This time last year, Gerald Dixon had a decision to make.

He had a comfortable job as a pro scout for the Buffalo Bills, one he held since 2014. He was one of the few who survived when Brandon Beane rebuilt the scouting staff in 2017 after the Bills fired Doug Whaley.

Dixon had another opportunity, though. It was unconventional, a risk. But risks never scared him before. Assistant general manager Joe Schoen, director of player personnel Dan Morgan, director of college scouting Terrance Gray, director of pro personnel Malik Boyd and assistant director of college scouting Lake Dawson created a powerful logjam at the top of the Bills’ front office. To advance his career, Dixon would have to take a chance.

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That chance came in the form of the XFL. Whaley, his old boss, was the senior vice president of football operations, charged with hiring the coaches for the teams and putting together a database of players. When Whaley was sourcing the coaches, he called Dixon about Pep Hamilton, who was hired to coach the D.C. Defenders. Dixon, known by his peers as “Smoke,” had known Hamilton in the 1990s when Hamilton tried to recruit him to play at Howard. Once Hamilton was locked in as the coach of the D.C. franchise, Whaley called Dixon again.

“I don’t know what you want to do, but there’s going to be some positions open,” Whaley said. “If you’re interested, you may want to call up Pep and see where it goes from there.”

Dixon made the call. He and Hamilton talked about the opportunity and how it would fit into Dixon’s plans. It was a chance for Dixon, whose family immigrated from Jamaica to Maryland when he was 7 years old, to be closer to his family. It would allow him a chance to break through the ceiling he’d hit in the Bills’ front office. He would be able to be a part of building something from scratch, not just as a scout but as one of the lead personnel people.

This wasn’t about wanting to leave Buffalo. Two years earlier, Dixon had fought to stay with the Bills. When Whaley and his staff were fired, Jim Monos, Whaley’s director of player personnel, texted Sean McDermott right away.

“Please give Gerald Dixon a chance,” Monos wrote. “You’ve got a good one, and you don’t find many guys like him that can do it all.”

Dixon had to play the waiting game. The Bills took a few weeks to settle on Beane as their general manager. While the Bills went through their process, Dixon prepared. His father always told him, “Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.” He compiled notes. He planned out his nicest suit.

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Once Beane was hired, he began assembling a staff, giving interviews to anyone on the old staff who wanted on. Not everyone took the interview as seriously as Dixon did. Dixon’s interview was on Mother’s Day in 2017. Beane still remembers being blown away by his suit and his preparation. More than that, Beane appreciated Dixon’s honesty. Yes, Dixon was loyal to Whaley and Monos, two of his best friends. He was also up front about what went wrong and wanted to be a part of fixing it.

“I wanted the job because I felt the business at hand was not finished,” Dixon said.

With that interview, Dixon kept his job.

“He earned that opportunity as if he had been let go from another team,” Beane said.

Dixon was part of a Bills playoff berth in 2017 and a roster makeover in 2018, but the opportunity with the XFL was an enticing. From the moment Dixon broke into coaching at The Citadel, he knew he wanted to be a general manager. The XFL opening wasn’t a general manager job in title, but he would be part of a three-man personnel staff with Matt Cooper and Greg Gabriel. They, along with Hamilton, would be building the team. Two years after fighting to keep his job in Buffalo, Dixon informed Beane he would be joining the XFL’s D.C. Defenders.

“I think he made a risky move, but that’s Smoke,” Monos said. “He’s going to do what he wants to do.”

Dixon said he got that attitude from his father, who moved his family from poverty in their home country to the United States for a better life.

“I don’t know how not to dream big and go after stuff and look forward to things that aren’t certain,” Dixon said. “Because that’s what he did.”

For a while, Dixon’s decision couldn’t have been going more smoothly. He spent last summer on the road, visiting NFL training camps and scouting the talent that could be available when the XFL drafted in the fall. The Defenders team he and the rest of the staff put together looked like one of the best in the league, getting off to a 3-2 start, the second-best record in the XFL. Like everything else in the sports world, it came screeching to a halt in mid-March. The XFL suspended operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In April, the league filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to the financial fallout. That leaves Dixon among hundreds without a job, wondering what the future of the league looks like if there is a league at all.

