For 32 years and counting, Jeff Shiver has brought his invaluable scouting insight to the Bears

In the spring of 1987, Jeff Shiver was making a hamburger on a skillet in his Lafayette, Ind., home when the phone rang. It was Bears personnel boss Bill Tobin, asking Shiver if he were interested in a scouting job.

Shiver drove to Lake Forest, where Tobin made him an offer of $25,000 yearly — a raise of $7,000 from what he had been earning as a Blesto scout. Shiver accepted gladly, and he thought he hit the jackpot.

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After they shook hands, Tobin said, “You are going to be with the Bears a long time.”

Thirty-two years later, Tobin looks prophetic.

If Shiver were a contestant on the show “Survivor,” he’d be a prohibitive favorite to win.

Shiver has been a full-time scout with the Bears longer than any personnel man in their 100-year history. It is believed Shiver has been with the Bears longer than any NFL scout has been continuously employed with one exception — Scott DiStefano has been with the Broncos five year longer.

General manager Ryan Pace is his sixth direct-report boss. He has worked with seven Bears head coaches.

An institution in the halls of Halas, Shiver has had a say in every Bears draft pick from Brad Muster to David Montgomery.

“Jeff worked out even better than I thought,” Tobin said. “He’s a wonderful person and damn good scout. He’s been a giant in the scouting industry.”

Says former Bears general manager Jerry Angelo: “I think the world of him. I don’t know of anybody more respected and or revered in the scouting business than Jeff. I saw it from afar when I was with other teams and I saw it firsthand when I got to Chicago. Whatever he says, you can take it to the bank.”

Shiver is a “consummate professional” in the opinion of former Bears personnel director Rod Graves.

“I would always turn to Jeff when I needed what I call a core evaluation,” he said. “I’d be surprised if Ryan and the others after me didn’t use Jeff the same way. He was totally reliable, a great evaluator and somebody I could trust.”

Shiver, as is his way, credits his longevity to almost everyone in his contacts app. But he’ll start with God, and Laura, the woman by his side for 34 years.

“It’s a hard job,” he said. “To be able to do it begins with a great wife. Not once did I walk in the front door and hear her complain about me not being there.”

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She had a right to complain. Shiver, like many in his profession, typically spends 250 to 275 nights on the road every year. He has more than five million lifetime Marriott points.

He usually gets where he’s going in his Ford Edge. Past cornfields, clothes lines and white picket fences, he drives about 30,000 miles every year. Driving is better than flying because he can make stops at out-of-the-way schools like Western Illinois and Hillsdale College.

On the road, he has received wonderful news — “Honey, I think I’m pregnant.” — and awful news — “Your brother-in-law was in a car accident, and he didn’t make it.”

Among his best travel memories are phone calls with his children Brittany, John, Paige and Nicole when they were young. “Dad, when are you coming home?” they’d ask, warming his heart.

The road can be unforgiving. It puts lines on foreheads, dark bags under eyes and aches in backs. But Shiver lives a clean life. He’s an oatmeal and berries kind of guy. If he’s up late these days, it’s because he can’t stop turning the pages of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

The road, and time, are his allies. All the days and nights he has spent traveling separate him from most of his peers.

The Midwest long has been Shiver’s territory. He knows the Big Ten, the MAC and the Missouri Valley like he knows his clothes drawers.

“Familiarity is one of the strongest attributes a scout can have,” says Tobin, now a personnel executive with the Bengals.

There are times when a college coach will give a misleading answer to a sensitive question about a player, and a less experienced talent evaluator might come back to a draft meeting with that information. Then Shiver will come back with the real story — the one he was given after a subtle eye roll and a hushed conversation in a back hallway when the other scouts were preoccupied.

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“His experience on our staff is invaluable,” Pace said of the 62-year-old. “Think about the relationships he has established and the resources he has available to him. He can pick up the phone and get information a younger scout can’t. And he has a library of players in his head. In a draft meeting, at the drop of a hat, he’ll say this player reminds me of that player for this reason. It’s awesome. Sometimes he’ll go way back, nobody remembers the player.”

