Three-time Super Bowl champion executive Scott Pioli joins the Sky Sports NFL coverage for Week Three this weekend; watch the Los Angeles Chargers at the Minnesota Vikings from 6pm, followed by Chicago Bears at Kansas City Chiefs in the 9.25pm kickoff live on Sky.
Thursday 21 September 2023 13:32, UK
Before the days of Bill Belichick, drafting Tom Brady and becoming a three-time Super Bowl champion executive with one of the NFL's greatest dynasty teams, there was Whitley Bay for Scott Pioli. And Newcastle. And the pub owned by Sting's brother.
It was the summer of 1986. Pioli was a defensive lineman for Central Connecticut State when the university's soccer coach Shaun Green, who only retired back in 2019 after 35 seasons in charge, informed him of an opportunity to take his talents across the pond.
Green had been friends with the general manager of the then-Newcastle Senators American Football team, coached by an American in RC Ledford, who were keen on nabbing the services of some of the Blue Devils' top players.
Accompanied by his friend Sal Cintorino, Pioli made the trip.
"They would take care of our room and board and take care of everything but I was still playing in college so I could not play or I would lose my eligibility in the United States," Pioli tells Sky Sports.
Unable to strap on the pads and helmet, Pioli instead worked as defensive coordinator of the British side in what would mark the beginning of his coaching journey. In the Senators' Hall of Fame, he is now referred to as the owner of the first defensive playbook ever seen in the North East.
"We had a terrific team, we had an undefeated season. I wasn't there for the entire season because I still had to continue my training. But as soon as school ended, we were on a flight to London, got picked up and headed up to the land of the Geordies.
"I had never been out of the country! And it was just an incredible experience. It was so good of an experience with so many good people that I actually had to leave early, because I'm like, 'I've got to get back to training!' It was so fun, it was this amazing, amazing experience."
Pioli recalls his players using their jobs to fund the purchasing of pads and helmets, while managing to find a balance between work and football. While much is said of the game's enormity in Europe today, it was clear back then a love for football was deep-rooted in the UK.
"I loved it because it brought me back to why I fell in love with the game football. It was this community thing. And we had this guy who was a biker. It was just a beautiful team of people," added Pioli.
“One thing I'll never forget was getting picked up at Heathrow and Sal and I are in the car all the way up to Newcastle and the country just looks different than in the United States. I hadn't travelled a whole lot, we didn't grow up with any money so we didn't travel to go on vacations at all in the United States.
“But travelling and just seeing the greenery, the hills, the fields, it was beautiful. And then we got to Whitley Bay, and it was spectacular. It was just this charming, beautiful town."
Pioli was no different to any student in need of some pocket money, particularly having arrived at the time of a struggling economy.
And so he would take on a few shifts at a local Whitley Bay bar named Dunes, owned by Philip Sumner - the brother of the Police frontman Sting.
"We needed a little side hustle to make some extra money," recalls Pioli. "This bar was right down on the water. And they actually let us work a few nights a week to make extra money because RC was paying us but these people were also chipping and doing little fundraisers to make sure that we had a place to stay.
"I was still a young guy. I was 20 years old maybe and I ate a lot back then you know I was training and we were eating RC and his wife out of their home. We spent a lot of time with the community and I can't get over how kind folks were and knowing that we were outsiders, but not knowing who we were.
"We were welcome everywhere and I fell in love with Newcastle. And I fell in love with the Geordies."
As for the accent? It took some initial perplexion, humour and time to adjust to the unfamiliar tones.
"Being from the United States, you don't understand different dialects and different accents, just like we have in the United States," laughs Pioli. "And I remember the first time, especially if maybe they had a couple of pints in them, or maybe if we had a couple of pints in us, they start speaking Geordie, so to speak. And I was like 'what?!'.
"It reminded me of a good tough industrial town, just like the United States, you know, cities like Cleveland and Detroit and Pittsburgh, they just had gritty people that were good and hard-working people. I could talk about my time there forever. It was spectacular."
Pioli would later head to Syracuse as a graduate assistant coach for two years following his departure at Central Connecticut, beating LSU in the 1988 Hall of Fame Bowl before downing Georgia in the Peach Bowl the following season.
He spent the next two years at Murray State in roles as offensive line and defensive line coach, after which the NFL came calling.
“I had met Bill Belichick back when I was in college as a player and we became friends and we kind of stayed in touch,” he recalls. “So when he got hired as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns I was down at Murray State, he ended up hiring me and bringing me up to Cleveland.”
Pioli remained with the Browns upon their move to Baltimore, playing a role in drafting Hall of Famers Jonathan Ogden and Ray Lewis, before reuniting with Belichick at the New York Jets in 1997.
