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EAGAN, Minn. — Death rarely crossed Ryan Grigson’s mind. He was a 20-year-old college football player who stood 6-foot-6 and hit dudes for fun. Mortality? Please. It was the last of his worries.
That was until another human speared him in the stomach.
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It happened in 1992 during a game between Purdue and Minnesota. Initially, Grigson, a tight end and offensive tackle for the Boilermakers, believed the collision to be normal. Just another run-of-the-mill football hit. After the game, though, the spot on his abdomen swelled, so he relayed his symptoms to the training staff. Once they saw the bruise, they recommended he get to the local hospital.
Three days later, he awoke in a haze in the intensive care unit with machinery attached to his upper body by strands of wires. The diagnosis: collapsed lungs, a failed kidney, a ruptured pancreas and a bad case of pneumonia.
“I was a hot mess,” Grigson, the former general manager of the Indianapolis Colts and now the Minnesota Vikings’ senior vice president of player personnel, said recently.
For weeks, he lay in bed in the ICU, drifting in and out of consciousness. The hospital machinery whirred. Doctors and nurses came and went in what felt like a fast-forwarded time-lapse. He lost 30 pounds. His condition was so severe that doctors told his mother the injury could be life-threatening.
After nearly a month, Grigson’s health improved. So much so, in fact, that Grigson began to think about returning to the football field. Once, a teammate visited the hospital and asked, “Are you really going to play after this?” Grigson smiled. His mother, on the other hand, never asked. She knew the answer.
Of course he was.
Ryan Grigson was always going to come back to football. And no injury, no public firing and no, not even another visceral health scare was going to stop him. Now, at the age of 51, Grigson has been pulling from his past experiences to help Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah in a way he wishes someone had been there to help him years before.
Wish former #Purdue OT Ryan Grigson a happy 50th birthday before reading today's @PurdueBookstore Headlines.https://t.co/J0FPoF2IuO pic.twitter.com/x7TuNv6hG4
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If we are to attempt to understand Ryan Grigson’s love of football, we have to begin with his father. Jeffrey Grigson grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Hammond, Ind., inside a house that butted up against an oil refinery.
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Jeff played college ball at Northwest Missouri State and was a 6-foot-3, 270-pounder who bench-pressed 500 pounds. Before he could make a name for himself, he left to join the Marines, then returned and took a job as a construction worker.
Ryan learned about Marine strength and toughness through his father’s discipline. He also inherited an affinity for football that only deepened when, at age 9, his father died from brain cancer. For years following his father’s passing, Ryan had recurring dreams. He would walk into an arcade, see his father and approach him, thinking that his death had all been some kind of prank.
“Like someone pulled a fast one on me,” Ryan said.
Then he would awake to reality.
Sports became Grigson’s outlet. He sprouted a gigantic frame that resembled his father’s and, like his dad, earned a college scholarship. The hospitalization during his junior season set him back, but Grigson had been raised not to give up. If anything, he doubled down.
He returned to the football field the following fall at Purdue, where he became a team captain. In 1995, the Bengals drafted him in the sixth round but cut him before Week 1. He signed with the Lions and played one season before he was cut the following summer. He spent a season in the CFL before suffering a back injury that ended his playing career.
Following his retirement, he dabbled in scouting and coached in the Arena Football League. In 1999, four failed interviews later, he landed a job with the St. Louis Rams as a scout. The experience set him on a path toward subsequent personnel opportunities with the Philadelphia Eagles. In 2010, the Eagles tabbed him as their director of player personnel.
Two years later, the Indianapolis Colts hired Grigson to chart their future.
Grigson’s first order of business in the big chair was to introduce himself to the team’s staff. Andrew Berry, then a 25-year-old pro scout (and now the Browns’ general manager), noticed that his new boss, who wore a scruffy goatee and long curly hair, filled out the entire doorway of his office.
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“My first thought was, ‘Man, this guy is humongous,’” Berry said.
Paired with his size, Grigson’s relentless attitude intimidated Berry at first. Grigson demanded excellence and operated based on an Andy Reid mantra: “It’s a bottom-line business. You’re held to a standard, and that standard is winning.” And at the beginning of Grigson’s tenure, the Colts won often.
Grigson inherited a 2-14 team, but things turned around quickly. In 2012, his first year, thanks in no small part to a rookie quarterback by the name of Andrew Luck, the Colts went 11-5. It was, at the time, the third-largest improvement in record year-over-year in NFL history. Sporting News and Pro Football Weekly named him their NFL executive of the year. Grigson credited Luck and a collective synergy between the coaching staff and front office, all of which was inspired by coach Chuck Pagano’s cancer diagnosis.