Shiver says Montgomery, for instance, reminds him a little of Matt Forte. Some comparisons are off-limits, however. “One thing you never do is compare anybody to Walter Payton,” he said.

If not for Shiver, the Bears might not have drafted Anthony “A-Train” Thomas, the 2001 NFL offensive rookie of the year. Then-personnel boss Mark Hatley initially was inclined to select a player at another position in the second round, but Shiver appealed to him to take Thomas because the drop-off at the position was steep.

Later, after Hatley left the Bears to work for the Packers, he called Shiver to tell him he was right about A-Train.

“I give Mark a lot of credit for taking him,” Shiver said. “He was kind of an ugly runner, an upright, short stepper who ran like a sewing machine, but he was strong, had great vision and he ran hard.”

Shiver often provides levity with phrases such as “ran like a sewing machine.”

“He does a real good job of painting the picture of the player,” Pace said. “He has a million one liners that crack up the room. He has a way of bringing passion and energy and still keeping it fun.”

Among other players Shiver has pushed for over the years were Jim Schwantz (as an undrafted free agent), Rosey Colvin, Mike Brown and Kyle Orton.

“He was a big Kyle Orton fan,” Angelo said. “He talked about his toughness — physically and mentally — his leadership, his passion for the game, and how the guys would rally around him. He pointed out the intangibles that are hard to find out about.”

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Shiver always excelled at evaluating character, according to Angelo. That, in part, was why Shiver gave Drew Brees the highest grade he ever gave a quarterback in 2001.

Shiver is quicker to talk about his misses than his hits though. He keeps a copy of his report about Tom Brady from 2000 on his phone “to keep me humble.” Shiver had a sixth-round grade on Brady, and made the notation: “Bad body award.”

He also remembers thinking Hatley and scout John Paul Young had lost their minds for thinking they could draft a safety from New Mexico with the ninth pick in 2000 and convert him to an inside linebacker. Turned out Brian Urlacher wasn’t such a bad pick.

“I still laugh about it with John Paul and Brian to this day,” he said.

The business Shiver is in isn’t the same one he got into all those years ago.

When he was hired, he was one of only four college scouts with the Bears, and his territory spanned 1,700 miles from Sue Saint Marie, Mich. to Corpus Christi, Texas. Now Shiver is one of 14 college scouts with the team. While their territories are much smaller than they used to be, scouts are required to scrutinize every prospect more intensely. Instead of working in a 28-team league that had 12 draft rounds, he works in a 32-team league with seven draft rounds.

Back then, college coaches were more honest about their players. Now, a lie detector test might be the most valuable scouting tool.

Shiver worked in an era when scouts were able to get to know college coaches because campuses weren’t swarmed with scouting competitors, and coaches didn’t have responsibilities like television shows and social media to draw them away from human interaction.

He recalls that day in 1988 when Michigan coach Bo Schembechler acknowledged him for the first time during a campus visit.

“From a distance, he said, ‘Hey Shivs, what’s going on?’” Shiver said. “That’s when I knew I had made it at Michigan.”

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Shiver would show up on a campus, projector in one hand, two dozen donuts for the staff in another. He’d borrow a canister of film and watch it on a white wall in a quiet office.

Now most everything is on iPads. Some schools won’t let in scouts but for a few days a year.

There were no cell phones in Shiver’s early career. Scouts had to call the office once a week and give an update on their travels. All of their reports were written long-hand.

The most he was allowed to spend on a hotel room was $37. But usually, he got a rate of $20.

Scouts have changed too. They’re more educated than they used to be, and less colorful. In the old days most of them were old coaches, yesterday’s heroes who got some of their best information over brown bottles and nuts in a corner of the local VFW. Now they’re ambitious young climbers who are more comfortable looking into computer screens than eyes.

Pace is a different kind of boss than Shiver ever had.

“The thing that strikes me most about him is there is a lot of interaction and discussion, maybe more than I’ve ever been around,” Shiver said. “It’s ‘Hey, everybody get your piece said.’ Then we come up with a grade and stick with it. I can’t recall a time with Ryan when the Bears grade on a player has changed significantly late in the process. And I’ve seen it in the past.”

