Has Mark Dominik lost much of his power?

Throughout this offseason, it seems Greg schiano has been pulling the strings at One Buc Place. While there's no concrete evidence for that assumption, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. There's the influx of former Rutgers players on the roster and the change in philosophy that included the sudden addition of veteran free agents. Perhaps most telling of all, the Buccaneers added former coach Butch Davis in an undetermined front office role. Butch Davis is a Greg Schiano guy, and his presence in the front office can only take away from Schiano's power.

When the Glazers fired Raheem Morris in January, they didn't fire Dominik - but they didn't offer him a lot of support, either. In fact, they made it clear that he could lose final control over the roster to a head coach. All in all, it's easy to assume that Dominik has lost quite a bit of authority over the past few months. That's exactly what Stephen Holder did in article published in the Tampa Bay Times today.

If that is indeed the way it works in Tampa Bay these days, I would be pretty disappointed. Placing total control of an organization in one person's hands has only rarely worked in the NFL, and it has blown up in a coach's face much more often. A coach and a general manager have different ways of looking at a roster, with GMs being much more concerned with the long-term prospects of the franchise, while coaches often look at just the next year. Coaches also evaluate players differently from general managers.

All of this produces natural conflicts, which is not a bad thing. But if the coach is ultimately the one who gets to decide on everything, the result is a roster built for the short term, and one that collapses after a few years. The Bucs saw the result of short-term roster building throughout most of Jon Gruden's tenure, for instance.

Of course, we don't actually know whether Greg Schiano has final say. There's one other, simple explanation: Mark Dominik listens to Schiano more than he did to Morris. When Morris was coach, he didn't have a lot of input on which players would be acquired and which ones would be retained. If it had been up to Raheem, Barrett Ruud would still be a Buccaneer, for instance. With Schiano, this is certainly different, as many of Schiano's guys have been added to the roster over the past few months.

Is this simply a case of a general manager listening to his coach, or is Dominik being overruled? It's impossible to say at this point.