About thirty minutes before the first game of the 2008 regular season, Scott Pioli walked unnoticed toward the club level of Gillette Stadium. He was on his way to the coaches’ box, where he always sat in the front row and watched the games. It was amazing: He had been going through this routine for nearly a decade, having helped assemble four Super Bowl teams and three champions, yet he blended into a crowd of Patriots fans without so much as a “Hey, aren’t you…?”
He didn’t mind the anonymity, and on a few occasions he was teased about it mercilessly. Once, he had driven to work and parked his car in front of a stadium sign that read RESERVED FOR SCOTT PIOLI. He remained in the car to finish a cell phone conversation he was having and he was interrupted by a security guard’s hasty rap on the window.
“Excuse me, sir. You’re going to have to move. This space is for Scott Pioli.”
Pioli smiled.
“I am Scott Pioli.”
There was the time in New Orleans when he couldn’t get into the Patriots’ Super Bowl party because security didn’t recognize him. Another time, he and Dallas were at dinner outside of Boston with another couple, Berj and Regina Najarian. Berj, one of his closest friends, was Bill Belichick’s executive assistant. The couples had planned to go to a restaurant run by celebrity chef Ming Tsai, and when they arrived, the chef put on a show for them. He was thrilled to see Berj and asked several football questions, but he didn’t know much about the other guy.
“What do you do for work?” the chef asked Pioli.
“I work for the Patriots, too,” he replied.
“Really? What do you do?”
For the rest of that night, it was the punch line that the couples kept coming back to, over wine and laughter, putting the emphasis on different words to keep the joke going. “So, Scott, what do you do?” They messed with him for a while about that one. He could take it, and it was even funnier because everyone at the table knew just how thorough his work with the Patriots was. The NFL knew who Pioli was, too, and that’s why he had become known more for turning down job interviews than going on them. And those were just the teams that had followed procedure and asked the Patriots for permission to speak with him; a couple teams had gone the back-channel route, procedure be damned, and let Pioli know that his own universe could exist in their city, with total football control and all the money and perks he’d ever need. He always said no, easily, because money and power would never be the combination that would lure him away from New England.
Maybe people didn’t know his face, but they knew his name and respected his brain. He was the man on the other side of the ampersand, Belichick & Pioli, whom everyone mentioned from the Combine until the day after the draft. It was the duo that helped turn the cliché about the draft, the inexact science of it all, into a myth. The Patriots had been extremely exact in round one with their picks, with most of them either known as among the best in the league at their positions or at least solid contributors to championship-level teams. The first-round aberration came with Laurence Maroney, and they could go back to their notes on him and study the intense internal disagreements that preceded the pick. Good drafts were a huge reason Pioli sat in that home coaches’ box and, from 2001 through 2007, watched his team win fifty-five of its sixty-six home games, a winning percentage of 83.
Similar expectations were in place for the 2008 season. The Spygate heat from the previous September had cooled, and by the spring it had made its way to South Park, with Belichick’s “I misinterpreted the rules” being the fodder for an episode on the irreverent cartoon. Belichick and Patriots owner Robert Kraft had apologized for the incident again at the owners’ meetings, with Kraft’s contrition coming off so sincerely that he was given a standing ovation. In an extraordinary move, the Boston Herald ran apologies on its front and back pages for publishing a false story on the eve of the Super Bowl. It turned out the paper’s claim that the Patriots had taped a Saint Louis Rams walk-through before the Super Bowl couldn’t be supported, so the Herald ran large bold-type headlines that read SORRY, PATS and OUR MISTAKE. Even senator Arlen Specter, who had appointed himself as a watchdog of Spygate conspiracies, began to get distracted by other things and was on his way to making news for an abrupt switch to the Democratic Party.
On the first Sunday in September 2008, the only sour sign from the past year actually hung in the north end zone of Gillette. It was a banner commemorating the “16–0 regular season.” The rest of the story, the postseason postscript, is what made the new addition so unsightly for most fans. As Pioli sat in the coaches’ box, with plenty of time before kickoff, he ignored the banner and instead looked to the field and the red uniforms of the opponent, the Kansas City Chiefs. When he saw the jagged white arrowhead with the red interlocking “KC” in the classic logo, he didn’t think of how young the Chiefs were and how the Patriots were heavy favorites in the opener. Every time he saw Kansas City, he thought of the connections, personal and visceral, he had made with the franchise.
One of Pioli’s personal connections had been with the best of all, the late Lamar Hunt, who died in December 2006. Not only had Hunt founded the Chiefs, he’d founded the entire American Football League in 1960. At the time, he was still in his late twenties. He was the reason a team like the Patriots, an AFL original, had life, and it was his ingenuity that led to the merger between the AFL and NFL. He was a wealthy man without airs, “relentlessly modest,” as the Dallas Morning News put it, as legendary for his humility as he was for his contributions to pro football, soccer, and tennis. He was a Hall of Famer in all three sports, elected in three different decades. He wasn’t a bad investor, either: He and seven others invested in the Chicago Bulls in 1966, a deal that would eventually allow him to enjoy having six championship rings and Michael Jordan on his side. Even his nickname, Games, was understated given his impact on pro sports.
Pioli met Hunt for the first time in 2004. They were at the owners’ meetings in Palm Beach, and one day after business had been done, Pioli wandered off to a hospitality suite. He entered the room at the luxurious Breakers Hotel, an oceanfront resort, and found it to be nearly empty. There was one man in there and Pioli did a double take when he saw him. He recognized Hunt and suddenly became a nervous fan. He had deep respect for the history of the league, so he knew the story of Hunt as well as many other men who first met in hotels that weren’t nearly as posh as the Breakers. They were the ones who built the league that made Pioli’s NFL life possible. It was one of the subjects Pioli was passionate about, and sometimes he’d start talking about it and become so emotional that he’d well up with tears. After fidgeting and talking himself in and out of saying something, he finally decided to say hello to Hunt, and the two had a friendly and short conversation.
