War Room

by Michael Holley

  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 Sco
tt.”

  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 b
e 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.