THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: The St. Maries way — Mueller, heading into the North Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame, reflects on four-plus decades of life in the pro football business

Is there something in the water in the St. Joe River?

St. Maries, a logging town of roughly 2,500 people, seems to have produced more than its fair share of folks who made it big there, or went on to make it big regionally or nationally.

Mitch Santos, St. Maries High volleyball coach.

Debbie (Martin) Buchanan, St. Maries volleyball star, scholarship to USC, coached Idaho’s volleyball program for two decades.

Robert “Marz” Marzulli, instrumental in forming many of the youth sports programs in St. Maries.

Eric Russell, longtime college football assistant coach.

Jeff Choate, longtime college football assistant coach, now in his first year as an FBS head coach, at Nevada.

And Randy Mueller, an executive for 35 years in the National Football League.

“Here’s another one,” Randy said. “My cousin, who was in my class, grew up across the alley, Tommy Mueller, co-founder of SpaceX. Same class, same family, same age.”

So, is there really something in the water in St. Maries?

“There’s definitely some parallels with our backgrounds — work ethic, a little bit of humility,” said Randy Mueller, who is scheduled to be inducted into the North Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame this weekend, as part of the 61st North Idaho Sports Banquet on Saturday night at The Coeur d’Alene Resort. “Knowing those other guys pretty well, all a bit humble, no expectations, keep my mouth shut and my head down and make the bosses look good, and something good will happen. And I think all of those guys are like that.”

BEFORE HIS long career in the NFL, Randy Mueller was a standout three-sport athlete at St. Maries High — by his own admission, better at basketball and baseball than he was at football.

Then Jim Wilund came to town and became head football coach at St. Maries in 1977, installed a pass-happy offense and named Mueller his starting quarterback as a sophomore.

“I credit him with getting me on the right track,” Mueller, 62, said last week, in an interview with The Press at a coffee shop in downtown Coeur d’Alene.

Randy’s first job was washing cars for his father, a car salesman.

Back then, the Seattle Seahawks trained at Eastern Washington University in Cheney. At the urging of his mother, Randy applied for a job with the Seahawks while they were in Cheney, and was hired as a ball boy, at age 17. It was 1978, and the Seahawks were preparing for their third NFL season.

“I remember the Seahawks laughing at me the first year I got there,” Randy recalled. “They said, ‘You know why we hired you?’

‘No, why?’

‘It was because you had all your hair permed up and you looked like a fool, and we said we had to hire this guy because he’s such a goofy-looking kid,’” Randy said.

Hey, whatever gets you in the door.

Mueller spent five summers total with the Seahawks, the first three as a ball boy, then promoted to “camp go-fer” for two years, remembering the one day he made 13 trips from Cheney to the Spokane International Airport, fetching players arriving for training camp. Seattle hired him full-time in 1983, after he had led Linfield College of McMinnville, Ore., to an NAIA championship.

“That’s how I got to learn the business, per se, and it also woke me up,” Mueller said. “I was lucky enough to get this gig as a kid, and then I just kept my mouth shut, and learned everything that I could, was lucky enough along the way, every time somebody needed something, they came to me.”

One year, the video guy wrecked his car and broke his hands, “so I became his hands and feet,” recalled Mueller, who recalled driving film every day from the Seahawks practices to KHQ-TV, then on Spokane’s South Hill.

Mueller would stay after practice to help trainers make “Vaseline sandwiches,” which were used to tape ankles. 

One year in Seattle, after he was hired full-time by the Seahawks, the defensive backs coach came down with cancer, so they pulled Mueller out of the scouting department to help coach for a couple months.

Chuck Knox’s first year as Seattle’s head coach was Mueller’s first year as a full-time employee of the Seahawks, who offered him a job in scouting, essentially as a go-fer.

“Knox used to tell me, ‘Don’t tell me how rough the water is, just get in the boat, kid,’” Mueller said. “So I’d just get in the boat, and learn.”

MUELLER STAYED with the Seahawks through the 1999 season — he was a pro personnel assistant from 1983-89, then pro personnel director for five seasons, then vice president of football operations for five more.

As a pro personnel assistant, Mueller would scrounge up sports sections from newspapers in each NFL city, see what the beat writers had to say about the team, make note of injuries, etc. 

“Back in those days, there were no computers,” Mueller recalled.

After leaving Seattle, he was general manager of the New Orleans Saints for two seasons — he was named NFL Executive of the Year in 2000.

Then it was three years with the Miami Dolphins as GM, then 10 with the Chargers as a senior executive for football operations.