After New England won its third Super Bowl in February 2005, Pioli received a handwritten note from the man whose family was responsible for naming the game the Patriots had just won. It was the Hunt children’s 1960s toy, the bounce-to-the-sky Super Ball, that sparked an idea and led to their father giving the championship game its now-famous moniker. He was also the one who decided that Roman numerals should be attached to the game because they had a “dignified” look. So he sent that congratulatory note after Super Bowl XXXIX, and Pioli wrote a note of his own to Hunt after the Chiefs beat the Patriots in November 2005. Pioli was surprised when he received yet another letter from Hunt, once again handwritten, a few weeks later. He thanked Pioli for the thoughtful note, mentioned that the Chiefs had been lucky that day against the Patriots, applauded Pioli on his “very important part in the team-building process there in New England,” and wished “continued success to [Pioli] and the organization.” He was genuinely happy for someone else’s success, so true to his character he modestly concluded, “I kind of look at it like everyone in the NFL is in this ‘project’ together. I feel very fortunate to have been able to be a small part of it for a lot of years. Regards, Lamar Hunt.”
“It was very typical for my dad to drop people notes. In fact, he was famous for it, and we all still marvel at his ability to produce either short notes or long memos on a daily basis,” says Clark Hunt, one of Lamar’s three sons. “He would absolutely turn them out. And everybody who’s ever worked for him has a file of Lamar Hunt letters. And they’re very interesting, on a wide range of subjects, and it really shows his creativity, because he was always an idea guy. But he was also one of the best people I knew in terms of being thoughtful and just dropping people notes. ‘Hey, congratulations, I read that you won this award.’ Or, ‘Congrats on the Super Bowl.’
“It’s not like today, where people are hitting stuff on their BlackBerry or where the English is garbled at best. His writing was very well thought out and there were no missed commas or missed periods or anything like that. I don’t know what he would think about all the e-mail and texting and Twitter and so forth.”
In his notes to Pioli, Hunt never made a reference to his cancer, first diagnosed in his prostate in 1998. It wouldn’t be completely accurate to say he “battled” health problems from that moment on, because it would paint the picture of someone whose body and spirit were noticeably beaten. The truth is that Hunt lived, played, and worked around any issue that arose, and he embraced that philosophy until his death. He took a two-week trip to the Caribbean shortly after publicly announcing he had prostate cancer. He was always watching or listening to his Chiefs, whether he was at Arrowhead or in some hospital room. And he spun out big ideas, as usual, but maybe even Lamar Hunt didn’t dream that the Patriots executive he encouraged would one day become a Chief.
Unfortunately for Chiefs fans, they knew long before the 2008 season began that the championship drought in Kansas City was going to continue. It had been fifteen years since they’d won a playoff game and thirty-eight since they’d won a Super Bowl. They’d pieced together four wins in 2007, and when the season was over they fully committed to the kids. Jared Allen, their best defensive player, was traded for three draft picks, and eleven of the twelve players the Chiefs selected on draft day made the 2008 roster. Not one of those picks was a quarterback, although they could have had Joe Flacco if they wanted him, so they entered Gillette with Brodie Croyle as their starter.
It was game time. Pioli settled into his seat next to Ernie Adams, a longtime Belichick adviser. As usual, the coaches’ box came to life. It was an audio box, as it buzzed with coaches’ observations and curses, but it was a future box, too, because anyone who experienced the game there was always several seconds ahead of the crowd. If you put on a headset, you were getting the director’s cut of the game, mostly narrated by Belichick, Josh McDaniels, and defensive coordinator Dean Pees, with cameos from Adams and various coaches. You knew the proper name and purpose of each play, long before the huddle broke. You knew exactly who blew the assignment, who made the key block, and what Belichick instantly thought of it all, minus the filter of It is what it is.
Seven and a half minutes into the season, the buzz in the box stopped. The headsets went quiet. It was one of the first times that those in the box saw things exactly the same way as the sixty-eight thousand fans on the other side of the glass. Tom Brady had dropped back to pass and was hit low by safety Bernard Pollard. Brady’s left leg bent too far just as he was throwing and his anterior cruciate ligament snapped. There was an alarming scream, startling even Pollard, and Brady instinctively held his injured knee and leg. The gesture was the obvious giveaway: This was serious and season-ending. For a few seconds, no coach said anything, and the silence hung there the way it does in the room after a tasteless joke. What do you say after that? Around the NFL, coaches are trained not to become overly emotional about injuries. So the noise in the box and headsets returned slowly, eventually building back up to the point where it was before Brady got hurt. They knew they were going to beat the Chiefs, even if their eventual 17–10 win would be much tougher than anyone expected. But that wasn’t the story. The real story was that everyone in the organization was going to have to accept that the Patriots’ starting quarterback for the rest of the season was going to be Matt Cassel.
Finding a replacement for Tom Brady isn’t in anyone’s job description, but technically that was the simplistic answer to the What do you do? question Pioli had gotten at that Boston restaurant. The reason he spent hours upon hours away from home was because he was either on or presiding over a constant talent search to be discussed and debated with his staff. For Pioli and his staff, that debate was never at the top of the roster, at quarterback. It was somewhere in the thirty-to-fifty-three range, for Brady’s backup. On the weekend of the 2005 draft, the Patriots weren’t thinking of someone who could take snaps behind Brady. Their first four picks that year were guard Logan Mankins, cornerback Ellis Hobbs, tackle Nick Kaczur, and safety James Sanders. They had two seventh-round picks, which was a wasteland for many teams. The Packers and Giants, who had found productive players like Donald Driver, Mark Tauscher, Ahmad Bradshaw, Derrick Ward, and Kevin Walter in the seventh, as well as the Patriots, were among the rare teams that saw and selected reliable players at the low end of the draft. Pioli and Belichick had become draft students in their time working together, so they knew the typical profiles of what teams faced in the last round.
“If you look at the player and say, ‘Okay, we think that they’re going to develop based on their work ethic, their intelligence, their commitment,’ then that’s a good seventh-round pick. But there are lots of guys in the seventh round that don’t have that, in all honesty,” Belichick says. “They’re just not good enough. You just draft them to cut. Then there are some character guys. Those guys that have slid down the board and their character is an issue. There are some players where you say, ‘Look, I do not want this guy on my team under any circumstances.’ There are other guys that you say, ‘Okay, this guy’s got problems but we think we can handle it.’ We think we can… I wouldn’t say really get him straightened out; I’d say we think we can handle and manage the problem.”
The Patriots’ first seventh-rounder in ’05, Cassel, was part of the initial group that Belichick described. But the projection was more complicated because he had barely played in college. He backed up Heisman Trophy winners Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart at USC, and by the time he got to New England it was as if he was backing up Hollywood itself. Brady had championships and Super Bowl MVPs. He had contracts and endorsements worth millions. He was pursued by women so attractive that they were insulted if you simply called them beautiful. Cassel? He had a spot on the team.
