After an unconventional scouting career during which he camped in a VW Van between college visits--and a Skype interview for the Atlanta Falcons’ vacant general manager job in 2008 that reflected his underdog status--Thomas Dimitroff surprisingly landed the gig and ascended to the upper echelon of his profession. During his 13-season tenure, which ended with his firing last fall, Dimitroff built the Falcons into a consistent winner and took the franchise to the verge of its first championship before an unfathomable Tom Brady comeback spoiled Atlanta’s Super Bowl LI experience. In Part 2 of a wide-ranging conversation with a journalist he knows well (and that journalist’s counterculture-embracing daughter), Dimitroff describes an epic (and possibly wine-fueled) zip-line mishap that took place a few nights before Super Bowl LIII, tells us who the 49ers and Falcons might draft (respectively) with the third and fourth picks of the 2021 draft and reveals which two personnel executives damaged his property on their way out of his driveway.
A few nights before Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta, Dimitroff hosted Silver and some of his NFL Network colleagues at his Buckhead home, treated them to some exquisitely selected bottles of expensive red wine and took them outside to try out the zip line he installed in his backyard. Drama ensued, all of which is recounted here. Dimitroff then welcomes a special guest who livened up a previous Pass It Down episode (with Packers coach Matt LaFleur) and solitics her thoughts on zip-line safety that trace back to a high-altitude adventure in a Costa Rican rainforest. Dimitroff ponders which quarterback his former offensive coordinator, current 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, will select with the third overall pick and weighs in on what the Falcons should do with the fourth overall selection. He leaves us with two stories about employees who smashed their cars into brick structures on his property--one of whom put the incident in his rear-view mirror and became the Jacksonville Jaguars’ general manager.