War Room

by Michael Holley

  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 l
ater, 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.