In his first two seasons in the league, Cassel was once again surrounded by Heisman Trophy winners. But these guys, Doug Flutie and Vinny Testaverde, had won the trophy before Cassel had started first grade. He really didn’t have to worry about being replaced by men in their early forties. But 2008 was different. The Patriots spent a third-round pick on a quarterback named Kevin O’Connell, and that was viewed as an indictment of Cassel’s skills. Things got shakier when Cassel didn’t look good in the preseason, yet he made the team and beat out the rookie for the backup job.
Halfway through the first quarter of 2008, he did more than take over for the injured Brady. He was now one of those people responsible for making the nightmare in the desert disappear. That Super Bowl loss to the Giants had deeply affected some players and coaches to the point where they sometimes had 2007 flashbacks. They were haunted by calls and plays they could have made but didn’t. Tedy Bruschi had been ready to announce his retirement if they won, but the loss stung him so much that he was determined to return so the football memory in the Phoenix suburbs wouldn’t be his final one. The man who would be calling plays for Cassel, McDaniels, had spent a restless off-season thinking of the game, too.
“You know, some of us were fortunate enough to be there in ’01 and ’03 and ’04, and those years, statistically, weren’t the same as ’07. But the ending was better,” he says. “And the taste in your mouth was a whole different thing. And I think that’s what sticks with you. I know it made me want to get back to that game in a worse way, just to try to have that feeling that we had in ’01, ’03, and ’04 again.”
Just as there was a sense that the dynamics were changing in 2004, which was the final season Belichick had Romeo Crennel and Charlie Weis as his coordinators, there was also a feeling that 2008 represented something different. It wasn’t just the loss of Brady. It was the knowledge that owners from other teams might come knocking after the season, taking away someone else from the Patriots’ fountain of winning. The brand, whether the Patriots wanted to use that word or not, had been established. Belichick wasn’t going to leave, so teams were looking for the next best thing, someone the head coach had shined on, as if they would get what he had by osmosis. McDaniels was one of the prime candidates to leave. He had gotten the league’s attention the previous two years with his offensive diversity. One year he took an offense that lost its top two receivers and turned it into a top-ten unit, and the next season he called the plays for the most explosive offensive force in NFL history. He was confident and smart and had worked with Belichick for the previous seven seasons. It was a tough résumé to ignore.
The 2008 season was also the ground floor of a different locker-room mix, the nexus of a championship Patriots generation with a generation that was a combination of youth and imports. Bruschi, Mike Vrabel, and Rodney Harrison were in their early to midthirties. This wasn’t going to be their team for long. They could try to be enforcers like they were five years earlier, but there were too many new guys to reach. There were times Bruschi and Vrabel would be sitting at their lockers and Vrabel would turn to Bruschi and say, “So this is the next generation, huh? This is the next generation?”
The next generation provided speed and athleticism that the veterans no longer had, but the veterans knew what it took to build the infrastructure of a championship locker room. The next generation was looser and louder than the generation that came before them, which was okay, except that the wise veterans wondered why a group that had accomplished nothing was seemingly so relaxed. It was evolution, and it happened in football as well as dozens of other industries in America. It wouldn’t bring down the Patriots in 2008, but a few bad seeds were in place for problems in the near future.
One game into Cassel’s career as a starter, it was obvious that the Patriots were going to be a lot better than expected at quarterback. In the week leading up to their second game of the season, in New York against the Jets, there had been wild rumors and hysteria. If it wasn’t a call to bring in free agent Daunte Culpepper to be the quarterback, it was a report that Chris Simms and Tim Rattay were coming to town. No one wanted to hear about the system and how no street free agent could possibly be better for the Patriots than Cassel, who was carefully selected as one of the right fifty-three. It was hard for many to grasp that the Patriots didn’t see Cassel as a scrub. He was going into his fourth season in New England for an obvious reason: Belichick and Pioli believed in him.
His first test was against Eric Mangini’s Jets, who had devoted three straight drafts to beating the Patriots. Center Nick Mangold was drafted with nose tackle Vince Wilfork in mind, linebacker Vernon Gholston was brought in to be a hybrid player similar to what Willie McGinest was with the Patriots, and the Jets had cashed in some draft chips, Patriot-like, to move up the board and select cornerback Darrelle Revis. They believed Revis could defend any receiver, large or small, and when they graded him before the draft, he received their version of straight A’s. They used green dots to indicate when a player was exceptional, and he had those dots in intelligence, character, athletic ability, strength, speed, and even his ability to return kicks and punts.
Cassel was smart enough not to throw too many balls in Revis’s direction, which meant there were times he’d hold the football and take sacks. He was going to have to work on that, but it was clear to McDaniels that the offense wouldn’t have to be radically modified when Cassel ran it. They started him off slowly against the Jets, and he passed for 165 yards in an impressive 19–10 win. By the time the Patriots saw the Jets again, in mid-November, Cassel would be running the offense with no restrictions. In some games, he’d put up Brady-like numbers, which put him on the path to a Brady-like contract.
In November, a little more than a week before Thanksgiving, Pioli decided that he could take a scouting trip and visit a friend at the same time. So he headed to Atlanta to see how Thomas Dimitroff was doing. The Falcons had already surpassed their four-win total from the previous season, and each of their new additions was contributing as planned, if not better. Quarterback Matt Ryan, the team’s first-round pick, was playing with poise and was the favorite to win Rookie of the Year. Running back Michael Turner, the team’s top free-agent target, immediately lived up to expectations by breaking the team’s single-game rushing record in the first game of the season. Curtis Lofton, a second-round pick, looked like a natural as a starting middle linebacker. In a 24–0 shutout of the Raiders, Lofton and the rest of the defense couldn’t have played better as they allowed just three first downs the entire game. As for the Raiders and their new cornerback, former Falcon DeAngelo Hall, Al Davis regretted trading two picks for him and handing him a $70 million contract. Halfway through the year, Hall had played so poorly, giving up more yards than any corner in football, that he was released.
Dimitroff’s father always had career advice for him, even in casual settings, and one of the things he told his younger son was to be himself if an opportunity to run a department ever came his way. Pioli noticed that Dimitroff was living his father’s words. This had become a mission for Dimitroff. He knew there had been raised eyebrows around the league when Arthur Blank hired a college director who’d never managed day-to-day in an office, as a general manager would have to do. He knew he was also viewed by some old-guard traditionalists as some New Age freak, a forty-two-year-old outdoors lover with his head in the clouds. But he was confident that he didn’t have to compromise all his interests just to look the part of a hard-core football man, whatever that was. The Falcons’ office became a reflection of him, from scouting philosophy to patronizing Whole Foods.
