Scouts life: How Daniel Jeremiah went from the 20/20 club to NFL Network
CULVER CITY, Calif. — The doubt most often crept into Daniel Jeremiah’s head late at night when he was still at the Baltimore Ravens’ practice facility fulfilling his responsibilities as a 26-year-old personnel assistant.
He loved the work, enjoyed the people and knew how fortunate he was just to get a foot in the door. But he had a wife and a young daughter who lived two minutes from the facility, and they barely saw him.
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“I almost was close to quitting,” says Jeremiah, now 41. “It was too hard on our marriage and on our family just to not be home. I just remember thinking, ‘This is not sustainable. I cannot do this long term.’
“I have some legitimate regrets about that because I wasn’t home. I remember thinking, ‘If that’s what it takes to be at the top of the mountain in that profession, that’s not for me. That’s for somebody else.’”
Jeremiah was part of the Ravens’ 20/20 club. The twenties represented the typical age (20-something) and general salary range ($20,000s) of staffers. On some days, 20 also came close to representing the number of hours in the office. Jeremiah remembers getting to the facility at 6:30 a.m. on Mondays and staying until 1 or 2 the next morning. Tuesdays weren’t so bad. He’d be out of there by 11 p.m. or midnight. And by the end of the week, he could ease up with a 12- or 13-hour day.
The program was designed for young people who were hungry to break into the league. The personnel assistants were often single and just out of college. The job was their life and their only responsibility. But Jeremiah was different. He was married, had a young daughter, and his wife, Merae, was pregnant with their second child.
The payoff for the long hours was an opportunity to learn the ropes and break into scouting for a successful franchise. General manager Ozzie Newsome welcomed input from everyone, regardless of title. It didn’t matter that Jeremiah’s role put him at the bottom of the organizational totem pole. On Mondays after games, the entire personnel staff would watch the film together. Jeremiah was assigned a position to watch and asked to explain his evaluations.
“That was my scouting education was for two years sitting in those meetings and watching tape with those guys, listening to what they saw,” he says.
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Jeremiah reflects on those days while sitting on a blue couch in the green room last month at the NFL Network studios. He had recently returned home to Murrieta, Calif., after attending six pro days across the country — mostly to watch this year’s top quarterback prospects throw live. It was a trip that Mike Mayock would have made for the network in past years, but with Mayock now the general manager in Oakland, the network bumped Jeremiah to lead draft analyst.
His home is 88 miles away from the studios, but the traffic is terrible so he left for work at 4:15 this morning. Jeremiah’s family life is a lot different than it was back in Baltimore. He and his wife now have four kids. The oldest, Lauren, is 17. He still spends his time watching film and evaluating players. But on most days, Jeremiah works from his home office and can build his schedule around track meets and football practices and volleyball games.
Jeremiah has been with NFL Network since 2012, but his role is different now with Mayock gone. At the combine, Jeremiah used to be on a side set, offering notes and thoughts on about 75 players during the broadcast. This year, he hit on pretty much all of them. During draft coverage in past years, he’d usually be the second or third analyst to offer an opinion. Now, he’ll be the first.
Executives at the network point to Thursday as Jeremiah’s “Oscars night.” Sure, everything he does matters, but the first round is when Jeremiah will have the most eyes on him during the league’s signature offseason event. His journey to this role started back in 1998 with a surprise lunch guest and has included 16-hour drives, a series of twists and turns and a whole lot of different-colored pens.
Daniel Jeremiah on the “Path to the Draft” show on NFL Network. (Alix Kane / NFL)ESPN’s Chris Mortensen credits his wife, Micki, for introducing him to the words of Dr. David Jeremiah. David is the senior pastor at Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, Calif., which is near San Diego. When Mortensen was living in Fairburn, Ga., he had a radio intercom system in his house. Micki would put on Christian radio, and different pastors would preach from 8 a.m. to noon. At first, Mortensen would simply tolerate the background noise as he tried to get work done. But something about David’s voice and demeanor resonated with him.
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When Mortensen flew out to San Diego to cover Super Bowl XXXII in January 1998, he decided he’d stop at David’s church for the Sunday service the week before the big game. He arrived early and sat in the front row. Somebody recognized him from his work on TV and introduced him to David, who invited Mortensen to his house for lunch. His son, Daniel, who began his college career playing quarterback at Northeast Louisiana before transferring to Appalachian State, was home for winter break. When he walked through the door, he was surprised to see Chris Mortensen at the kitchen table. But they hit it off, and Mortensen explained that he was going to be interviewing Reggie White the next day if Daniel wanted to tag along. And so began his foray into the broadcasting industry.
