BY SEAN DONOVAN
After a tenure marred by poor draft selections and organizational dysfunction, former Miami Dolphins general manager Jeff Ireland is joining a franchise that has been a recent example of excellence in both of those areas.
Ireland has been added to the front office of the defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, at least for this draft season. The hiring was first reported by Alex Marvez of FoxSports.com and made official by the team on Monday.
In Seattle, the longtime Dolphins top executive will be reunited with Seahawks general manager John Schneider, under whom Ireland served as a scout when Schneider was the Kansas City Chiefs' director of pro personnel in the late 1990s.
Marvez reports that Ireland will assume a draft consultant role with the potential for a long term position with the team. That may strike some as ironic, since Ireland attained a near pariah-like status in Miami in part because of his draft blunders.
One of his biggest mistakes was selecting diminutive option quarterback Pat White in the second round of the 2009 draft, three years before Schneider struck gold with Russell Wilson, a sub-six-foot third round signal caller that lead a high profile read option attack.
Ireland may work himself back into an NFL front office on a permanent basis eventually, but he'll need to distance himself from his time in Miami. It might help, at least subconsciously, that his new workplace is 3,298 miles from his old one.
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