Les Snead, the player personnel director, had the office closest to the general manager’s, and he got used to the consistent aroma of cooked chickpeas, tomatoes, and rice coming from Dimitroff’s direction. “It always smells good,” Snead says, “but I’m not sure about the taste.” Dimitroff’s executive assistant Laura Moore, a former Virginia Tech soccer player, quickly learned to build certain things into his schedule: reading time, limited appointments before ten A.M., and a workout. She also learned to listen carefully for context clues because some of the words he used were as long as sectionals. “Each person in the office has a word he’s used on them that they don’t understand,” she says. “Sometimes he’ll see the look on my face and say, ‘Do you know what that means?’” His office was equipped with an expensive stationary bike, which received monthly maintenance from Atlanta Cycle. Sometimes he’d be in there riding and watching film, and sometimes it was just a ride to the sounds of the Zac Brown Band.
Moore knew that if she couldn’t find Dimitroff in the building, there was a good chance he was just several feet away, outside. Shortly after taking the job, he met with the superintendent of the grounds crew, Jim Hewitt, and asked what it would take to build a two-mile bike path at the facility. Hewitt cleared some of the refuse from the area, and in lieu of workouts, Dimitroff and scout Robinson Payne did the rest. They’d spend forty-five minutes to an hour each time they went out there, bushwhacking and raking, until they finally had a path on which the serious cyclist could ride or just walk and clear his mind. “Sometimes I’ll be out there on my cell,” Dimitroff says, “which will get you a dirty look on a bike path in Boulder.”
Pioli was also impressed that Dimitroff had taken the essence of the Patriots’ scouting system and tweaked it to make it more relevant to a 4–3 defense, which head coach Mike Smith and his defensive coordinator, Brian VanGorder, preferred. The Patriots were a team with bulk, with defensive ends Richard Seymour and Ty Warren both over three hundred pounds. Dimitroff was drawn to athleticism and fluidity, and he could now have an Atlanta roster with lighter, faster defensive ends and linebackers who wouldn’t have been system fits in New England.
When the two friends weren’t touring the facility, they were working and talking. They scouted a University of Miami—Georgia Tech game in midtown, watching Tech coach Paul Johnson’s triple-option offense produce 472 yards on the ground. They sat in the same suite as an unusual man, Clay Matthews Sr., who was on the verge of representing three generations of NFL history: He played in the league, as did his sons Clay Jr. and Bruce, and his grandson, Clay III, was going to be a first-round pick in the spring. They talked about the future, specifically Pioli’s job future, and they weren’t sure at the time if they were discussing a move that Pioli wanted to make in the next year or if it was something more far off. Pioli was proud of Dimitroff and inspired by him. Not only had he left the Patriot nest and had instant success, he’d done it his way. He wasn’t trying to be Belichick, Pioli, or even his father. He had ideas about the way he’d like to see football operations run, and he was putting those ideas in place. For Pioli, the trip to Atlanta only solidified what he was already starting to believe, that the time for him to leave New England was approaching, too. It wasn’t a money chase, because if he’d wanted that he could have had it years earlier. It wasn’t a quest for more power, to be the man, because in his mind that went against everything football was supposed to be. There wasn’t a rift to speak of between him and Belichick.
“The thing that happens with some people is that they taste success and think they’re smarter than they are. I never got to the point where I thought I was smarter than Bill,” he says. “Without Bill, I’m at a completely different station in my football career. Probably still wallowing in the Ohio Valley Conference somewhere. And dreaming about making it to the NFL.”
If the right opportunity were there, maybe it would be time to go simply because of renewal. After all, Pioli had worked with Belichick every year but one since he was twenty-seven, and now he was forty-three. Maybe it was healthy to go somewhere else and find the next New England, so to speak. The Patriots were well run and established. How great would it be, how pure would it be, to go somewhere and be part of a group that revived some team’s football heartbeat? How much fun would it be to bring together a passionate group of players who hungered to achieve something greater than their individual selves?
That’s how Pioli thought of football, and it explained a lot of things about his life, past and present. It’s the reason he was a bit withdrawn, feeling hollow and embarrassed, when he was honored as an all—New England player in college, at Central Connecticut. The honor was flattering, but it was far from the ultimate because it was an honor that didn’t bring in his teammates.
He really was the personification of the group activity the Patriots did before every Super Bowl, choosing to be introduced as a team. It was why, when he pulled into his garage at home in New England, he still parked near a sign that read A WIZARD LIVES HERE. That was a sign from high school, when boosters went around his hometown of Washingtonville, New York, and rallied the football players, the Wizards, before their games. He still loved a Wizards team that went undefeated, just as much as he loved the Patriots, because they got together and did something that their individual talent said wasn’t possible. He was a professional evaluator, used to analyzing the best athletes in the world, but when he described his high school teammates he made them all sound like people you should’ve watched or read about.
“I never got into pro football to see if I could run a team and ‘do it on my own.’ What does that prove? What does it even mean?” he says. “I love team-building. I love the idea of like-minded people coming together and creating greatness that is never just about one person. At some point you find that the brotherhood of relationships far exceeds any individual glory that you could ever be given.”
It’s not something he worked on. It’s just who he was. People often told him he had the one-liner wit of his father-in-law, which he did, but his ability to create laughs sometimes hid an introverted side. The Patriots essentially had a one-voice policy, which meant no one in football operations except Belichick could speak to the media without permission. Pioli could have done twice as many media interviews if he wanted and been entertaining along the way, especially if he were interested in doing something like a weekly music segment on a radio station. He knew music like he knew football, and he could have put a happy face on what many perceived to be a dour and businesslike Patriots franchise. But he didn’t want to, no disrespect to the deejays and journalists. As long as the policy was in place, he was content to do his job, completely and anonymously, while Belichick dealt with the media.
Over the years, his success had brought him the type of income that blue-collar workers like his dad never had. He appreciated and enjoyed the life the NFL provided, but anyone who was around him could see that it was important for him to stay connected to people who knew him when. He was still close to several friends and teammates from high school, and he celebrated many Super Bowls with his college roommate, Ralph Marchant. He didn’t romanticize the life he had growing up, because there were some moments he wouldn’t want to relive, but there was something eternally grounding in what he had experienced. He always seemed to be conscious of the world he was in, with chartered flights, million-dollar player contracts, and billion-dollar TV deals, vs. the world he came from, where no one he knew talked about signing bonuses or even contracts.
