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n f l b o i l e r s toughness personified Grigson brings Purdue experience to the NFL BY KYLE CHARTERS KCharters@GoldandBlack.com I nside Mollenkopf about 20 years ago, Ryan Grigson took a break from a walk-thru to glance at the sidelines of Purdue's indoor facility and saw scouts looking back. They might have been there to see him — the offensive lineman was a late-round NFL pick in 1995 — but they were likely taking a closer evaluation of Mike Alstott and others. But the draft, or his future as a player, wasn't what was on Grigson's mind that afternoon. Instead, he was daydreaming about a future in a front office. "(I'm) thinking 'That seems like that be a pretty interesting job.' You get to watch football and get paid for it and don't get beat up, don't get put in the hospital, don't have casts on.' Those types of things," said Grigson, the second-year general manager of the Indianapolis Colts. "It was kind of in the back of my head. But I had always been really a draftnik, kind of a football freak, so to speak. Anybody who knows me knows that in my apartments at Purdue, I always had all the media guides from the football office that I could scrounge up. I loved just reading what my friends said is useless information. "I think I've proven that wrong, so to speak, because I have kind of a catalog in my mind of so many players that I've played against or other guys that I've seen on film, even back then as a college football player watching tape." Those hours spent scouring over materials — imagine if he had the Internet to click through back then — were the start of what's been a largely successful career as an NFL scout, then a GM. Hired by Indianapolis prior to the 2012 season, Grigson, who had been the director of player personnel in his final two years with the Philadelphia Eagles, was charged with helping the Colts recover from a two-win campaign into a playoff contender once again. And do so while seeing the end of the Peyton Manning Era. He couldn't have been much more successful in Year 1, drafting Andrew Luck with the No. 1 overall pick, landing other key elements in the rest of the '12 draft and making enough free agent pickups to fill out the roster. The Colts were 11-5 in 2012, with Grigson being named the NFL's Executive-of-the-Year. "Unbelievable," Alstott said in April, when he was in West Lafayette for Purdue's spring game. "… You talk about putting your Tom Campbell Ryan Grigson, a Boilermaker from 1991-94, was the NFL Executive-of-the-Year in 2012, his first season as the GM of the Colts. 80 • Gold and Black IllustrateD • volume 23, issue 6 GBIprint.com GoldandBlack.com