Shiver says Pace fosters a culture in which young people can grow. Pace credits Shiver with taking young scouts under his wing and helping them develop. He says Shiver played a big part in the educations of three men who were moved up from scouting assistants to full-time scouts.

Shiver finds the environment invigorating. What hasn’t changed is Shiver keeps learning.

It was former head coach Lovie Smith who used to tell him, “Shivs, we can learn from our players if we just listen.”

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Shivs listens. When he was at the New Orleans Superdome in early 1986 for the scouting combine as a Blesto scout, he watched Cowboys coach Tom Landry taking notes on a loose-leaf notebook. He noticed Landry kept looking at the ground as offensive linemen went through their drills.

Finally, he introduced himself and asked Landry what he was looking at.

“He said he was looking at their ankles,” Shiver says. “Their ankles tell you if they can move or not. Bad ankles can’t move. I’ve kept that in mind when I’m looking at offensive linemen ever since.”

He also took a different lesson from another coaching legend, Don Shula. The conduit was longtime Dolphins scout Mike Cartwright, who was watching film of a running back with Shiver in the late 1980s. The running back fumbled twice in a game.

Cartwright: “I can relax on this one because Shula won’t take him.”

Shiver: “What do you mean? He’s a great back.”

Cartwright: “Shula says, ‘Once a fumbler, always a fumbler.’ It’s the incurable disease in football.”

Many helped Shiver become the scout he is. Mike Ditka taught him a great deal, as did his assistants Jim LaRue and Dick Stanfel. He is grateful for the wisdom imparted from Bears president Ted Phillips and former administration director Bill McGrane.

During his first year as a scout, he was timing a kicker running the 40-yard dash at Illinois State. As the kicker crossed the finish line, he veered and ran into Shiver’s outstretched hand, knocking his stopwatch.

Shiver yelled at him. “Can’t you run a straight line? What’s wrong with you?” A chorus of scouts and coaches joined in, heckling the young man. The dejected kicker was supposed to run again, but he didn’t. He walked off and went home.  Shiver tried to find him to apologize, but couldn’t.

Shiver has thought about it for decades. “I hope,” he says, “that it wasn’t an unsettling moment in his life.”

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The irony is Shiver has spent a career lifting people with his Southern warmth and grace. He hails from Atmore, Ala., a mill town on the coastal plain between Mobile and Pensacola, Fla., but it’s more apt to say he is from the salt of the earth.

Graves speaks for many when he says, “There aren’t many people I put higher on my list than Jeff Shiver as a friend and respected professional. I have nothing but wonderful things to say about him. I can honestly say I love the man.”

Shiver has made his mark in life with a smile, a firm handshake and good old fashioned sincerity. To say he never met someone who didn’t become his friend is only a slight embellishment.

One of the first and most important things Shiver learned as a scout was to value everyone in his path — not just the coaches or people who have something he can benefit from. It’s the everyday folk — the gas attendant, the custodian, the security guard.

“The mission,” he says, “never is greater than the people you come in contact with.”

At places like The Little Dooey in Starkwood, Miss., Dreamland BBQ in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Mich., the food is special enough to make you go out of your way. But it’s the cashiers, waitresses and bus boys that keep drawing Shiver back.

Shiver was raised right by his late parents John and Myrtle. Jeff learned how to work from daddy, who was an auto mechanic at Shiver’s Auto Service for more than 80 years, putting in 12 hours a day, six days a week. In World War II, John was a flight engineer and gunner in the Army Air Corps.

Mom kept the books and tended to Jeff and his two sisters. He still can feel her love when he bakes Myrtle’s Sour Cream Pound Cake.

And on the topic of food preparation, remember that hamburger Shiver was cooking when he got the call to come to Lake Forest? He got caught up on the phone and badly burned it. But he ate it anyway.

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Says Shiver, “By far, the best burger I ever tasted.”

(Top photo of Virginia McCaskey and Jeff Shiver: Courtesy Jeff Shiver)

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