Jeremiah later helped Mortensen at the 1998 draft. Reporters didn’t have cell phones at the time. So during the broadcast, Jeremiah was in charge of answering Mortensen’s landline and taking messages from general managers and agents. They remained in touch after the draft, and the summer after Jeremiah graduated, ESPN offered him a job as a spotter in the booth for Sunday Night Football broadcasts. He’d point out to the camera crew which players were involved in each play so they knew who to zero in on.
In 2002, Daniel worked the first game in Houston Texans history against the Dallas Cowboys. He noticed that Texans quarterback David Carr was wearing what looked like a rubber wedding band on his finger. He’d never seen that before and mentioned it in the booth. The broadcast team of Mike Patrick, Paul Maguire and Joe Theismann ran with it. Later, Stuart Scott mentioned the ring while presenting highlights of the game. The only problem? Jeremiah was only guessing. For all he knew, Carr might have just been taping up a bruised finger.
“I just remember thinking like ‘I’m gonna get fired. I don’t even know if this is true,’” Jeremiah says. “I remember being nervous watching that (laughs).”
But his instincts were spot on. It was a wedding band.
In his second year with ESPN, Jeremiah ran into his brother’s college roommate, TJ McCreight, who was working as a player personnel assistant with the Ravens. McCreight mentioned that the team might have an opening, and Jeremiah decided he was interested. So he volunteered to do a series of odd jobs for the Ravens at the 2003 combine as a sort of informal interview.
“I had to get up at 5 a.m. every day and save seats at the weigh-ins,” says Jeremiah. “I could never get there before the Dolphins. The Dolphins, they might not have won a Super Bowl in the last 20 years, but they have won the seat-saving championship on a yearly basis.”
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During the prospect interviews at night, Jeremiah helped escort draft hopefuls to meetings with the Ravens. And he had to make sure the room was filled with everybody’s favorite drinks and snacks. None of the personnel people with the Ravens seemed to care about Jeremiah’s football knowledge or scouting potential at the time.
“That was kind of a good education for me about how you get jobs,” he says. “It’s not how much you know or necessarily even who you know, it’s showing them that you’re gonna work hard and you can get along with people. If you prove those two things, they can teach you the rest.”
He ended up formally interviewing that spring. The Ravens had him go to practice, watch the tight ends and write a report. He also had to watch tape on a college prospect and write another report. Jeremiah didn’t totally know what he was doing, but McCreight told him that the Ravens were known for speed, toughness and instincts. So he sprinkled those buzz words into his reports, and it worked. He got the job.
Current Eagles vice president of player personnel Joe Douglas had the personnel assistant job before Jeremiah, but he got promoted to an area scout position.
“I was so excited to not have to do this job anymore,” says Douglas. “I was so excited that someone else was coming in to do this position.”
Douglas created a lengthy, detailed spreadsheet for Jeremiah and the other new personnel assistant, Jeremiah Washburn, so they knew what was expected of them on each day at various points throughout the year.
“Honestly, almost August to June, in that position you’re in the office early and you’re fortunate if you’re leaving before 9 or 10 p.m.,” says Douglas. “Rite of passage is the right way to describe it. But at the same time, you’re learning so much.”
Jeremiah loved the work and was a natural. But it was hard on his family life, and he knew something had to give.
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“Those two years in the office were probably the toughest two years for our family, just because my wife, we lived two minutes away from the facility, and I never saw her,” says Jeremiah. “So that was a hard, hard, hard time. Especially with two little kids. She’s away from her family. And I’m not really around. So that was a hard, stressful period.”
Washburn, now one of Jeremiah’s closest friends, was in the same boat as Jeremiah as a husband and father.
“We were there all the time,” says Washburn, who now works as an advanced projects coordinator for the Eagles. “He and I saw each other more than our spouses for a two-year period.
“If I told you (the hours), you wouldn’t believe it. It was shocking. We just wanted to be in the league very badly. I think we both believed in what we were doing. It was a rite of passage, especially in that building. Going back to Cleveland, there have been so many guys going through that role, heck, going back to Jim Schwartz with (Bill) Belichick back in Cleveland. Those hours were really long, and they just didn’t stop, but it was a good group of guys.
“You hit your breaking point every so often of, ‘Is this really what I’m supposed to be doing?’ People will say anything past 11 o’clock at night in the office. And that was most of the time when those (conversations) happened.”