He followed Belichick to the Patriots in 2000 as the vice president of player personnel, among his first successes being an instrumental hand in the selection of a Michigan quarterback named Tom Brady as the 199th overall pick at the Draft.
The foundations had been laid for eight years of dominance as the Patriots marched to three Super Bowl titles, between them Pioli and Belichick having established themselves among the league's shrewdest evaluators and sharpest navigators of the NFL's draft and free agency recruitment processes in maintaining a competitive roster across which a mutual team-first ethos flourished.
Their Patriots DNA made for a ruthless winning machine, fronted by Brady and what would become one of the defining masterstrokes in draft history.
"We would need at least another 10 minutes to understand the Brady pick in its entirety," jokes Pioli.
"Heading into that offseason we had only 41 players under contract. I think the roster limit for camp at that time was 85, so we only had 41 players and we were $10.5m over the cap. Now, it wasn't $10.5m dollars over the cap on a $200m cap - this was $10.5m over a cap that was less than $100,000.
"We had to re-do some contracts and cut a bunch of players, we had to move down to 39 players to get to the cap. I give that background because when you draft, you want to draft the best player available at all times. Sometimes you have to deviate and draft based on need.
"That's why people say, you know, 'which one do you do?' Well, you do a little bit of both, or you try to do a little bit of both."
The Patriots entered the draft with three quarterbacks on the roster in Drew Bledsoe, Michael Bishop and John Friesz, none of whom New England could afford to cut due to the impact their cap number would have against the limit.
"At certain times, we started talking about Brady in the fourth round. You build a draft board and as players are picked, you're pulling those tags off the board.
"Around the fourth round Brady isn't in the group of guys we were talking about as the best player available. We keep saying, 'we don't need a quarterback, we don't even have a backup tackle, or we don't have a starting nickel corner'. And we kept going through that process.
"So we talked about it in the fourth round and in the fifth round. We actually drafted someone in the sixth round before Brady. And we drafted a defensive tackle in the fifth round before Brady and yet we felt in our hearts that Brady was ranked better, but we're like 'we can't take a fourth quarterback, we need to start building this football team'."
Having selected Virginia safety Antwan Harris with the 187th overall pick in the sixth round, the Patriots could overlook Brady no longer.
"I'll never forget, there was this gentleman by the name of Bucko Kilroy, one of the great football people in the history of our game, he was so old that Bucko played for the team that was called the Steagles, when the Steelers and Eagles had to combine rosters in World War Two, and he had become the General Manager of the Patriots.
"I always kept Bucko around and wanted him around because he was experienced when I needed help and I thought he was that guy for me.
"In the middle of the Draft Bucko looks up and says "I don't know what's going on with that guy, but somebody better call and see if he's dead or alive because nobody is taking him!'.
The Patriots found themselves on the clock. This Brady guy was still sitting there.
Quarterbacks coach Dick Rehbein liked him, offensive coordinator Charlie Weis liked him, Belichick liked him.
"We finally looked at each other like what are we doing?" says Pioli.
They pulled the trigger. And the rest was history, as they say. Pioli won three titles during his time with the Patriots, before taking up the post as Kansas City Chiefs General Manager in 2009.
Belichick and Brady won three more rings together, until the latter departed for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers where he would win a remarkable seventh in his first season with Bruce Arians' team.
Pioli cites the impact of Mike Vrabel and Tedy Bruschi, Larry Izzo and David Givens, Deion Branch and Antowain Smith, the overriding message being that it was never purely about Brady and Belichick. That was always the in-house Patriots attitude.
"It was a team that was such a throwback to the reality and the truth of what I know football to be about. And what Bill knew football to be about in that it was always more about the collective.
"We weren't this polished group yet, really, I think until the 2004 Championship team. And we were about the team.
"That first Super Bowl, when we were told the players were going to be introduced individually, our players said 'to heck with them' and they ran out into the field as a team. The owner Robert Kraft said, 'we'll pay the fine, we don't care'.
"I look back on those first three Championships. They were everything I felt we represented at the time. We had built our football team in a way that we had a lot of players that other teams did not want. Other teams had discarded players that came in for very low salaries because they weren't star players yet. They came to our team.
"They did the work, they sacrificed, and I think one of the things that I feel bad about retrospectively is because our players bought into the team concept so much that they never got enough public respect for how good they were."
Three-time Super Bowl champion executive Scott Pioli joins the Sky Sports NFL coverage for Week Three this weekend; watch the Los Angeles Chargers at the Minnesota Vikings from 6pm, followed by Chicago Bears at Kansas City Chiefs in the 9.25pm kickoff.