He spent the last few years as an executive with spring/summer football teams — with the Salt Lake Stallions, before the Alliance of American Football folded midway during its first season, then a year with the Houston Roughnecks of the XFL and two years with the Seattle Sea Dragons of the XFL.

“I never had a plan, or a goal … I want to be a general manager — never, ever did it cross my mind,” Mueller said. “Even after 10, 12 years in the business. I thought, if I did a good job, and the people above me were happy with it, I could do this for a long time. I just kept my mouth shut and just kept doing stuff, and pretty soon I had a whole bunch of stuff to do that nobody else wanted to do.”

Mueller was GM in Seattle in 1995 when longtime friend Dennis Erickson was hired as coach.

When the Seahawks brass (Paul Allen and Bob Whitsitt) fired Erickson following the 1998 season, “that was a bad day, because Dennis and I were very close,” Mueller said.

Mueller stayed one more season when Mike Holmgren was hired as head coach, vice president of football operations and general manager.

Then the Saints came calling.

“We had a really good thing in New Orleans,” Mueller said. “We won the division our first year, won our first playoff game in the history of the Saints. I had been offered a contract extension two weeks earlier, and I don’t know what changed, because I was on a marketing junket for the team for about 10 days through the Gulf South. And when I came back … ‘Hey, we’re going to change our whole leadership.’

“To me, I didn’t get fired. I don’t know what happened. I was only there two years.”

Mueller worked for ESPN as an NFL analyst for three years.

Then Nick Saban came calling.

They had known of each other when Mueller was in New Orleans and Saban was head coach at LSU. Mueller remembers playing golf at Manito Country Club in Spokane when Saban called and asked him to come to Baton Rouge and meet with him.

A week or so later, both were in Miami — Saban as head coach of the Dolphins, Mueller as the GM.

Saban spent two seasons with the Dolphins before getting back into college football at Alabama, where … well, you know what happened there.

Mueller stayed another season in Miami working with Bill Parcells, hired to replace Saban, before taking a job with the Chargers.

“During my time in Seattle, and in New Orleans, and a little bit in Miami, the GM title meant different than what it means now,” Mueller said. “I was in charge of personnel, I was in charge of the cap, I was in charge of the coach, I was in charge of everything at those stops.

“Now, everything is compartmentalized. You have a cap expert. You have a personnel expert. You have a coach that may or may not have final say. The structure has changed, but the jobs have grown so much that now there’s three guys doing one job.”

When Mueller went to New Orleans, he took his best friend, Mickey Loomis, along. They had worked together for 15 years in Seattle. Loomis replaced Mueller in New Orleans, and is currently the longest-tenured GM in the NFL.

MUELLER’S BEST draft move?

In 1997, with Erickson as coach in Seattle, Mueller traded quarterback Rick Mirer to the Chicago Bears for a first-round pick in the NFL draft. After the trade, the Seahawks had picks 10 and 11 in the first round. Through myriad deals, Seattle ended up with the third and sixth picks.

“And we drafted Shawn Springs at 3 and Walter Jones at 6,” Mueller said. “That’s one that most Seattle people talk about.”

Conversely, one move he would like to have back?

“My second year in New Orleans, after we won the division, we had beaten the Rams in the playoffs. I thought we were better than we probably were at that point. I thought we were a couple guys away from being really good,” Mueller recalled. “So I forced a free-agent signing of a receiver … I liked him; he was a good player. But he was a bad dude. And we brought him into our locker room in Year 2, and it really stirred the pot up, to the point where we had to let him go, and it was bad.

“I regret not knowing the person, the character, the intangibles, like I should have,” Mueller said. “But I was enamored (that) this guy can run fast, he can catch, he’s going to put us over the top. That was one for sure that I would love to do over again.”

MUELLER SPENT 10 years with the Chargers as a national scout, averaging roughly 200 nights on the road, when he figured that was enough of the football life. 

Spending more time at his home in suburban Seattle, with the occasional getaway to his place in Harrison, sounded appealing.

Then Bill Polian, the Pro Football Hall of Fame general manager, called and talked him into becoming GM of the Salt Lake Stallions and working again with Erickson, who was going to be the head coach.

That led into two years in the XFL, the last one in Seattle. When the XFL and the USFL merged, half of the teams were eliminated, one of those the Seattle team.

“There are no West Coast teams, and I have no desire to go anywhere else,” Mueller said.

These days, he works full-time for The Athletic, lending his GM expertise to columns, stories and podcasts. He also has an advising business, Muellerfootball.com, and said he may help a team later this month prepare for the NFL draft.

MUELLER SAID he learned to judge talent by watching hours and hours of tape.