“I grew up with two parents who hated their jobs, really hated them,” he says. “My father had a wife, four kids, a house payment, a car payment, and a high school education. He didn’t have choices. He didn’t have options. The way he lived was the way it was going to be.”
Ron and Diane Pioli did the best they could with what they had, with Ron working at the local phone company and, at times, driving a cab and working as a plumber. It’s probably the reason Pioli had no tolerance for slackers or complainers in the NFL. They wouldn’t last long around him, whether they were just-getting-by scouts or underachieving players. He had seen too much achievement from people who didn’t have nearly the resources or support network that someone working in the NFL does.
He watched as his sister, Lisa, two years older than he is, relied on her smarts, her creativity, her drive, and her family to finally carve out the life that she truly wanted. That was in jeopardy in high school when Lisa got pregnant at eighteen, three months before graduation. She got into a bad marriage and divorced, so she was a single mother trying to find her way. She started going to school at Orange County Community College and then went to work at Sharper Electronics. The company had a tuition-reimbursement program, and it would cover the entire cost of a class if the employee came away with A’s. Lisa got A’s. She went to night school, year after year, with her parents watching her daughter.
“You know, three years ago she just finished her master’s,” Pioli says. “She’s got her bachelor’s and her master’s. Magna cum laude. Put herself through school. She’s remarried now, too, to the greatest guy in the world, and she just got her first full-time teaching job. She’s incredible.”
No matter where he worked, and no matter how much money he made, there was something infused in Pioli that appreciated that thing, that hard struggle on the way to achievement. It’s why he could appreciate Cassel, the seventh-rounder who produced back-to-back four-hundred-yard passing games in November and was looking like he belonged as an NFL starter.
It’s the reason he could understand how cool it was to have rare, original hardcover copies of Ernest Hemingway’s novels, which he and Dallas owned, yet when he quoted a writer it was usually a Jersey guy named Springsteen. It was fitting that he was drawn to Bruce, a musician loved by the mainstream who sometimes grappled with his mainstream success. Darkness on the Edge of Town was the result of Springsteen sanding away at all the things he perceived to be overly commercial and finding something raw and genuine instead. It turned out to be an authentic album and a great one, of course, but it never had singles that were as popular as the ones on Born to Run.
Pioli had loved Springsteen since he was a teenager, and when Ron Pioli had asked years ago what the hell all that noise was his son was always listening to, he tried to connect with his father by highlighting some lyrics in “Badlands.” There was a line that Scott found powerful, a line that he thought a workingman like his father could relate to: Poor man wanna be rich / Rich man wanna be king / And a king ain’t satisfied / Until he rules everything. But fathers and their teenage sons don’t always view things the same way, especially when it comes to music. Ron didn’t see at the time that the music was Scott’s literature, and it was literature that would help him understand his own small town and deepen his appreciation for the everyday people who made it run.
One month before the 2008 season began, Springsteen had a concert at Gillette. For the first time ever, Pioli, the Bruce devotee, got a chance to meet him afterward. He expected the meeting to be brief, five minutes max. But they began talking about those lyrics from “Badlands” and family dynamics and New Jersey and New York. There were tears in Pioli’s eyes and there were tears in Springsteen’s, too. Springsteen’s manager kept popping into the room telling him that he had to go, and the Boss kept waving him off. They had connected.
Months later, it all made sense. If Pioli ever left New England, it would probably be for a place where he and others could go back to their football roots, strip away hype and distractions, and have their own Darkness on the Edge of Town.
After beating the Seahawks in Seattle the first week of December, the Patriots were 8–5 and headed toward a bunched finish in the AFC play-off standings. It was one of those years where someone with double-digit wins wasn’t going to make the postseason. Unless the Patriots got some help, they were going to be that team. The problem was both simple and predictable: The Patriots had no problems against teams that weren’t going to the play-offs and struggled against teams that were.
Cassel seemed to get better and better by the snap. He still took far too many sacks, but he wasn’t a repeat offender in making mistakes. You’d see a flaw one game and it would be corrected the next. What the quarterback couldn’t do was rewrite the losses, with all five of them coming in the conference, nor could he change New England’s 2–4 record against likely play-off teams. He did exactly what the team needed the final three games of the season, throwing a combined seven touchdown passes to just one interception. The Patriots won all three, including a finale in Buffalo where the wind gusts were so ferocious that they caused the goalposts to sway. Cassel threw just eight times in the 13–0 win.
The only play-off hope for the Patriots, with eleven wins, rested on the shoulders of Mangini and Brett Favre. The Jets, playing at home, needed to beat the Dolphins. If that happened, the division would belong to New England for the sixth consecutive season. Favre was all over the place in the game, wildly under-and overthrowing his targets all day. He threw three interceptions, and when the season was over archaeologists would have all they needed when they looked at the quarterback’s final totals: twenty-two touchdowns, twenty-two interceptions. He helped, and then he didn’t. He didn’t help himself, the Patriots, or Mangini in the final game of the season.
The Jets lost, completing the one and only season of Favre’s career in New York. It also completed the season for the 11–5 Patriots, who lost the divisional tiebreaker to the Dolphins. For Mangini, whose team had lost four of its last five games, the loss cost him his job. He had lasted just three seasons in New York, a surprisingly short run for a man who had made the play-offs in his first year; was given a made-for-the-tabloids nickname, Mangenius; and had begun thinking long-term for the Jets. He was excited about his roster, and he felt like he had a bit of a secret weapon in information technology. He had helped design a computer system that he believed to be one of a kind. It quickly crunched and spit out data that Mangini believed many personnel departments in the league were missing. He had developed it on his own and had spent hours with computer programmers building and refining it. As much as he respected the Patriots’ approach to the draft, he didn’t think they or anyone else had technology that was so specific.
He would have to leave the intel in New York and move on to another job. As surprising as his firing was, the instant pursuit of him was just as stunning. The season had ended on December 28, and within forty-eight hours Mangini was being heavily recruited by the Cleveland Browns. Mangini was familiar with some other top recruits on the market, too. Their names were Josh McDaniels and Scott Pioli.