What Jeremiah needed was some kind of reassurance that there was an end in sight. Halfway through his second year, Newsome gave him that. He told Jeremiah that he’d be able to move back to California as a West Coast scout. That was all Jeremiah needed to hear.
When Jeremiah first started in Baltimore, a veteran scout told him it was better to be wrong and strong than to be weak and right. The bottom line: Everybody was going to miss with some evaluations. But nobody would remember that you liked a guy if you were whispering in the corner. Jeremiah took that advice and ran with it. He did his homework, listened and formed strong opinions with evidence to back them up. In 2006, now working as a West Coast area scout, Jeremiah pounded the table for an Oregon defensive tackle named Haloti Ngata. Mortensen remembers calling Jeremiah before the draft that year.
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“I said, ‘I’m hearing from a lot of people that (Ngata) takes a lot of plays off,’” recalls Mortensen. “And he said, ‘You can take an eraser to that. This guy’s gonna be a stud. That taking plays off is baloney.’ And knowing Daniel, I think he really probably said ‘baloney.’ So I just saw the guy evolve into what I would consider one of the best scouts in the league.”
The Ravens didn’t draft safety Eric Weddle in 2007, but Douglas remembers Jeremiah nailing his evaluation of the now-six-time Pro Bowler. What stood out to those who worked with Jeremiah was his ability to communicate his opinions in an effective, concise manner — something that has served him well during his television career.
“Daniel was super polished, and it would almost tick me off every so often,” says Washburn. “He just was so good on his feet. He could articulate things a little faster. He was great at formulating an argument, never being combative or personal or anything like that, but he was as good as I’ve seen with that. He had conviction, a great eye for talent and just a really good mannerism in terms of dealing with others.”
He had a sense of humor, too. According to Douglas, Jeremiah would sometimes slip movie references into his reports. Despite the long hours, they loved the work and had fun being around each other. They would crack jokes, play basketball in between meetings and prank each other during training camp. Douglas recalls one time when Jeremiah asked to borrow his car to run an errand. When he got the keys back, he noticed that Jeremiah had left him some surprises.
“You turn the car on, all the alarms would go off, the radio’s blasting, your seat, everything, he’d change everything possible in your car,” says Douglas with a laugh. “Rearranged everything, front and back,”
So he went into Jeremiah’s room to exact revenge.
“I went in and took the mattress, the frame, everything out of his room,” says Douglas. “Except for his personal stuff. The mattress, the box frame and the bed frame, took it all out. … He’s like, ‘C’mon, this was you.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. The hotel staff, they must have been pissed off at something you did.’”
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During the drafts, Jeremiah was in charge of being on the headset and calling in the picks. In 2004, Jeremiah called in wide receiver Clarence Moore from Northern Arizona. Another Ravens staffer, Chad Alexander, was on site at the draft and was responsible for writing down the player’s name and turning in the card. The team called Moore from the practice facility to let him know he was their pick, and he was on the phone with owner Steve Bisciotti. But Newsome got a late trade offer that he wanted to accept, thinking the Ravens could get Moore in the next round.
“They’re like, ‘Hang up the phone!’ to the owner,” says Jeremiah. “So Bisciotti’s like, ‘We’ll have to call you back.’ And I’m like, ‘Chad, don’t turn in the card! Don’t turn in the card!’ So we ended up making the trade, and he ended up still being there when we came back. We got him later. But there were a lot of stressful moments like that.”
When director of player personnel Phil Savage left Baltimore to become the general manager of the Cleveland Browns in 2005, he wanted to take Jeremiah with him. But Newsome didn’t want to lose Jeremiah and wouldn’t let him out of his contract, so he had to wait until 2007 to become Cleveland’s national scout. The Browns went 10-6 in Jeremiah’s first year in Cleveland but fell to 4-12 in 2008, and Jeremiah and others were fired. He interviewed for jobs with the Arizona Cardinals and New England Patriots, but Jeremiah’s contract with the Browns had offset language in it so he essentially would have been working for free.
Instead, he decided to take a year off, hang out with his family and look into media opportunities. Mortensen had told him to sign up for Twitter so he did. Jeremiah remembers being on an Alaskan cruise with his family and stopping by the internet cafe to check his email. He had 1,100 new messages.
“I go, ‘What the heck?’ It was because I got a new email every time I got a new follower,” he remembers. “I could not figure this out. So I kept scrolling down, finally saw an email from Mort. ‘Hey, I just encouraged people to follow you on Twitter … you might want to tweet something.’ Because I hadn’t even tweeted anything.”