“Andrew was the biggest catalyst of all that success,” Grigson said. “But there was also a team element. The team was galvanized.”
But the shine of the inaugural season wore off quickly. In 2013, the Colts finished 11-5, but Grigson was lambasted for trading a 2014 first-round pick for running back Trent Richardson.
That September, Colts running back Vick Ballard tore his ACL, and Grigson felt the team needed an immediate replacement. With most of Richardson’s guaranteed money already paid, he took a chance on the second-year back who had tallied 950 rushing yards, 12 total touchdowns and 51 receptions as a rookie.
The deal backfired spectacularly. Richardson would go on to run for just 977 yards in 29 games with the Colts before they waived him in March 2015.
Draft misses like offensive linemen Hugh Thornton and Khaled Holmes only stoked the flames. In 2014, the Colts finished 11-5 again but were destroyed by the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game. Then, in 2015, Luck lacerated a kidney and partially tore his abdominal muscle in a November game against the Denver Broncos.
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“Any time you don’t win a championship with a talent like (Luck), if you don’t put enough around him, don’t have the right scheme, if you don’t find the right coach, your fingerprints are on it,” Grigson said. “It falls on the GM at the end of the day. He was an elite talent.”
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For a while, pundits skewered him for Luck’s porous offensive line. The team’s franchise quarterback and former No. 1 pick was sacked 73 times in his first 30 games as a starter. Grigson attempted to shore up the front with journeymen like Gosder Cherilus and Donald Thomas, both of whom suffered injuries.
Simultaneously, reports surfaced about Grigson’s intensity and his overbearing leadership style. Berry heard these concerns but didn’t think they offered the full story.
“I felt like I always saw Ryan’s true intentions and motives,” Berry said. “I do think he gets unfairly villainized. But he’ll also be the first to admit that there are situations where he could’ve operated differently.”
The Colts posted a 49-31 record over the five seasons Grigson was general manager. (Joe Robbins / Getty Images)It took time for Grigson to realize he was not totally prepared for the general manager role. One night, late in his tenure, his wife, Cynthia, tried to distill his foremost challenge.
“What’s your title?” Cynthia asked.
“General manager,” he responded.
“Manager,” Cynthia said. “You manage people.”
Evaluating players? Filling out a roster? Making impactful trades? He was familiar with these facets of the job.
But managing media obligations? Creating the right kind of culture? Fielding insight from different departments to make collaborative decisions? These were some of the facets that he believes led to his ouster after five seasons and a 49-31 record.
“I didn’t help myself,” he said. “I was deep into my job. I could’ve been more open, more engaging. I was intimidated. Experience is the best teacher. I lacked patience. I could not press pause. I was a bad listener. As a leader of an organization, you cannot be on 10 all the time. Not to mention, your opinion is not the only opinion. I know this now. But at the time, you feel like you just let down your family name.”
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Time allowed him to reflect and grow. To ponder the ways in which he could change.
In 2017, after Grigson had been let go by the Colts, Berry added him to his Browns staff as a senior football consultant. Berry thought Grigson would add a key ingredient to his decision-making cabinet, one that was made up of many analytically inclined staffers. Berry also believed Grigson, with his background, could help fast-track the development of young scouts.
Berry introduced Grigson to the staff as part of the organization’s “scout school.” Essentially, Berry thought Grigson could outline his rise in the profession, explain the interview process for general managers and describe the challenges he had encountered.
“I had no doubt that as people got to know him, they’d like him,” Berry said.
One of the attendees of the symposium was Paul DePodesta of “Moneyball” fame, the Harvard man who at age 31 became the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Browns hired him as their chief strategy officer in 2016. DePodesta listened to Grigson and marveled at the similarities between their experiences in the decision-making seat.
“When I sat in that chair, it was, like, ‘This is different,'” DePodesta said. “It took me a while to get, but when you’re the GM or when you’re the head coach, virtually every conversation you have during the course of the day is that other person’s most important conversation of the day.”
Discussing their shared experiences crystallized some of what went wrong for Grigson and other areas he had not considered as deeply as he should have. How the general manager’s ability to connect with players can help the attitude in the locker room. How the GM’s relationships with the coach and owner — and even the media — can have bigger ramifications.
Two years working as a consultant for Seattle Seahawks general manager John Schneider cemented the importance of what Cynthia had tried to relay several years earlier — that, more than anything else, the general manager role was about managing people. The secret sauce, it seemed, was hiring staffers with different areas of expertise and providing them with a platform to share their ideas in a positive environment.