In an odd twist, Browns owner Randy Lerner wanted to hire Mangini and Pioli. It didn’t seem to cross Lerner’s mind that he could pick just one; it was like saying you were a fan of the Jets and Patriots or Yankees and Red Sox. It wasn’t possible. There was three years’ worth of issues that needed to be worked out between the two, and working it out together on a new job seemed to be a level of dysfunction that even the sensationalist TV shrinks wouldn’t want to touch.
Still, Pioli liked Lerner. He had been raised in the Shaker Heights section of Cleveland, the son of billionaire Al Lerner, who was a minority owner of the original Cleveland Browns. Al Lerner had a role in helping the Browns move to Baltimore in 1995, and he was the reason the “new” Browns returned in 1998 when he paid $530 million for an expansion team. Al Lerner died four years later, and Randy assumed control of the team. Pioli and Randy Lerner knew some of the same people in Cleveland, starting with Indians executive Mark Shapiro, who was one of Pioli’s best friends (and Mangini’s brother-in-law). Lerner had received permission to speak with Pioli, and Pioli felt it was his obligation to talk with a man for whom he had a lot of respect. They met on New Year’s Eve in Providence, on Lerner’s private plane. When Pioli got to the plane, in the early afternoon, two people departed and he walked on. Seven hours later he was still there, laughing and talking despite the driving snowstorm that was ruining many Rhode Islanders’ New Year’s plans.
They talked about football; the Browns; Browns history; Lerner’s family; Pioli’s family; the city of Cleveland, which Pioli loved; and team-building. The conversation was flowing so well that it wouldn’t have been shocking if Lerner had asked Pioli to fly back to Cleveland with him and become the new boss of the Browns by New Year’s Day. But there were a couple of issues, one that they couldn’t get around and one that Pioli didn’t want to get around.
The first issue, obviously, was Mangini. Lerner asked Pioli flatout if he could work with Mangini. It was complicated. The two of them had grown up together in the business, working in Cleveland, Baltimore, New York, and New England at the same time. They had been part of that brotherhood that Pioli described, but it was going to be very difficult to reestablish trust after the way things ended in New England.
There was also the matter of another scheduled interview Pioli had five days later, with the Kansas City Chiefs. Lerner let Pioli know that the Browns job was his if he wanted it, but Pioli didn’t want to make that commitment without talking to the Chiefs first. He didn’t think it was right to schedule an interview and then cancel it. Besides, he didn’t want to cancel it.
Lerner and Pioli shook hands, and Pioli left to deal with the snowstorm. Lerner went back to Cleveland to deal with a storm of a different kind in his organization, which was about to hire its third head coach in the last six years. It would also be Lerner’s second swing at the Belichick Tree, since the man he was going to hire, Mangini, was replacing Romeo Crennel, who had three losing seasons in his four years with the Browns.
As both Pioli and McDaniels went on interviews, it seemed that they went out of their way to avoid each other. Everyone in the Patriots organization knew how Mangini was viewed there, and no one wanted to even give the appearance that he was being disloyal to Belichick. So Pioli never asked McDaniels what he was thinking, and McDaniels never approached Pioli about what his plans were. They were a ready-made GM-coach combo that would have worked well together, but there wasn’t so much as a whisper in the office about what they were going to do in the future.
On the first Monday of 2009, January 5, Pioli sat in the Hunt Sports Group offices in Dallas. The Chiefs were originally the Dallas Texans, and when the franchise moved to Kansas City in 1963, Lamar Hunt kept his home in Texas. When Arrowhead was built in the early 1970s, a multilevel apartment was included for the Hunts to use. The shuttling between Texas and Missouri worked for the Hunts, so they continued to be headquartered in Dallas while the team played in Kansas City.
Pioli had met the Chiefs’ chairman of the board, Clark Hunt, just once, and it was years earlier at a league labor seminar in Dallas. They had barely spoken then, quickly going through a handshake, the way you do when you have an assembly line of people to meet. But going into his interview, Pioli had done his research on Hunt and had been impressed. Hunt was just six weeks older than Pioli, yet this relatively young man was considered one of the league’s brightest minds. He had been a scholar and an athlete at Southern Methodist University, where he graduated number one in his class and was an academic All-American on the soccer team. As an SMU undergraduate and MBA student, his favorite classes had been ones focusing on capital markets trading, so naturally the company where he had his first full-time job was a fit: Goldman Sachs, the New York City investment banking and securities giant.
“You talk about something that’ll grow you up fast,” he says with a laugh. “I had had summer jobs, but nothing like working for Goldman Sachs. They’re happy to throw you right into the fire. They’re a lot like a professional sports team: They have a big draft class every year, firm-wide. The area I was in, there were maybe fifty of us. They work your tail off for two years and then hold on to a few people in the class. There are others that they want to go back to business school, with the thought that they’ll bring them back. And then there are some that probably need to do something else.”
Hunt was a draft pick who made it, getting an opportunity to work first in New York and then Los Angeles. He could have stayed with the firm as long as he wanted, but it made more sense for him to work with his dad, someone he considered “a creative genius.” He attended league meetings with his father, helped him with the founding and operating of Major League Soccer, and provided advice whenever it was needed. They spent so much time together that there weren’t many secrets, but there was at least one. Clark had no idea that his father was trading letters with Pioli. When his father passed toward the end of the 2006 season, Clark, then forty-one, became the youngest owner in the NFL.
He had been in the top decision-making seat for a year when the fans demanded that he make a change. At the end of the 2007 season, in which the Chiefs were 4–12, many fans wanted Hunt to move on from Carl Peterson, the longtime president, CEO, and general manager. Hunt didn’t think it was the right time. He retained Peterson and head coach Herm Edwards. But fourteen games into the 2008 season, Peterson resigned and Hunt said that the new GM would have input on Edwards’s job. He had heard many stories about Pioli, and one of the things he heard most often was that just getting Pioli to interview for the job would be a long shot.
“That was probably the biggest concern,” Hunt says. “That he might not be interested.”
Pioli was ready to leave New England, so he was interested, and thanks to a legendary letter-writer named Lamar Hunt, he automatically had positive thoughts about the Kansas City Chiefs.
Even before the interview in Dallas began, the handful of people who would interview Pioli was able to understand how frugal he could be. He could have stayed in any area hotel he wanted on Sunday night, the night before his all-day interview. The tab was on the Chiefs, yet Pioli selected a fairly shabby place near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, a hotel where if they left the light on for you, the light would flicker.
