In 2006, Patrick Willis lost his younger brother, Detris, to a drowning accident. Patrick was about to become a college senior at Ole Miss ahead of the 2006 football season. He grieved, then he came back, led the SEC in tackles for the second straight year, won the Butkus Award, and was named a consensus All-American. Mike Singletary, then assistant head coach and linebackers coach for the San Francisco 49ers, had only watched his film without knowing about his personal life and walked away unimpressed.

Speaking on EssentiallySports’ live 2026 NFL Draft show, Singletary described what happened when Scot McCloughan, the team’s vice president of player personnel, asked him to evaluate Willis.

“I remember early on in that offseason, Scot McCloughan asked me to look at Patrick Willis and tell him what I thought of him,” Mike Singletary said. “And I looked at him, and I thought, ‘he’s okay’. And he said, ‘Well, we’re thinking about taking him in the first round. So he needs to be more than okay.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s all I see.’”

McCloughan asked him for a reassessment, and Singletary looked a third time. Same answer. So, McCloughan came back a third time and asked one direct question: “Do you know his story at all?” Singletary admitted that he didn’t. What McCloughan told him shifted his entire evaluation.

“[McCloughan] said, ‘Well, when you look at the film, let me give you a little backdrop on who Patrick Willis is and what he’s been through,” Singletary recalled on our show. “‘You know, his family situation is really tough. Mom is kind of in and out of his life. Dad is gone. And Patrick is the big brother, and he takes care of his brother and sister. And there have been times when there was no food, or it was a really tough situation. And then right before the season, Patrick Willis’ younger brother drowns.”

Willis still showed up for Ole Miss and played like the best linebacker in the country. That 2006 season, he logged 11.4 tackles per game (137 total), 11.5 tackles for loss, and defended 7 passes. Add his personal struggles, and Singletary was left amazed.

“All of this happened before the season and right before the start of his senior year, his brother drowns, and he’s playing the way he’s playing?” Singletary said. “I said, ‘Oh yeah, we need this guy. We need him all day long.’ And so Scot said, ‘OK.’ That’s what I thought – when you heard his story, you would feel that way. And it gave me a whole new perspective. Some of these kids, you have no idea where they are in their lives. And when I found that out, I said, ‘This kid is still playing. He is balling. And to have that happen, there was something special about him.’ And it was.”

NFL, American Football Herren, USA 2014: Chiefs vs 49ers OCT 05 05 October 2014: Patrick Willis of the San Francisco 49ers during an NFL game between the Niners and the Kansas City Chiefs at Levi s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA. The 49ers won the game 22-17. Santa Clara CA United States of America EDITORIAL USE ONLY Copyright: xx ZUMA-20141005_zaf_c04_300.jpg DanielxGluskoterx csmphoto976614Singletary is a Hall of Fame linebacker himself – someone who spent his entire playing career reading situations faster than anyone else on the field. He watched Willis twice and still came back with “okay.” Now, that’s not a knock on him. It’s an honest illustration of what film alone can and cannot tell you. What the tape showed was a first-round linebacker. What it couldn’t show was a man who had carried his family, lost his brother, and still performed.

When you know what someone played through, you know something real about how they’ll handle adversity in the NFL. McCloughan understood that, and he refused to let Singletary stop at the surface. And Patrick made sure McCloughan’s assessment was spot on.

That dynamic – one person with the standing to push back and the authority to make the final call – is exactly what Mike Singletary addressed when the conversation shifted to how the Niners’ draft room functioned. The Willis story happened inside a war room that worked because Scot McCloughan ran it himself.

The war room McCloughan built, and what came after

On our EssentiallySports NFL draft show, Mike Singletary was direct about what made the 49ers work in that era.

“I really liked when I was at San Francisco and Scot McCloughan – I thought he did an excellent job,” Singletary said. “You knew that he was that guy. And when it was time to make that pick, there was no ‘what do you think?’ It was, ‘Hey, here is the pick, and let’s go.’ And I think that’s the way that it should be.”

McCloughan joined the 49ers in 2005 as VP of player personnel and was promoted to general manager in February 2008. The 2007 draft class he built — with Willis at the center of it — became the structural foundation of the Jim Harbaugh teams that reached Super Bowl XLVII after the 2012 season. McCloughan left the organization in March 2010 to become the Seattle Seahawks’ senior personnel executive. But back in San Fran, the room he’d vacated changed drastically. Singletary, by then the head coach, was real about what it felt like.

“Right before the draft, it was a little less sure of what the role should be and how we should move forward,” Singletary said. It was a tough situation for me, it was a tough situation for Trent Baalke (who replaced Scot as the VP of player personnel). It was a tough situation for the owners. It’s kind of like, ‘Well, what do you do in this situation? When you have a head coach that maybe doesn’t have quite the experience that you would like [in] selecting players, and at the same time, is not quite trusting of the other guys that are now in that position that has to make that selection.”

Singletary went 18-22 across parts of three seasons before the Niners fired him with one game left in 2010. But what he described in this interview isn’t about wins and losses. It’s about a structural problem that predated most of the losing: no clear decision-maker in the draft room, a head coach who, by his own admission, wasn’t fully equipped to fill that void, and a front office relationship that never stabilized when Scot McCloughan walked out.

The Willis pick happened because McCloughan had both the knowledge to see what the film wasn’t showing and the standing to make Singletary look harder. The moment he left, that accountability went with him. Singletary didn’t dress that up or deflect it, and most people in that seat would never say it out loud at all.