Grigson, left, and Seahawks general manager John Schneider. (Courtesy of Grigson)In 2020, after Berry brought Grigson back to Cleveland, Grigson relayed his insights to a newly hired vice president of football operations named Kwesi Adofo-Mensah. In Berry’s eyes, the two men could not have been more different. Adofo-Mensah entered football through the financial space and interacted, to use Berry’s words, with a “laid-back Cali vibe.” Grigson, on the other hand, was a football executive who has risen the ranks the traditional route. Thinking they could learn from each other’s areas of expertise, Berry set up a weekly meeting between the two at 4:30 p.m. on Thursdays. Some days, they’d play music together. Other times, Adofo-Mensah would pepper Grigson with football-focused questions.
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“It was the highlight of both of our weeks,” Adofo-Mensah said. “The thing I will always remember is how self-reflective he was. He’s one of the most reflective people I’ve ever met. He kind of downloaded his experience for me.”
Their connection deepened over time. Then, in August 2021, Adofo-Mensah could not get ahold of his mentor, his friend. He learned that Grigson was in the hospital, once again battling for his life.
At first, his COVID-19 case spurred a fever. Vaccinated, Grigson thought it would pass. It didn’t. He was admitted to the hospital, then doctors hauled in breathing machines. At one point, Grigson said, 98 percent of his oxygen arrived by way of the machine. He could sense the nurses’ concern. It scared him. He agonized. He waited for weeks.
“By the grace of God,” he said, “I got a full recovery.”
This time, returning to football was not his foremost priority. He was more focused on spending time with his wife and six children, who could not visit because of the severity of the illness. He expected to do some football consulting when time allowed.
But then, he received a call from Adofo-Mensah, asking if Grigson could help him transform the Vikings’ culture. Grigson weighed the opportunity, thinking about the time commitment and the energy it would take. In the end, though, he felt compelled. To be a sounding board Adofo-Mensah, a person to lean on when the time arose.
One recent Saturday afternoon, Grigson sat on his perch at the TCO Performance Center overlooking the Vikings’ practice fields. Instead of a goatee, Grigson now sports a full-on salt-and-pepper beard.
He was reflecting on his first season with the Vikings. And to understand his perspective on the 13-4 season that ended with a wild-card loss to the Giants, you have to understand Grigson’s role within Adofo-Mensah’s front office.
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Like Berry did in Cleveland, Adofo-Mensah has essentially developed a cabinet of personnel staffers with different backgrounds. Some of them see the game through an analytics lens. Others approach it from a scouting perspective.
“You need people who cover each other’s blind spots,” Adofo-Mensah said. “You need different perspectives. And it’s OK if people don’t agree. As a decision-maker, your job is to find that middle ground.”
So often in player personnel, Adofo-Mensah said, it’s easy to assess what players cannot do.
“Ryan has been trained by some great ones — Andy Reid, Howie Roseman, that Eagles staff — and has been taught how to be optimistic,” Adofo-Mensah said. “That was something I felt like I needed.”
That and a person with experience navigating everything it takes to be the general manager — ownership expectations, media obligations, locker-room dynamics and more.
“He’s a mentor,” Adofo-Mensah said. “He’s a friend. He’s everything to me. I’m just fortunate to have him here.”
Grigson, meanwhile, said he is fortunate to have a boss who has helped him get up to speed on data-driven analysis. In conversation about players, Grigson cites yards after contact metrics and pressure rates.
“Statistics that are paramount at certain positions to being impactful,” Grigson said. “That’s been a process where I feel like I can say it’s part of who I am now and I believe in it.”
Grigson, his wife, Cynthia, and their six children at U.S. Bank Stadium last season. (Courtesy of Grigson)In recent months, Vikings staff meetings have cemented why Grigson still relishes being present as opposed to consulting from afar. As Adofo-Mensah sat in a room with the team’s development staff discussing players, Grigson felt like he was still learning. The strength staff offered insights. Nutritional staffers added their perspectives. Coaches provided feedback. The collection of information formed a clear, collaborative plan for each player.
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Grigson described all of this on his perch overlooking the field, then grew reflective. He said his kids joke with him about how much he has mellowed. About how he is more relaxed, more patient.
Grigson laughs the thoughts off, wanting to remain the strong presence that he was raised by his father to be. But in the quiet moments like this one, his words spilling out slowly and emotionally after all he has experienced, one thing is obvious.
He knows they’re right.
(Top illustration: Samuel Richardson / The Athletic; photos courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings)
The Football 100, the definitive ranking of the NFL’s best 100 players of all time, goes on sale this fall. Pre-order it here.
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