Colbert Followed Recruiting Trail To Personnel Spot With Steelers
By Jerry DiPaola

He loved sports, all sports -- football, basketball, baseball, hockey. But he knew it wasn't going to work out. Not on the field, anyway.

Oh, Ohio Northern University tried to recruit him as an outside linebacker and a punter, mostly as a favor to his brother, a good friend of the head coach. But Kevin Colbert was painfully aware, "I was very average, at best."

But average was not the word Steelers president Dan Rooney thought of when he sat across a table from Colbert last year, looking for the team's next director of football operations. He saw a bright, energetic, perceptive guy who knows football and something else equally as important -- how to get along with people.

Which is just one of the reasons Rooney hired Colbert from among a blue-ribbon group of NFL personnel gurus that included Terry Bradway, who recently was named to replace Bill Parcells as head of football operations of the New York Jets.

Colbert's ability to get to know everything about a prospect and to respect the other guy's opinion has served him well in his 11-year NFL career.

"I think you have to be open-minded in this business and understand there are a bunch of different factors that go into selecting a player," Colbert said. "I am open-minded enough to consider all those factors and not shut anything out.

"I think I can get along with most people, but I think that just comes from being open-minded and being willing to understand that everybody can make some input into your decision."

Colbert's career in coaching, scouting and athletic administration began while he was still a student at Community College of Allegheny County and Robert Morris College in the mid-to-late 1970s. He had played football for former North Catholic High School coach Ron Hughes, and after graduation, he served as an equipment manager, trainer and assistant coach for the North Catholic freshman team.

After he graduated from Robert Morris in 1979, with a bachelor's degree in sports management, Colbert

served as an intern with the Detroit Pistons in season-ticket sales. While in Detroit, he reunited with Hughes, who had become a scout for BLESTO, an NFL scouting combine. Colbert would scan the waiver wires, compiling lists of available free agents.

Colbert found his way back to western Pennsylvania as a graduate assistant basketball and baseball coach at Robert Morris.

"I didn't know anything about basketball," said Colbert, who worked under coach Matt Furjanic. "Basically, I was a recruiter and a, quote, scout. My whole job was recruiting. During games, I was not an X and O coach. I kept the fouls."

But he was an ace recruiter, helping bring guards Chipper Harris and Forest Grant from Valley and Beaver Falls High Schools to the tiny college in Coraopolis. Asked if he was good at recruiting, Colbert -- a man not given to self-promotion -- said, "I think so."

Thanks in large part to Colbert, Robert Morris rode Harris and Grant to NCAA tournament berths in 1982 and 1983. More importantly, Colbert met his wife Janis, a native of Beaver Falls, while recruiting Grant.

"She worked with his sister. I was always spending time with him," Colbert said. "For us, dating would be going to high school basketball games to recruit players."

Colbert, though, wasn't around for Robert Morris' NCAA appearances, accepting a job with Ohio Wesleyan University as running backs coach, baseball coach and recruiting coordinator in 1981.

"I was more into the personnel end of it than I was on the field," he said. "I think I knew more about it."

Because of his relationship with Hughes, who eventually became the Detroit Lions vice president of player personnel, and former North Catholic coaches Jack and Joe Bushofsky, now in the Carolina Panthers personnel department, Colbert was destined to follow them.

"Early in my so-called career, I thought I might have a chance in that profession," he said. "I could tell I was going to be better at that than I was an on-the-field coach."

After leaving Ohio Wesleyan in 1984, Colbert worked with BLESTO and the Miami Dolphins before Hughes named him the Lions pro scouting director.

With the Steelers, Colbert has kept Coach Bill Cowher and his staff busy scouting and evaluating prospective draft choices and available free agents. Colbert realizes the importance of the team ignoring no prospect. After all, it has gone three consecutive seasons without a playoff berth, the first time that's happened since 1987.

Colbert was hired last year when the Steelers were at one of the low points in franchise history, with back-to-back losing seasons and a glut of free agents leaving for richer contracts. The team recovered to finish 9-7 in 2000, but Colbert said his job is only beginning.

"It's exciting now because I'm responsible for trying to build on where we ended up. The responsibility to take the next step comes to me, and I have to direct us through free agency, direct us through the draft.

"`Are we signing the right guys? Who do we keep?' The coaches have an opinion on that because they deal with these guys every day, but I'll also offer my opinion to it, where needed."

Colbert said he doesn't always agree with Cowher.

"I don't think that's a bad thing," Colbert said. "I think that's a healthy thing because there are things he's going to point out about a player and there are things that I'm going to point out about a player. As long as we are both willing to see those things and admit that, `Wait a minute. I see what you're saying. You know what, coach, maybe you need to think about this.'

"As long as there's an exchange of information, I think it's healthy."

Colbert said disagreements about which player to draft are ironed out days in advance.

"If there are any kind of disagreements, we're going to stay there until we come to a common agreement. We'll just sit there and keep talking about it. We'll put in another tape, (read) another report until we come to a conclusion that we agree on."

Jerry DiPaola is a sports writer with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.