DeMeco Ryans is looking for the right thing in potential new players

DeMeco Ryans is a coach you can respect. A coach you can play for. We know that this is a fact because his own players gave him one of the highest grades in the recent yearly evaluation. We know his players adore him. We know he's capable of a great many things. We know he's a tremendous coach who asks only from his players what he knows they're capable of.

He knows his men and he knows how to build a team. He knows this because he's got a type. A type of player that very much sounds like the player we all want our teams filled with. The guys who are "football players" before they're athletes.

The kind of guys you can rely on. And those are the types that Ryans is looking for. The kind of guys you can build a team around. Speaking to the media at the NFL Scouting Combine, Ryans revealed the type of guys he's looking for in the draft, saying (via Sports Illustrated);

"When you have that first-hand look of the guys who you've spent day after day with, you know them. You know their strengths. You know their weaknesses. You know everything about the player. ...For me, it's always person over player and bringing the right person in is of high importance to me."

Knowing that the person comes before the player is not an ideal that every coach has. You can coach up a person, but you can't instill things into a player. We see all the time the super-talented guy who can't stay on the field for a variety of reasons. Those guys can become stars but often times they hold back the teams they're on. Look at Josh Gordon or someone like Terrell Owens. They both hurt the team they were on for various reasons.

Yet, if you find a guy, like a Hines Ward, or a DeMeco Ryans-type, someone who excels at the game by being a reliable player, then you can not only find success, but you can build a winner.