Jeremiah started rattling off opinions online, and Mortensen would retweet them so his following would grow. He began getting radio interview requests, launched a podcast and started his own blog.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Jeremiah says. “Just started writing some crap on there.”
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But his voiced gained credibility. ESPN eventually asked him do a talk-back on First Take from a studio in Orange County.
“The very first time I did it, I was on a remote and my eyes just darted all over the place,” Jeremiah recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘They’re not gonna use this on air.’ I was totally scared. And then they put it on air. I was like, ‘They had to use that?’ And then I saw myself with my eyes darting all over the screen. I was like, ‘I look like a psychopath.’”
Jeremiah went to his dad’s ministry and practiced in front of the camera. He got invited to Connecticut for a week to tape ESPN segments with Skip Bayless, Bob Ley, Jalen Rose and others. Douglas remembers catching a draft segment with Jeremiah on TV during that period.
“The first time I saw him, he was doing like ESPN Ocho draft coverage with Herm Edwards,” says Douglas. “He had just left Cleveland. And that draft, he’s sitting alongside Herm Edwards. And I’m watching him like, ‘Holy crap, Daniel’s a complete natural at this. He looks like he’s been doing this for years. He’s not nervous, he’s keeping things light, there’s no umms and ahhs. There’s no fillers.’ I’m like, ‘Man this guy looks like a professional and he just left the Browns.’”
Adds Mortensen, “The feedback I was getting was pretty substantial to the point that we were prepared to offer him a nice deal to join us at ESPN.”
But ESPN had a hiring freeze at the time, so the offer Jeremiah was expecting never came.
“I don’t know who was more disappointed,” says Mortensen. “I’m sure Daniel was more disappointed, but I was really disappointed. There were other people at ESPN disappointed because they thought we were adding a talent that was in my thought going to be a star.”
The money from the Browns was running out, Jeremiah didn’t have a media opportunity worth pursuing, and so he decided to try to get back into the league. This time, he found a home with the Philadelphia Eagles as a West Coast area scout from 2010 to 2012.
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Jeremiah estimates he was on the road between 150 and 175 nights per year. When he first started scouting, he had to use Mapquest to print out directions. During his stint with the Eagles, he at least had the help of a GPS. He vowed not to miss kids’ birthdays and other important events at home. That sometimes meant bypassing bad flight times in favor of 14- or 16-hour drives back to Murrieta from places like Boise. Or 10-to-12 hour trips from Salt Lake City.
During that time, Andy Fenelon, a senior editor at NFL.com, reached out to Jeremiah about potentially joining the site as a writer. Fenelon had been a fan of Jeremiah’s Twitter account and thought he could offer an attractive blend of expertise and wit. After the 2012 draft, Jeremiah told Eagles general manager Howie Roseman he wanted to leave the organization.
“He was great. He’s like, ‘Yeah, take your time. We want you here. What can we do for you?’” says Jeremiah. “At the end of the day, it really wasn’t a tough decision, just from the family side of things. I’m like, ‘I’m gonna be home more.’ And it was just a new, exciting path to go on.”
During his recent pro day trip, Jeremiah was on a flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Columbia, Mo. There were about 10 of his old scouting friends on board with him. They all waited about 90 minutes on the runway before taking off. When they landed, the A/C wasn’t working, and it took forever to deplane.
“I walked by one of my buddies and I go, ‘If I needed a reminder of why I got out of this profession, this is a very gentle way of reminding me of why I left this life behind,'” says Jeremiah. “They were all cracking up laughing.”
Of course, there are parts of the scouting jobs that broadcasting can’t match.
“I miss the scoreboard more than anything else,” says Jeremiah. “There’s nothing like, even if you’re at home watching your team, that you’ve had the smallest imprint, having a legitimate interest in who wins or loses the game. That was the fun part. I do miss that.”
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Jeremiah still talks like a scout. He casually calls one prospect “a little fleshy” and later, while hosting a panel of college coaches, asks them for their “gotta have its” when it comes to quarterbacks. Currently, in the draft process, Jeremiah says he is “chasing ghosts.” That means looking at small-school prospects who have worked out well in recent weeks but didn’t participate in the combine. And when explaining why he likes to go to bowl games in December and January, he says, “body typing.” He wants to see what the prospects look like up close.
It’s clear that Jeremiah loves talking about players. He remembers being a big fan of seven-time Pro Bowl guard Logan Mankins back in 2005. He prefers offensive linemen who are smart, tough and instinctive, and thinks teams make mistakes when they focus too much on athleticism — especially with guards and centers. He admits that evaluating defensive backs can be tricky but loves debating quarterbacks.