On Monday morning, his interviewers quickly saw his focus and convictions, too. Pioli looked around a conference room and saw Clark Hunt, Daniel Hunt, team president Denny Thum, and Ryan Petkoff, who handled PR for the Hunts. He handed them all folders that included several pages of observations, salary-cap information, and thoughts he had about leading a winning franchise. Unsolicited, he apologized to them for not having the “book” that some candidates came to the table with during interviews.
“I don’t have one and I never will,” he said to them. “I’ve never understood how and when people can create a book when you’re working for someone and you have a job to do. You’re supposed to be working for that team. Robert Kraft doesn’t pay me to write books.”
There was silence. They stared at Pioli and then stared at one another. It hadn’t occurred to Pioli that they didn’t care if he had a book or not. Clark Hunt was just happy that he had gotten Pioli through the door for an interview, something, amazingly, that no one had done since 1992. That was for Pioli’s first NFL job, with Bill Belichick. Since that time, he had advanced to different positions without putting on his best suit, talking about his personal highlights, and telling a potential employer that references were available upon request.
They moved on.
The interview wasn’t as casual as the one with Lerner, but it was just as smooth. Clark Hunt wanted to know about Pioli’s family as much as he wanted to hear about the Patriots and team-building. The conversation lasted eight hours, with a couple of food breaks, and there were both pointed and poignant moments. One of the sharpest and most direct questions of the day happened when Pioli was asked about Spygate and what his role was in it. He said that as one of the leaders in the organization, he had to take part of the responsibility for something that happened on his watch.
Clark Hunt asked him if he would consider retaining Edwards, whom Hunt credited with the push for a Chiefs youth movement after the 2006 season. Hunt respected Edwards’s honest assessment of where they were. It’s not always easy to endorse the kids because, inevitably, the head coach who endorsed them usually isn’t around to watch them grow up. Pioli said that of course he would consider Edwards and speak with him before making any decisions, although there were no promises that Edwards would be retained.
At one point, Pioli had to do a complicated verbal tiptoe. He realized how much the Chiefs meant to the Hunts, and he had obviously been awed by Lamar Hunt, but he needed to address a few things with the organization without coming off as disrespectful. He wanted to investigate why there had been a twenty-two-year gap between division titles, 1971 to 1993, and he wanted to understand why there was a perception of a Chiefs juggernaut, as recently as the late 1990s, when in reality there had been just three play-off wins in the previous twenty years. He wondered if the problem wasn’t just on the field.
“There’s this living, breathing dysfunction with football organizations,” he said, “and it pits lifetime employees vs. temporary employees. It’s insane. You need the help of all these people to do the job well. It’s not just players. It’s equipment people, the grounds crew, community relations, marketing…”
He didn’t know these interviewers the way he knew Lerner, but this was a more complete conversation. There were plenty of laughs mixed in with some hard-core football talk. As Pioli spoke, the Chiefs realized how fortunate they were. Technically, they were talking to the Patriots’ vice president of player personnel, so, by NFL rules, offering a person in that position a GM’s job was a promotion. The league wanted to eliminate teams stealing one another’s front-office people for lateral moves, so a hierarchy was established. Even though Pioli really was the GM in New England, he wasn’t as far as the masthead was concerned. What it meant for Pioli was that he was free to take the Chiefs job if he wanted it. It was clear that they wanted him.
“He was obviously prepared, which is sort of one of his hallmarks,” Hunt says. “But it’s just sort of his thoughtful, analytical personality that really came through, and I felt like I was having a different conversation with him than I had had with the other people. Not that the others were all the same, because they weren’t, there was just something that was deeper, more thoughtful, about this conversation that I was having with Scott.”
For Pioli, his long day in Dallas led to some intricate emotional moments during his trip back to New England. He was on the verge of a new beginning, and the possibilities of that journey were exciting. But beginning something in Kansas City would mean, officially, that he had finished something with the Patriots. He thought about what that meant and it made his heart heavy, even though he knew it was time to go somewhere else. He was going to excitedly accept the Chiefs’ offer to become their new GM, and there would be a random moment when he’d say to himself, “Man, I’m working for the Kansas City Chiefs. Lamar Hunt’s team.” Working for Lamar Hunt’s team would mean telling the man who brought him to the NFL, Bill Belichick, that he’d no longer be a part of his team.
What the public saw from the New England Patriots most of the time was a cardboard stiffness. Engaging them in a relaxed, on-the-record conversation was like trying to converse with the generic computer voice that repeated your four or five menu options. Belichick had convinced most of them that the media were a distraction, and despite their real personalities, they became men of steel when the cameras came on.
There were no cameras in Foxboro in the middle of January, so steel gave way to flesh, muscle fiber, and blood. The Patriots weren’t trying to “manage expectations” or “focus on the next game.” They were just a bunch of guys sad that they were losing two more three-time champions, Scott Pioli and Josh McDaniels. McDaniels was going to Denver, where at thirty-two years old he’d be the youngest coach in the league. It had been easy for him the night before, when Belichick had left him a message congratulating him on getting the job. The coach said he was happy for McDaniels and his wife, Laura, and their three kids. But then there was the next day, when McDaniels had to see Belichick.
He walked into Belichick’s office with every intention of speaking, but he couldn’t say anything. He was so appreciative of everything the coach had done for him, he couldn’t quite put it in a sentence or two to express his gratitude. Every time he tried to get out a word, his voice would start cracking and he’d have to quickly stop or everything was going to fall apart. Belichick put up his hands, told him not to worry about speaking, and gave him some advice.
“Things are about to change for you. They always do,” the coach said. “You’re not going to be playing a lot of golf, I can tell you that. But don’t let the important things change. Whatever you do, make sure Laura is okay with it. This is going to be a big change for her, too. Make sure you keep up a good relationship with your kids.”
Belichick also reminded him to bring young people into the system whom he could train, just as Belichick had done with McDaniels. Later, it was Laura McDaniels’s turn to cry. The couple was being driven to the airport when a call came in from Tom Brady. McDaniels put him on speaker and, within seconds, Laura’s makeup was running.
“You’re going to do a great job out there,” Brady said. “I’m going to miss you, man. I love you.”
There was a feeling in Foxboro that it was only a matter of time before McDaniels left. With Pioli, the instinctive reaction for people was not to give him a hug and say, “Congratulations.” It was more, “You’re kidding, right?” Even when permission was sought and granted, even when he went on lengthy interviews with the Browns and Chiefs, there was a belief that Pioli wasn’t going anywhere.
