Dane Brugler is now locked in with The Athletic as the outlet’s lead NFL Draft analyst through the 2028 draft, but a decade ago, he came within a job offer of perhaps never writing about the draft professionally again. In a recent podcast appearance with Ari Meirov, Brugler detailed how a 2015 interview with the Kansas City Chiefs nearly pulled him off the media path, and why the timing of his wife’s pregnancy ended up rerouting his career.
The opportunity traced back to a relationship Brugler had built years earlier with John Dorsey, who gave him his first NFL front office interview with the Green Bay Packers before later becoming general manager of the Chiefs. By 2015, Brugler had already been passed over by several teams and had turned down an offer from the Raiders over bad timing. When Dorsey called him in for an interview in Kansas City — where Chris Ballard was also part of the front office at the time — Brugler treated it as the job he’d actually been chasing.
“I really wanted to work for the Chiefs,” Brugler said of his mindset going in. “This is the fit, this is what I want.”
In 2015, the #Chiefs wanted to hire Dane Brugler to their front office — and joining an NFL team had always been his dream.
But as he explains below, the timing wasn’t right, and he ultimately had to pass. It was one of the toughest decisions of his career.
Here’s his story: https://t.co/eP0KKImc4wpic.twitter.com/eUdAOCmGfJ
— Ari Meirov (@MySportsUpdate) June 30, 2026
He got the job. The Chiefs wanted him in Kansas City by the end of July to start the role, which put the date on a collision course with his wife’s due date with their first child, which fell during that same stretch. Brugler and his wife were living in Texas at the time, with both of their families still in Northeast Ohio, leaving no clean way to relocate a pregnant woman to Kansas City on a six-week notice, or move away from Texas without her doctors, her home, or family nearby.
“I had to make this decision about, OK, my wife’s about to have a baby in a month and a half, and I can’t leave her by herself,” Brugler said.
He called Dorsey and Ballard to turn the job down, but was admittedly “heartbroken.”
Ballard left him a voicemail afterward telling him he’d made the right call, something Brugler chalked up to Ballard being a father himself, with several kids of his own. It’s the moment Brugler now points to as the one that reset his career path. Rather than keep chasing another front office opening after the Chiefs fell through, he leaned into the media side full time, a decision that’s since turned into a decade covering the draft, first at CBS Sports and, since 2020, at The Athletic.
Turning down an NFL front office job to stay in media isn’t unheard of, but it more often runs the other direction. Mike Mayock spent 14 years as NFL Network’s lead draft analyst before leaving to become the Raiders’ general manager in 2018, a run that ended in a firing three years later and no return to full-time television since. As for Brugler’s path, the door to a front office was open, and he chose to stay on the outside of it.
“As much as I want to be in the NFL, the media thing has really taken off,” Brugler said. “It’s really going well. I think I’ve established credibility with people and there’s enough of a following where people trust what I’m doing and the work I’m putting out.”
Brugler still talks with scouts around the league on a daily basis, work he does now from outside any single organization.
“Working with scouts every day, like that are in the league, and those friendships, like that matters to me, because I have so much respect for what they do,” Brugler adds. “So even though I wasn’t doing that in an official capacity with the team, I’m still doing it from an outside perspective.”
He’s under contract with The Athletic through the 2028 NFL Draft.
The post The Athletic’s Dane Brugler reveals why he turned down Chiefs’ front office job appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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