When he was working for teams, Jeremiah had to watch at least three games of every player he was scouting before writing a report. He now starts off with one game, and if the prospect doesn’t look like a guy who will go in the first four or five rounds, he moves on. Jeremiah wants to have his own evaluations of players in the first four or five rounds, and he wants to be able to at least talk knowledgeably about the guys in the sixth and seventh rounds. It’s impossible to do in-depth reports on 400 players, although that’s how many he’ll end up watching at least once.
At one point, when describing his process, Jeremiah’s face lights up, and he leaves the room to grab a black backpack. When he returns, he pulls out a pack of colorful pens and sets them up on the coffee table.
“This is the most important purchase any scout can make right here,” he says excitedly. “It’s like you’re a 9-year-old elementary school student. So for each game, you just grab a different color and label it. So all your notes don’t run together.”
Jeremiah has gone through a lot of pens over the years. He handwrites all of his initial notes before eventually summarizing them into a spreadsheet.
NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah (left) and Rich Eisen in the booth during the 2019 combine. (Hiro Ueno / NFL)In addition to becoming the NFL Network’s lead draft analyst, Jeremiah is taking on other roles such as hosting. On the day we visit, he’s the point man for a panel with college coaches Mike Gundy, Dana Holgorsen, Steve Addazio and Mario Cristobal. Jeremiah operates like a seasoned vet, instructing them to look at him and not the camera, and encouraging them to tee each other up for questions to make the segment more conversational.
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He’s also self-deprecating and points out multiple times during our interview that he still has no idea what he’s doing. During the panel, Gundy sits to Jeremiah’s left with his trademark mullet and an orange Oklahoma State pullover tucked into a baggy pair of khakis. At one point, when Jeremiah is introducing everyone, he blacks out for a second and can’t remember Gundy’s first name.
“Coach Gundy, looking as good as ever,” he says, improvising on the fly.
Mortensen remembers thinking that Jeremiah was polished when he first tried out at ESPN back in 2009.
“He understood time, something I have yet to learn. And I’m going to be 68 years old this year,” Mortensen says.
“I actually thought he was a little bit underutilized (at NFL Network). But I saw him work in the studio, and I said, ‘He’s doing stuff you can’t even teach people. He’s so natural at it.’ He would actually host segments and co-host segments. He’s tossing to breaks. I can’t toss to a break to save my life. I finally had to have (Adam) Schefter do it. … When they lost Mike (Mayock), they lost a valuable guy. I do not believe there’s any slippage. That’s how good Daniel is. That’s not a knock on Mike. It just tells you how strongly I believe about Daniel.”
The bond between Mortensen’s family and Jeremiah’s family remains tight. Mortensen has trouble talking about David without getting too emotional. When he found out in 2016 that he had throat cancer, Mortensen leaned on David for spiritual support.
“I can’t tell you how many times he’s prayed over the phone with me. It’s a countless number of times,” says Mortensen.
“When I was diagnosed with cancer, he couldn’t do enough in terms of spiritual support and friendship support. From my perspective, when I’ve got people like that praying for me, not just him, there were others, but he was a special one. If I die before David, that’s who I want up there giving my eulogy. … That’s probably as well as you can speak about somebody when you want them to say a few words when I’m up there, when really I’m at a better place than they are. I hope that’s not too fuzzy for you, but that’s really what it is.”
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The executives at NFL Network understand that there’s always a chance Jeremiah will get plucked by a team and return to the personnel side. In fact, teams have already called. But Jeremiah remembers the first two years in Baltimore and the long road trips away from his family when he was a scout. He may very well scratch that itch at some point, as Mayock did, but he can afford to be picky.
“He had an opportunity to be a head of a personnel department at two different NFL franchises,” says Mortensen. “With one of them, they probably would’ve promoted him to general manager within a year. And he thought about it, but he decided to just stay put and trust God as we like to say.”
Last year, for the first time, Jeremiah did color commentary for Los Angeles Chargers radio broadcasts. He was able to watch his son’s football games on Friday nights, travel with the team on Saturdays and be back by Sunday nights.
“I had a couple opportunities a while ago to get back into it, but the timing was not right,” says Jeremiah. “So it’s not something where I’d ever close the door on that. But for right now, where I am in my life, this is where I’m supposed to be. I’m not looking to move. So I’m not gonna leave happy trying to find happier. I’m plenty happy where I am.”
Top photo: Daniel Jeremiah, left, and Mike Mayock on the NFL Network set during the 2017 draft in Philadelphia. (Ben Liebenberg / NFL)
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