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There has not been much said about the general manager search for the Arizona Cardinals, but one thing we do know is that the team must comply with the Rooney Rule in interviewing a minority candidate for the position vacated by Rod Graves when he was fired by the team. We know that in-house candidate Steve Keim is being considered and that he is participating in the head coach hiring process right now, as he was part of the Ray Horton interviews. There is also the name Morocco Brown, who is with the Washington Redskins. The team will interview him and that will fill the Rooney requirement. Perhaps that is all it is (it very well may be).
But I wanted to find out what is known about Brown and reached out to Kevin Ewoldt from Hogs Haven, our Redskins blog on SB Nation. This is what he wrote me.
NFL teams are always very protective of their inner workings, especially when it comes to draft strategies, so I can't paint a perfect picture of Brown. However, some things are obvious, and it is that he deserves a GM job. The Redskins had arguably one of the worst drafts in 2008 (three second round picks...two of which never started and are now out of the league, the other being Fred Davis). That was back-breaking to this organization. In 2009, Orakpo fell into their lap in the first round, but their next 5 picks, none of them are in the league anymore. Shanahan took the head coaching job in 2010 and fired the entire staff except the scouting/personnel department. I had a chance to ask Shanahan at the combine why he saved their jobs after the porous drafts, and he basically said he liked what they did. Reading between the lines and from what I've heard around Redskins Park, Dan Snyder frequently discarded the scouts' advice and went with the high risk high reward players. Let's take Malcolm Kelly, for example. He had known knee issues, yet the Redskins drafted him anyway despite scouts saying to stay clear. Snyder and Cerrato wanted tall, fast WRs for Jim Zorn's WCO and they put their blinders on. Certainly, Morocco Brown and his team laid out all the players they liked, which I'm sure were vastly different then the outcome of picks. Shanahan saw that and kept him on. In short, Brown knows what he is doing, and it would be a loss for the Redskins if he left town, but it is well deserved for him.
This is Morocco introducing himself and explaining what he does.
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