The Arizona Cardinals want to add good players to their roster, no matter the position. However, no matter how good or talented, head coach Jonathan Gannon says there is a “price of admission” when it comes to considering a player in free agency or the draft.
It includes two things: “if they love ball and if they’re team guys first,” he said at the NFL combine on Tuesday.
General manager Monti Ossenfort, also at the combine on Tuesday, said they, as an organization, “we owe it to the locker room to bring in people that have the right mindset and are going to do the things that we ask them to do to our team in the best position to win.”
Ossenfort values “the character and the football makeup of a player as much important as the on-field ability.”
It isn’t an easy thing to measure and Gannon doesn’t pretend to have and “secret sauces” to make it a clear-cut decision, but it comes down to their approach on a day-to-day basis.
“(It’s) your daily habits,” he said. “I call it ‘winning behavior.’ Can you display winning behavior consistently, day after day after day? We have ways to define that. It’s not a perfect science.”
Gannon preached this consistently in his first year as head coach. Everything is about the team and not about the individual.
Ossenfort said the culture they are building “is guys that are willing to put the team first, guys that are going to put winning above any individual interest because ultimately, if we win, individual accolades, individual success is going to follow.”
Talent obviously matters, but we have seen talented players in the past do little to nothing. This is why, no matter the talent, Gannon and Ossenfort look for those two traits as the gateway.
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