“I don’t really care about the Xs and Os, other than I want to know what they’re being asked to do, but I want to judge talent from a different angle than, say, a coach would,” Mueller said. “But we’re going to fit that talent into what the coach wants to do with it. It’s not about getting the best players, it’s getting the best players for us.”

Last week, Mueller was looking at tape of receivers, for an upcoming piece in The Athletic — the 30 best potential free agents for next year (following the 2024 season).

“Talking about details … you have to be able to get away from somebody in the NFL to be successful,” he said. “You have to be able to put your foot in the ground and separate. Also, when you’re running, and they’re playing man-to-man, can you accelerate and get away from that guy that is running with you?

“The other thing is, you’ve got to be able to catch when you’re covered, because guess what? In the NFL, they cover you. There’s no big open windows most of the time. So you have to be able to identify this stuff, pick out those guys that can do that. And then not only evaluate them, but value them so that we can get them for the right price.”

As for the new kickoff rules …

“Love it’ we had it in the XFL for two years, they’ve restructured the whole kickoff; you won’t even recognize it,” Mueller said. “When you look at it the first time you’ll say, ‘That’s not football,’ but it wasn’t baseball when they had the clock on the pitcher and the catcher was punching the numbers on his knee, but now a year later, we totally forget about it and nobody asks about it.”

He likes the elimination of the hip-drop tackle, especially if it’s punished through fines after the fact, and not flagged so much by the officials.

“I don’t want them to have any more on their plate,” Mueller said.

When the NFL introduced the salary cap in the mid-1990s, Mueller already had a dozen or so years’ experience in the league. Though other GMs by then may have had way more experience, the salary cap helped even the playing field — they had to learn how to use the cap to construct a team, just like Mueller did.

Mueller enjoyed negotiating contracts, and said some of his best friends in the business were agents.

One year when Mueller was working in New Orleans, he happened to be at his home outside Seattle. The old Quarterback Challenge golf tournament was going on at The Coeur d’Alene Resort, and an agent was in town, and invited him to North Idaho.

“He and I met at The Resort and did three deals on a napkin, sitting out watching a band at The Resort in the summertime when I was here on vacation.” Mueller said.

Another time, Mueller was interested in a veteran free agent. 

Finally, the player’s agent said: “Here's what I’ll do. I’ll let you have him, but you’ve got to take three of my other guys at minimum salary, that I can’t get jobs for.”

“What do you think I said?” Mueller said. “‘We’ll take em.’

“And it ended up that one of those guys made our team as well. You just have to be flexible in those negotiations. My age, my lack of having done it a certain way forever, I was more pliable to listen to new ideas, to think outside the box.”

ONE OF the hardest parts of being a GM, Mueller said, was having to cut ties with veteran player.

Sometimes, a team will cut a young player with the intent of signing them to their practice squad — only to see another team swoop in and claim the player.

In their second season, the Seahawks drafted offensive tackle Steve August with the 14th overall pick in 1977. He played for Seattle until midway through the 1984 season, when the Seahawks traded him to his hometown Pittsburgh Steelers.

At the time, he was building a home overlooking Bear Creek Country Club in Woodinville, Wash., just outside Kirkland. This was back before cell phones, and Knox and McCormick couldn’t get ahold of August to give him the news.

“So they said ‘Randy, can you go out to Steve’s house and tell him to get his playbook and come see us at the office?’” Mueller recalled. “I’m probably 23, 24 years old. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Mueller eventually found August’s house; the lineman was outside, hosing off his deck.

“I’ll bet he hadn’t been moved in two days,” Mueller said. “I remember having to go out and say ‘Steve, Chuck and Mike want you to bring your book and they want to see you in the office.’ 

“And he said, ‘Come on.’ 

“I said, ‘I’m just the messenger, I feel terrible.’

“But I’ll always remember that, and I always had empathy for players on the way out because of that,” Mueller said. “This guy was overlooking a beautiful golf course, he’d just built this home that he’d spent his lifetime earning … a former first-round pick was finally in a great spot, and we were trading him to Pittsburgh.”

The story did have a happy ending, Mueller said, as August came back and lived in that dream home after he retired a year later.

Nevertheless …

“That empathy that I saw that day in his eyes, for 35 years it never left my mind,” Mueller said. “Every time we’d release somebody, it’s like you’ve got to feel for them.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @CdAPressSports.

    BILL HABER/Associated Press New Orleans Saints general manager Randy Mueller answers a question as newly hired coach Jim Haslett, right, looks on at a news conference in New Orleans on Feb. 3, 2000. Haslett had just been named head coach, replacing fired coach Mike Ditka.

    Randy Mueller