Theo Epstein Quotes

You win pennants in the off season when you build your teams with trades and free agents.

If you want to win in this league, you need quality depth management, in the age of the salary cap.

You don't want to make a living or habit out of trying to solve your problems with high-price pitching free agents because over the long run, there's so much risk involved that you really can hamstring your organization.

Good decisions can have bad short-term outcomes but be great for the business long-term.

My job, when it comes to free agency, trades, is not to pick players, but support the personnel department and the coaching staff. We have to have the financial resources to make things happen and that's my job.

So I'm going to tell you, it's going to be a good year. There are good players all over this country, and it is our job as a scouting department to find them, draft them, sign them, develop them, and help us to continue to win championships. So it's going to be a good year.

Now, would we like to have that super quarterback? Absolutely. And if we have the opportunity to get that person or develop that person, that's what we'll do.

I've always thought that having an attractive free agent is better than a guy who was picked in the seventh round.

We decided to go the way of trading and getting younger players.

Trade a player a year too early rather than a year too late.

Smart drafting is a wonderful thing. A smart free-agent signing is a wonderful thing. Smart trades are a wonderful thing, and that's a function of management.

General managers - I like to talk about the 'golden gut': general managers that not only can have a sense for the players that are going to perform beyond what people expect and get team chemistry right, but they also have to be able to make trades.

Every team in the league is always looking to upgrade its talent.

Any time you get a chance to acquire a really good football player, I'm all about that.

Getting a star player in the NBA is not impossibly hard, but close. It requires either an incredible amount of luck, or an amazing amount of time, or some other way to try and get at it.

The Bears need to let me be GM.

You have expectations always when you buy players. Mostly, you have positive expectations.

Whether it's drafting or player development, the ultimate is putting a team together.

When you've got money to spend, it's very easy to buy someone worth £50m rather than say, 'I'm going to play this 20-year-old English player.' It's easier to buy someone when you have the money to do it. But at the same time, if you give somebody an opportunity, you never know. You can only roll the dice and see how they perform.

You're in pro football, it's kind of interesting, because when you win, you draft last. In college football, you recruit. You gotta go after guys.

The Cubs, we built one of best farm systems - I think for a while there, it was the best farm system in baseball. And that was great. It got a lot of attention. But we didn't want the credit for the farm system. What we wanted was to see if we could do the tricky part, which was turn a lauded farm system into a World Series champion.

It is difficult to give time to develop projects in football. You buy the club, and you want the title after three months.

You cannot buy players and know, for sure, that they can deliver. You cannot know because football is a team sport.

Choosing players in any sport is an imperfect science.

Initially when I was looking to enter football I was looking at clubs in Italy or France or Spain, a mid-table club where I could develop players and eventually sell them.