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Yet Dixon faces it all with a smile and positive outlook. As he likes to say, his uncomfortable is his comfortable. When you came up the way Dixon and his family did in Jamaica, obstacles look different. When you understand the odds Dixon overcame just to get to the XFL, losing a job doesn’t seem so bad. And when you’ve built a network like the one Dixon has along the way, the next opportunity shouldn’t be far.

“The sky is the limit,” Whaley said. “Not only does he have the background in coaching and personnel, but now he can tie in the background of ops. He’s got everything covered. When you combine that with his personality, it’s just about when will he get the opportunity? That’s the question. It’s not if he’s qualified or if he’s ready. It’s when will he get that opportunity to make that next step? He’s got options.”

Dixon has a picture saved in his phone from before he left Jamaica. It’s him, his five sisters, his brother and his mother in front of their home in Jamaica. That home was little more than a shack as Dixon describes it.

He keeps that picture close by for the nights he’s working late. It reminds him of his father, who isn’t in the picture because he left to go to America a few months after Dixon was born. He worked there and sent money back while going through the proper channels to petition to bring his family over. Dixon was five when he first met his father.

Dixon’s mom, Margaret, worked any odd job she could find in the meantime to keep a roof over their heads. Eventually, Dixon’s dad, Gerald Sr., was able to move not just his wife and kids over but also his brother and sister and their families. He pulled his entire family out of poverty.

“I tell him all the time, ‘I don’t know how you did it, but you taught me how to do it,’” Dixon said.

Dixon’s father was demanding growing up. They didn’t have much in Maryland, either, but they kept everything neat and clean. Dixon was taught to present himself properly and to handle himself the right way.

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Football wasn’t his first love in sports. When he arrived in the United States at age seven, all he knew was cricket. Baseball became a natural fit. But people he looked up to in the neighborhood played basketball, so Dixon got into it, too. He saved his allowance to buy a basketball and spent his nights shooting on the hoop outside of their apartment complex, trying to be like Michael Jordan. He taught himself baseball by watching Rickey Henderson. Then Randall Cunningham and Mark Rypien captured his attention in football. The family never had money for lessons, so he taught himself by watching the pros on television.

When Dixon got to ninth grade, he tried out for the football team at Paint Branch High School. On his first day of practice, he got to the locker room and didn’t know how to put the pads on. His friend had to help him get his equipment on. After just three games on JV, Dixon got bumped up to varsity. By his senior year, he was the starting quarterback and MVP of a team that included future NFL star Darnell Dockett.

Dockett is the player Dabo Swinney came to see. Swinney was an assistant coach at Alabama. He didn’t typically recruit Maryland, but Alabama’s coaching staff wanted him to recruit a few kids at DeMatha Catholic. While he was up there, Swinney checked out a few other schools to see who was in the area. He’d heard about Dockett, so he stopped by Paint Branch. While Swinney was there, Paint Branch’s coach was selling him hard on Dixon. Swinney knew Dixon wouldn’t be able to crack Alabama’s quarterback depth chart, but he thought maybe he could play cornerback. Alabama’s defensive backs coach agreed, and the recruitment began.

“It’s really an understatement for me to say, but I’ll say it: He was a little rough around the edges,” Swinney said. “It’s not that he was a bad kid. I wouldn’t have recruited him if he was a bad kid. He was a good kid, but he only knew what he knew at 17 years of age and what he had been exposed to in life. He had a lot of walls up around him. He didn’t trust a lot of people and had a hard edge to him. That’s part of why he was successful, too. He came in and knew how to work. He wasn’t afraid to compete and he had a mindset that you have to have. But he also had a lot of growing to do as far as being the type of teammate you need to be or just maturing and understanding the bigger picture of life.”

Dixon readily admits this about his younger self. He said he was walking around with “a boulder on his shoulder.” He’d dealt with losing one of his sisters to Lupus in high school. That and his upbringing hardened him. By the time he was five, Dixon had to live through floods and poverty in Jamaica as well as his parents surviving a life-threatening car crash.

All of that gave him a laser-focus on his long-term goals. Occasionally, that made it hard for him to enjoy the process and success he was having.

Dixon visited Alabama, fell in love and committed. Dockett never visited, but Swinney’s trip to Maryland wasn’t for naught.

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“I mess with him all the time and say, ‘I came up here to get Darnell Dockett and I got Gerald freaking Dixon,’” Swinney said. “We came for the 6-4, 270-pound freakazoid of a defensive lineman and I walk away with a 5-10, 175-pound DB. I came for the cow and got the calf.”

