020. Over the years, he learned the ins and outs of the Patriots’ scouting philosophies from Caserio. And when Caserio left to become the Texans GM in 2021, Ziegler was promoted to fill his role as the director of player personnel. Beyond the fact that he’d been with the franchise for nearly a decade, his willingness to wear a number of hats and the way he excelled in several roles were key to his becoming the Patriots’ most influential front-office staffer under Belichick.
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“I just think the more exposure you have in any line of work, the more knowledge you have, and the more knowledge that you have, the better that you can perform your job,” Ziegler said. “All of those experiences have allowed me, I would say, to feel confident in my ability to run the scouting department. And I’ll still have things to learn, and I’ll learn things from the people that are here in this organization and ideas that they have and processes that they have that maybe are better than some of the ideas that I have myself. … I think it’s been a unique ride for me to get to this point, but I think it all kind of came together to allow me to have some of the success that I’ve had.”
Ziegler had an extensive scouting history, but last year was his first time working hands-on when it came to negotiating contracts and managing the salary cap. He already had a close relationship with Belichick, but their bond strengthened as they worked more directly on a daily basis. He learned how to go about the process of planning for years to come, came to understand how his decisions could influence the big picture and gained a greater appreciation for the details.
“Bill is really dedicated to evaluating every single thing that we do at every point of the year and looking at it critically and then evolving and trying to figure out how we are going to get these things better,” Ziegler said. “I think that’s critical to not staying stagnant and to always making sure you’re moving forward with the best ideas and the best processes.”
With Belichick being the Patriots’ de facto GM, there was always going to be a limit to how high Ziegler could climb within the Patriots organization as long as he was there. The same went for McDaniels, who some speculated could eventually become Belichick’s successor. When the Raiders’ head coach and GM jobs came open and Ziegler and McDaniels emerged as candidates, the prospect of taking the next step of their careers together emerged. It didn’t work out in Denver, but they didn’t hesitate to take it.
“We’ve grown up together in a lot of ways and grown together,” Ziegler said. “It’s invaluable to have had some tough times and bumps in the road. That’s how you learn and get better.”
Dave Ziegler got his first chance this week to experience the NFL Scouting Combine as a GM. (Jimmy Durkin / The Athletic)Ziegler and McDaniels have been friends for over 26 years and coworkers for more than a decade. They’re starting off with a level of familiarity that’s rare for any head coach and GM tandem, let alone one in their first season working together in that capacity. Naturally, they’ll be like-minded on many things and share philosophies for how the organization should be run.
“Any time you start a new program from the ground up, when you have two people that kind of speak the same language, I think it’s going to be beneficial to everybody involved,” Caserio said. “And I’m happy that both of them have the opportunity. They’ve earned it, and they deserve it.”
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That doesn’t mean there won’t be any tension in their relationship. Ziegler has the final say on draft picks, free-agency signings and other roster transactions. There will inevitably be times when they disagree, but they believe that’ll be a positive toward making their tenure a success.
“Dave and I can challenge one another,” McDaniels said. “We can disagree with one another, but that never affects our loyalty to one another and our ability to try to do what’s best. And I think that’s the best part about our relationship is that we don’t always have to see everything eye to eye, but eventually we’re going to get to an agreement on what’s best for the Raiders.
“I couldn’t ask for a better partner.”
(Top photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)
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