Here’s how you tell something about a person: Watch how they interact with others. Here was Adam Peters, a just-out-of-college, low-level scout with the New England Patriots. And here was Larry Cook, triple Peters’s age, a veteran who had forgotten more football than Peters could hope to know.
Column by Barry Svrluga
Imagine this: Washington’s NFL franchise not only has a competent, creative, on-the-rise executive overseeing a newly assembled, modern football operations department. It also has someone who appreciates the people who helped get him here, who wants to continue to grow, who treats those around him with respect.
Wait. This is Ashburn, right?
“Larry and Nadine Cook,” Peters said, thinking back. “Wonderful people. They took me in like family.”
Josh Harris, the still-new owner, is probably the most important figure in the current Washington Commanders hierarchy, what with a new stadium to secure and a fan base to rebuild — not to mention the checks to sign. Jayden Daniels, the about-to-be-unveiled quarterback, has to be second, because for close to 30 years, this franchise has been lost in darkness without a flashlight or a match as it searches for a solution at the most important position in American sports. Daniels might be it, and if he is, so much else falls into place.
But Peters ranks a close third. Sorry, Dan Quinn. Peters picks the players. Peters hires the head coach. Peters is paramount.
Think about how long it has been since a football-minded executive has had complete control of football-related decisions for this franchise. You’d have to go back to Charley Casserly, who was forced out by new owner Daniel Snyder in the summer of 1999. That’s 25 years ago — a quarter-century in which everyone from Joe Gibbs to Mike Shanahan to Scot McCloughan to Vinny Cerrato was undercut, to varying degrees, by Snyder and his longtime team president/henchman Bruce Allen.
What an era of incompetence. It’s over. Finally.
Peters was Harris’s most significant hire this offseason. He comes most directly from the San Francisco 49ers, where he helped General Manager John Lynch and Coach Kyle Shanahan build a roster that has reached two of the last five Super Bowls and should contend to get to another one this season. He came to San Francisco from the Denver Broncos, where he helped John Elway build a Super Bowl champion by rising through the college scouting department.
And he came to Denver from New England, where Pioli hired him at least in part because of how he treated the pro scouts who arrived at UCLA. There, Peters stopped playing football so he could pursue a career in it. In 2002, he became a graduate assistant for the Bruins. It wasn’t glamorous work. Get the scouts coffee. Make sure they had the right film. Answer any question they had.
“Anything anyone needed, he did immediately,” said Pioli, who would make trips in with other New England execs and scouts. “And he was curious, but not overbearing. That’s a real distinction, right? Showing interest without wearing people out. And it was clear that he absolutely loved football. He loved the game.”
That’s why someone such as Larry Cook mattered. Cook was a California-based scout for the Patriots, so he ended up at UCLA frequently. Peters got him his coffee. But he also listened to what Cook had to say.
“He just treated the OGs with so much respect,” Pioli said. “That matters.”
I relayed that story to Peters. He seemed taken aback.
“That’s nice that Scott said that, and I appreciate it,” Peters said. “But I really do think it was the other way around. Larry didn’t have to do anything for me, and he took time to help. There were scouting trips where I didn’t know what I was doing, and he showed me and helped me so I didn’t make the same mistakes twice. Yeah, he certainly did a lot more for me than I ever did for him.”
There are so many of those characters who help mold a career in football. Peters, 45, tried to pull different things from different people along the way. In San Francisco, he crossed paths with Robert Saleh, whom Kyle Shanahan hired to be his defensive coordinator and who is now the head coach of the New York Jets.
Peters and Saleh are the same age — peers, really. In talking about football — in talking about life — Saleh passed on a tip he learned from Pete Carroll, the longtime coach in Seattle: Come up with a personal philosophy, one that can be whittled down to 18 words or fewer, and use it to center yourself each day.
“You get a lot of feedback from other people — people that you work with, people that you live with, your family, your friends, people you work for,” Peters said. “You have them describe you, which is a little bit uncomfortable. But it’s humbling, and it’s also really, really cool.”
Peters’s 18 words will be shared another day. He’s still new here. But they’re in his office. They’re on his iPad. They’re a reminder, he said: “You find something new every day. You think you’ve figured it out, and you’ve got no idea.”
There’s just no overstating the difference in tenor and tone in Ashburn. While we were chatting at the close of practice last week, an equipment staffer wheeled a cart past us. A crushed soda can fell from it. Peters picked it up.
“Sorry, sorry,” the staffer said.
“No, I got it,” Peters said. “I got it.”
A regular, human act of kindness doesn’t mean Adam Peters can pick football players or lead a front office. His career would indicate he can. Not just because of where he worked and what those franchises have won, but because of the people they employed and the lessons he took from them. It’s a new day in Ashburn. How refreshing.
