Before concluding his 50-year career in the NFL as a buddy and mentor in the youthful Bengals personnel department that helped form one of the most recent Super Bowl teams, Bill Tobin established one of the NFL’s super squads. He was eighty-three.
Father of Bengals director of player personnel Duke Tobin, Tobin joined his son as an area scout prior to the 2003 NFL Draft after 27 years as an executive with the Bears, Colts, and Lions, during which he selected eight members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
In addition to working the Southeast and later the Midwest for the Bengals, Tobin was a proud, old-school, grass-roots scout who watched 16-millimeter film of the first Hall of Famer, Walter Payton, on a locker room wall at Jackson State in the fall of 1974. He also served as a national cross-checker and a consoling sounding board into the decade of Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase.
Mike Brown, the president of the Bengals, described him as “a true NFL success story.” “I thought of him as a good friend since he was a good man. I listened to everything Bill said. I just assumed that to be so. He was able to predict athletes’ future potential. That would be all I would need to know if he had indicated the individual was a good player. He will be missed.
Tobin’s most well-known role was serving as the center of a Chicago draft room that produced six Hall of Famers for the insane 1985 Bears team, which went on to win the Super Bowl and demolish the league with an 18-1 record. Furthermore, he didn’t hesitate to share his insights with the younger employees Duke Tobin has been training over the last ten years.
“I learned a lot from him. Many scouts learned from him along the road. “He’s going to leave a lasting legacy,” Mike Potts, director of college scouting for the Bengals, said. He cross-checked a lot of tapes. When it comes to appraisal, there is no more reliable eye. Not just with the Bengals, but perhaps around the NFL as well. merely in terms of his talent-spotting ability.”
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