Dixon laughs when he thinks about those days and how much he had to learn. Once he committed to Alabama, his goal was to start. He wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and he never backed down to a challenge. He may have been undersized, but he didn’t play like it. His first start wouldn’t come until Week 8 against Todd Pinkston and Southern Mississippi. A week after that, Dixon picked off his first pass against LSU and never returned to the bench. Alabama went on to the SEC championship game that season, and Dixon’s entire family made the trip to the Georgia Dome to watch him play for the first time.

“My dad doesn’t show a lot of emotion,” Dixon said. “The joy and the smile on his face that day … I don’t think he’s stopped smiling about it to this day. We still talk about it and he’s like, ‘Man, you made me feel so proud.’ That’s about the best you’re going to get out of my father.”

A few years later, Dixon left Alabama a semester early to try to continue his football career. He signed with the Bills in 2004 and would end up playing in NFL Europe and then the CFL from 2005-07, winning a Grey Cup with the Edmonton Eskimos. During that time, Dixon’s wife Stacia, who was then just a friend then, pushed him to go back and get his degree. He didn’t think he needed it with the money he was making from football, but she encouraged him. She had dug up an article from when Dixon was playing at Alabama. He was quoted as saying he was going to graduate from college because he had made a promise to his mom.

“That hit me in the gut,” Dixon said.

Dixon enrolled on the spot and finished up his degree. Stacia bought him a frame for his diploma. Rather than hang it in his own house, Dixon gave it to his mom and dad. It’s hanging in the hallway of their house to remind his dad that his sacrifice was worth it and his younger siblings, nieces and nephews of what they can accomplish.

“I believe everybody was put on this earth for a purpose,” Dixon said. “Mine was to help my family out as much as possible. Not financially, but I could give them direction and understanding. I was the first one to go to college, so I had to make sure I finished up properly.”

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That degree would come in handy when he transitioned to the next phase of his football career. When he moved back from Canada, he was living in the Miami area and working out at Coral Park High School waiting for a call for an NFL team. He struck up a conversation with a coach there, Christ Vagotis, an Alabama alum. Dixon made the connection and ended up joining Coral Park’s staff when an NFL opportunity didn’t come. He taught 11th grade English, coordinated an after-school peer counseling program and coached the defensive backs and special teams for Coral Park.

After half a season, he got a call from his college defensive backs coach. He told Dixon if he was ready to close the door on playing for good, there was an assistant coaching opening at The Citadel he should inquire about.

Dixon was hired as a graduate assistant and coached defensive line, linebackers and defensive backs over the course of six years. In December of 2013, he was out on the road recruiting when The Citadel’s head coach at the time, Kevin Higgins, called him to tell him he’d accepted a new job. Dixon’s first thought was, “Cool, where are we going?”

Higgins said, “No, I got a job.”

Higgins resigned from The Citadel to take the job as Wake Forest’s assistant head coach and wide receivers coach, a post he holds to this day. Dixon, meanwhile, had two months to find a job. In February, his contract would run out, the paychecks would stop and so would the health insurance. His oldest daughter was 3 at the time.

Dixon immediately started interviewing for jobs and had inroads on a position at Jacksonville State. He would have taken it, but that’s when Monos offered something different.

Monos and Dixon had met when Monos was scouting the southeast region for the New Orleans Saints. Based in Charleston, S.C., where The Citadel is located, Monos and Dixon met through a friend Monos had on The Citadel coaching staff. The first conversation they had told Monos everything he needed to know about Smoke. Dixon was asking Monos what he thought of Washington’s quarterback at the time, Auburn alum Jason Campbell. Monos tried to be delicate, unsure if Dixon knew Campbell personally.

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“I don’t know if he’s good enough as your starter,” Monos said.

“I think he stinks,” Dixon said.

Monos loved the conviction.

“That’s Smoke summed up,” Monos said. “It’s either you can play or you can’t.”

From there, Monos and Dixon struck up a friendship. They would watch football together, and slowly Monos started to learn about Dixon’s story.

“He wasn’t supposed to make it,” Monos said. “He wasn’t supposed to be successful. Those are the people I pay attention to, especially as a scout you’re always wanting to know guys’ backgrounds. When guys aren’t supposed to make it and they do, those are special people.”