How could he leave? He was part of a unique NFL partnership with Belichick. They had talked drafts, salary caps, free agents, and trades hundreds of times. But that was just the silhouette of their relationship. They had spent some fun times on Nantucket, with their families seeing so much of each other that it was practically a merger. It was as if Scott and Dallas had four kids, with Mia being the youngest and Belichick’s three, Amanda, Stephen, and Brian, acting as big sister and brothers. They loved each other, even when times were difficult. When Belichick and his wife, Debby, divorced, the Piolis refused to take sides. They couldn’t. They loved them both and they stayed close to each of them.
Pioli was leaving? So what was going to happen to that ampersand? Belichick & … what, exactly? Pioli was one of those employees whom bosses always appreciate but don’t really understand until they’re gone. They’re the ones who are so competent at their jobs that you don’t notice that they’re actually mastering a couple other duties that aren’t necessarily in the job description. Pioli could scout, negotiate, stack a board, manage a cap, and be a voice of reason.
When Pioli told Brady that he was leaving, the quarterback laughed. He thought he was joking. They were standing in the team’s weight room, Brady sweating himself back into shape after the knee injury that took his 2008 season. After being convinced that it wasn’t a prank, Brady stared for a long time and didn’t have much to say. On the record, the Patriots always said that job switches were not surprising and part of the uncertain NFL. But they had gotten used to putting on the armor of who they were supposed to be. Truly, moves like these made them wince. Whether it was good players who “got it” or executives and coaches who helped build it, it hurt to see champions walk out the door.
Robert and Jonathan Kraft both cried when they heard the news, and Pioli cried with them. The consolation was that they both had great things to say about the Hunt family. They knew Pioli was going to work for a good man, and they knew how many times this day could have happened if he had been inclined to make every available dollar on the market.
Down the hall and around the corner from the Krafts’ offices, a woman named Nancy Meier was red-eyed, too. She had worked with the Patriots since the 1970s, and she knew people the way Pioli knew players. She had become close to the Piolis and looked out for them. Sometimes she picked up things, whether it was someone’s integrity or insincerity, before her boss did. If he didn’t ask her opinion on something that she’d noticed, she felt that it was her obligation to tell him.
He was going to miss Berj Najarian, who indeed knew what Pioli had done as an employee and a friend going back to the time when the two met in New York, in 1997. Najarian’s office adjoined Belichick’s, so a trip to see the head coach usually meant a trip to see Najarian, too. They had spent time together professionally and socially over the past decade, and it was hard to imagine that getting together now would suddenly require some elaborate planning that had never existed before.
As for Belichick, their meeting was not what it should have been. There were no great speeches, no wise words, no reminiscing about what they had done. The Patriots would release perhaps the most heartfelt statement of the Belichick era, in which the head coach would glow about the contributions of Pioli. “It has been extremely gratifying for me to follow Scott’s career ascension from the bottom of the totem pole in Cleveland to his place as a pillar of championship teams in New England,” the statement read. “Now, with the opportunity to steer his own ship and a vision of building a winner, there is no more capable, hardworking, loyal, team-oriented person than Scott Pioli.”
But those words weren’t said face-to-face. Frankly, the absence of a blessing hurt Pioli, although Belichick may have been going through the same shock Brady had. Pioli had never been close to leaving before, so there was reason to believe that he would come back from the Cleveland and Kansas City interviews and say, “Okay, Bill. Now that those fifteen hours of interviews are over, what are we thinking about in free agency?” The other franchise losses had been different and somewhat expected. Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel were looking for head-coaching jobs a full year before they left Foxboro. McDaniels and Eric Mangini were both in their early thirties, quickly climbing from position coaches to coordinators, so it was inevitable that they’d take the next step.
Pioli wasn’t like any of them. Belichick hadn’t brought Weis and Crennel to the NFL. The coach had hired McDaniels and Mangini, but neither had the professional and personal history with him that Pioli had. And no one else would have it again because the Belichick of the twenty-first century never would do what the Belichick of the 1980s did. There’s no way he would be as trusting as he was then and reward a friend of a friend with a chance to watch film with him. He’d gotten lucky with Pioli, a young employee who’d never crossed or betrayed him. But times had changed; you couldn’t take those chances anymore.
The new era had begun in Foxboro. There were fewer and fewer people who knew what Belichick wanted and what he thought without even talking to him. There were fewer people capable of cracking open a beer with him and just playfully busting him, the way that old and secure friends do. The building still had smart evaluators and good players, for sure, just fewer of them. Belichick often emphasized that his teams should keep their heads down and not seek attention, but his brilliance and their brilliance drew attention. The NFL gathered and picked away at what it could of his fruits, from players to coaches and now, with the losses of Thomas Dimitroff and Pioli in back-to-back years, executives.
For the first time since 1997, it was time for everyone to be accountable for himself, independent of the others. Belichick was faced with replenishing the team, the coaching staff, and the scouting department. Pioli would be out on his own, no longer anonymous, putting himself in position to receive more credit and blame than he ever had in the past. Dimitroff was in Atlanta, trying to prove that he could build a champion with the heart of his father’s old-school toughness, and he could do it while eating tofu and wearing True Religion jeans.
Pioli and Belichick had built three championship teams together and nearly touched perfection another time. But it was the “together” part of football that always struck Pioli. It was why one of his best memories was standing on the field in the Superdome, after the Super Bowl win over the Rams, and being thanked by players like Mike Compton, Jermaine Wiggins, and Joe Andruzzi.
“We all had given each other something that no one else could give us,” he says.
It was why he could appreciate the meticulous craftsmanship and deep thought that was poured into some of the fine art that Dallas brought into their home, yet one of the pieces of art that stirred his soul was actually a football photo. He had purchased and framed it after his first visit to Arrowhead, in 1998. He had seen it as he walked through the press box, and he stared at it for the longest time, falling in love with the game again as he looked.
The picture was taken on Christmas Day 1971. The Chiefs were playing the Dolphins in a marathon play-off game at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium. Len Dawson, the “16” on his jersey still perfectly clean, was giving instructions in the huddle. Wendell Hayes’s pants were a combination of white, brown, and grass-stain green. Jim Tyrer’s helmet was scratched and had streaks of brown, yet he leaned in intensely, ready for more. Ed Podolak was exhausted, bent over with both hands on his knees.
“I think it’s one of the great pictures in NFL history,” Pioli says. “It’s the essence of football.”
Now he was off to Kansas City, to see if the essence of football could be re-created.