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Draft savant, Senior Bowl exec wears many hats

Phil Savage has four bosses these days.

A recent five-day stretch had him driving from his home in Mobile, Ala., to Tuscaloosa, where he watched video of every Alabama spring practice. Then he was off to Bristol, Conn., for an ESPN appearance.

After spending two decades as an NFL executive, Phil Savage has emerged as one of the pre-eminent NFL draft talent evaluators.
Photo by: COURTLAND W. RICHARDS
The next day, he was back to Tuscaloosa for the Crimson Tide’s A-Day spring game, where he called the action as an analyst on Alabama’s radio network, followed by multiple appearances on SiriusXM Radio and a speaking engagement at the University of South Alabama.

And that’s when he’s not consumed by his day job as executive director of the Reese’s Senior Bowl.

In the weeks leading up to the NFL draft, Savage, a former NFL general manager and scout, has been everywhere — across TV and radio, across state lines, across Alabama football, the NFL and the draft.

In a media landscape full of self-proclaimed draft experts and talent evaluators, Savage is emerging as the draft savant, a soft-spoken football intellectual who doesn’t scream at viewers and listeners to make his point.

“Phil has a unique credibility from having been a general manager and running draft rooms in the past,” said Mike Tannenbaum, Miami Dolphins executive vice president of football operations, who helped manage Savage’s career before he joined the Dolphins in January.

It’s almost been by happenstance that Savage, 50, has developed his own brand while talking about everybody else’s.

“A lot of folks do things for the money or their personal brand,” said Drew Iddings, director of promotions and planning for The Hershey Co., whose Reese’s brand is the Senior Bowl’s title sponsor. “Building his brand is not his first objective; building the Senior Bowl brand is. But they have kind of worked hand-in-hand.”

“There’s not a guy more uniquely qualified for that [Senior Bowl] job,” said Vince Thompson, CEO of Atlanta-based agency Melt, which sold Reese’s the Senior Bowl title sponsorship. “There’s nobody like him. He’s the pre-eminent talent analyst in the country.”

Executive director of the Reese’s Senior Bowl, Savage (second from right) also works for ESPN, SiriusXM Radio and the University of Alabama.
Photo by: COURTLAND W. RICHARDS
When Savage decided to leave the Philadelphia Eagles in 2012 to run the Senior Bowl, he didn’t want to leave scouting. So he attacked his new position much the same way as he would as a player personnel director.

“I thought I could approach the [Senior Bowl] game like I was running my own scouting and personnel department,” Savage said. “It’s been a good strategy.”

Savage and two young talent evaluators whom he mentors start the college football season with 350 players on their watch list for the Senior Bowl. Of those, Savage and his assistants will see about 200 in person, either at a game or a practice.

His position on Alabama’s radio team means that Savage will see most of the top talent in the SEC, either live or on video — sometimes both. Because his Saturdays are occupied with the Crimson Tide, Savage makes the most of weekday college games to attend and evaluate prospects. Last season, he saw 25 schools, ranging from Harvard to most of the football blue bloods, play games or practice. He goes in during the week just as if he were an NFL scout and watches video before moving to the sidelines to watch practice.

“The access I’m afforded by the schools is actually even better than when I came in from an NFL team,” Savage said. “They know I’m not digging for dirt like if I were working for a team. Each school has been very positive.”

Those 350 prospects on the initial watch list are pared to the 110 players who are invited to the Senior Bowl in January, when NFL scouts get a week’s worth of inspection on the top prospects.

Savage coordinates all of his travel and appearances himself.

“It’s a juggling act, but I love it,” he said of working for the Senior Bowl, Alabama, ESPN and SiriusXM. “It’s so different than having a single job. You never get bored. And each one of those opportunities, from a media standpoint, is a chance to put Reese’s and the Senior Bowl out there.”

Three years ago, before he took the Senior Bowl job, Savage’s claim to fame was being a scout and coach in the 1990s on the same Cleveland Browns staff as Bill Belichick and Nick Saban. It was the right place at the right time — a unique intersection in history when perhaps today’s best NFL coach and the best coach in college football worked together. Savage had an up-close view.

Savage’s roles include relating to players and coaches as well as speaking to audiences.
Photo by: COURTLAND W. RICHARDS (30
He went on to be a high-ranking player personnel executive with the Ravens’ Super Bowl-winning team in 2001 and then the Browns’ GM.

While running the Senior Bowl has enabled Savage to continue wearing his “scouting” hat, he’s also become an event promoter and manager. The Senior Bowl admittedly had gotten a little stale after 60 years when the game’s chairman, Angus Cooper, reached out to Savage, a Mobile native who grew up

attending the game as a child. Old autograph books from his youth contain signatures from Chuck Noll and Bum Phillips, coaches who attended the game to look at draft prospects in the 1970s.

Savage has reintroduced the game to the Mobile community with flag football leagues, middle school combines and other events to make the Senior Bowl top of mind year-round. He also envisioned the Senior Bowl as the first leg of the NFL’s offseason triple crown, along with the NFL combine in February and the draft in April.

“Phil has single-handedly turned the game around. It’s like taking a horse out of the glue factory and winning the Kentucky Derby with it,” Thompson said of the Senior Bowl’s revival.

Reese’s came on board as title sponsor in 2014 with a four-year deal at nearly $500,000 a year. The game had been without a title sponsor the previous two years.

“From an efficiency standpoint, it’s been one of our best performers,” Iddings said. “It really was an under-leveraged asset and we picked it up at the perfect time.”

The relationship with Savage has been icing, Iddings said. With a closet full of orange Reese’s Senior Bowl gear and orange ties, Savage has become a marketing extension of the brand. He even talked Cooper into changing the jersey colors. For 60-plus years, players had worn red, white and blue in the Senior Bowl. In January’s game, players for the first time wore Reese’s orange.

“When we did the sponsorship, we thought we were doing a sponsorship of the Senior Bowl,” Iddings said. “Unbeknownst to us at the time, what we were really getting was a de facto personal-services agreement with Phil. We don’t pay any extra for it, but he’s so committed to elevating the profile of the Senior Bowl, he’s become a huge ambassador for the game and for us.”

While Savage’s busy schedule keeps him on the road during football season, it’s manageable, he said, and he controls it, unlike his days as a scout for an NFL team. With a 3-year-old at home, that’s what makes him think he’ll be at the Senior Bowl for a while, as opposed to returning to an NFL front office.

But Thompson, who has worked with him closely to create a marketing plan for the game, envisions another path for Savage. “I think he could be Alabama’s next athletic director,” Thompson said, whenever current Alabama AD Bill Battle decides to retire.

For now, Savage seems energized by the prospect of restoring the Senior Bowl that he attended as a youth to a more prominent place on the NFL calendar.

“I feel like this is right in my wheelhouse,” he said.

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