Beyond that, Monos was blown away by his football mind. He watched the game with an intensity and passion that made him fun to be around. And he could connect with anyone. When Monos joined Whaley in Buffalo as his director of player personnel, he thought of Smoke right away.

“To me, it was just a no-brainer hire,” Monos said. “He hadn’t ever scouted, but he worked so hard and just watched and learned.”

Dixon and Whaley met at the Senior Bowl a few years earlier, so the familiarity was there. Whaley had already seen what Monos did.

“Once you start talking to Smoke for five minutes, you feel like you’ve known him for 10 years,” Whaley said. “It’s easy for him to develop relationships, but it’s also impressive just how he carries himself.

“People can hear you, but he listens. There’s going to be something in that conversation that he can connect with you on, whether it’s a person or a place, a school, a sporting event, a sporting team. He knows how to make people feel comfortable because he has something that he can link to you.”

That became more than just a networking tool. Dixon’s ability to relate with players became an asset to Buffalo’s front office. He could successfully source college players when needed, but he also had the connections to vet and recruit pro players who became available on the waiver wire. He was useful in the locker room, too, given his ability to relate to players, like Marcell Dareus.

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“When we brought Smoke on board, that helped us to be able to communicate with Marcell,” Monos said. “And Marcel doesn’t trust anyone. He trusted Smoke.”

Anthony Lynn saw the way players confided in Dixon during his two seasons in Buffalo, first as the running backs coach and then as offensive coordinator. When Lynn first met Dixon, he got an idea for how he connected with people.

“He’s very intentional and strategic. He knew a lot about me before I stepped in the door,” said Lynn, now the Chargers head coach.

“We get so caught up in Xs and Os and evaluations and everything, but at the end of the day, football is a relationship business,” Lynn said. “Some people can relate to others and some just can’t. Some do it a whole lot better than others. Smoke is one of those guys that does it a whole lot better than others in my opinion. He can relate to anybody and he’s a very likable guy. But if he didn’t work as hard as he did and bring his skills to the table, it wouldn’t matter.”

That’s why Lynn, just like everybody else who has come into contact with Dixon, instantly became a D.C. Defenders fan when the XFL launched. Lynn agonized over cutting Cardale Jones from the Chargers last summer but was thrilled to see him land with Dixon’s team.

Beane watched other former Bills sign with the Defenders. He heard from Dixon often about how much he was learning having to handle operations and personnel decisions on a scope he hadn’t seen in his previous role.

“That’s the part that you can’t simulate until you put them in that seat,” Beane said.

The beauty of the XFL was it put a lot of people in seats they otherwise would have waited years for in the NFL. Players got opportunities they might never have while waiting around on NFL practice squads. Coaches came out of retirement to mentor a younger generation. Old and new scouts came together to build teams.

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Gabriel had no previous connection to Dixon when he joined D.C.’s staff, but he quickly grew to love working with him and Cooper.

As the three of them drove around to training camps scouting, Gabriel wondered what the hell Dixon and Cooper were doing in the XFL. He thought they deserved to be in NFL front offices. Dixon had a pro scouting background that no other personnel guy in the XFL had, and that knowledge was invaluable when it came time to scour NFL roster cuts. The XFL built a scouting database of shared information for teams to use, but the Defenders did their own work. They divvied up the responsibilities and scouted as many NFL training camps as they could.

“Nobody will ever question his work ethic,” Gabriel said of Dixon. “He is a bulldog when it comes to getting work done.”

All Gabriel and the rest of that staff can do now is wonder what could have been. They think they had a team capable of winning the XFL championship. They felt the league was operating more smoothly than it had in its first go-around in 2001.

Now, the league may be dead again. Dixon will be among many looking for jobs when NFL teams can open their facilities and begin hiring again. Nobody knows what the future holds, but those who know Smoke know he’ll find a way to stay around the game.

“He ought to be on a lot of peoples’ radar in my opinion,” Lynn said.

As Dixon reflected on his journey, he was just a few days removed from leaving D.C.’s facility for the last time and helping players get back to their families safely. He thought about the day he walked out of One Bills Drive, the days he spent on the road with Gabriel and Cooper and what it felt like to see the team he built play games just miles from his family’s house in Maryland.

“It’s one of the most unreal years that I’ve been through, but probably my most promising and most exciting,” Dixon said.

(Top photo of Dixon and his dad courtesy of Gerald Dixon)