Scott Pioli: From coaching Newcastle to drafting Tom Brady and becoming a three-time Super Bowl champion executive | NFL News

Before Bill Belichick drafted Tom Brady and became a three-time Super Bowl-winning executive on one of the NFL’s greatest dynasty teams, Scott Pioli had Whitley Bay . And Newcastle. There’s also a bar owned by Sting’s brother.

It was the summer of 1986, and Pioli was a defensive lineman at Central Connecticut State University, where football coach Sean Green, who retired in 2019 after 35 seasons, told him there was a chance to develop his talents.

Green was friends with the then general manager of the Newcastle Senators football team, whose coach was an American from Ledford, and he was keen to hire some of the Blue Devils’ top players.

Pioli was accompanied on the trip by his friend Sal Centorino.

“They take care of our food and accommodation and take care of everything, but I’m still playing in college, so I can’t play or I’ll lose my eligibility in the United States,” Pioli told Sky Sports.

Unable to strap on pads and a helmet, Pioli transitioned to UK’s defensive coordinator role, marking the beginning of his coaching journey. He is now known in the Senators Hall of Fame as the owner of the first defensive playbook in the Northeast.

“We had a good team and we had an unbeaten season. I wasn’t there all season because I still needed to continue my training. But as soon as school was over we got on the plane to London. flight, was picked up and headed to the land of the Geordi people.

“I’ve never been abroad! It was such an incredible experience. It was such a great experience being with so many great people that I actually had to leave early because I thought, ‘I’ve got to get back to training!’ ” It was so much fun, it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. “

Pioli recalled that his players used their jobs to buy pads and helmets while trying to find a balance between work and football. Although there is much talk about the popularity of the game in Europe today, it is clear that the love of the game ran deep in Britain at the time.

“I love it because it reminds me of why I fell in love with the game of football. It’s a community thing. We have a cyclist. It’s a beautiful team,” Pioli added.

“One thing I will never forget is that I was picked up at Heathrow and Salle airports and drove all the way to Newcastle, a country that looked different to the US. I hadn’t been to a lot of places and we didn’t have the money Growing up, so we didn’t go on vacations all over the United States.

“But it was so beautiful as we traveled and saw the greenery, the hills, the fields. And then we got to Whitley Bay and it was just spectacular. It’s just this charming, beautiful town.”

Pioli is no different than any student who needs pocket money, especially coming here during tough economic times.

So he would work shifts at a local bar in Whitley Bay called Dunes, owned by Philip Sumner, brother of Sting, the lead singer of The Police.

“We needed some side hustle to make some extra money,” Pioli recalls. “This pub is right on the water. They actually let us work a few nights a week to make extra money because RC paid us, but the guys were also raising money and doing some fundraising to make sure we had a place live. .

“I was a young man. I was probably 20 and I was eating a lot, you know I was training and we were eating at RC and his wife’s house. We spent a lot of time with the community and I can’t forget the people How kind, knowing we were outsiders but not knowing who we were.

“We were welcomed everywhere and I fell in love with Newcastle. I fell in love with the Geordie people.”

As for the accent? It takes some initial confusion, humor, and time to adjust to the unfamiliar tone.

“Coming from America, you don’t understand the different dialects and accents, like we do in America,” Pioli said with a laugh. “I remember the first time, especially if they had a few pints in there, or if we had a few pints in there, they started speaking Geordie, so to speak. I was like ‘What?!’

“It reminds me of a tough industrial town, like America, you know, cities like Cleveland and Detroit and Pittsburgh, they all have gritty people who are kind and hard-working people. I could go on forever Talking about my time there “It was spectacular. “

Pioli spent two years as a graduate assistant coach at Syracuse before heading to Central Connecticut State, which beat LSU in the 1988 Hall of Fame Bowl and then Georgia in the Peach Bowl the next season.

He spent the next two years as the offensive line and defensive line coach at Murray State before the NFL came calling.

“I met Bill Belichick in college when I was a player and we became friends and stayed in touch,” he recalled. “So I was at Murray State when he was hired as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, and he ended up hiring me and bringing me to Cleveland.”

Pioli remained with the Browns after they moved to Baltimore, playing a role in drafting Hall of Famers Jonathan Ogden and Ray Lewis before rejoining Belichick with the New York Jets in 1997. gather.

In 2000, he followed Belichick to the Patriots and served as vice president of player personnel. One of his important achievements was helping Michigan quarterback Tom Brady be selected with the 199th overall pick in the draft. Selected.

The Patriots won three Super Bowls and laid the foundation for eight years of dominance, and between them Pioli and Belichick established themselves as the league’s savviest evaluators and the most astute in the NFL’s draft and free-agent recruiting processes. Navigator status to maintain a competitive roster in which a shared spirit of team-first flourishes.

Their Patriots DNA makes for a ruthless winning machine that, under Brady, will go down as one of the defining masterstrokes in draft history.

“It will take at least another 10 minutes before we fully understand Brady’s pick,” Pioli joked.

“Going into the offseason, we only had 41 players under contract. I think the roster limit for training camp at the time was 85, so we only had 41 players and were $10.5 million over the cap. Now, that’s not $10.5 million ” over the $200 million cap — that’s $10.5 million more than the cap under $100,000.

“We have to re-sign some contracts and cut a bunch of players, and we have to get down to 39 players to hit the cap. I give that context because when you draft, you want to draft the best player you can at any time sometimes. You have to deviate and draft as needed.

“That’s why people say, ‘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 have three quarterbacks on draft boards in Drew Bledsoe, Michael Bishop and John Freese, but New England can’t afford to cut them because of their cap numbers. upper limit.

“At some point, we started talking about Brady in the fourth round. You build a draft board and when players get drafted, you pull those tags off the board.

“Around the fourth round, Brady wasn’t among the top players we were talking about. We kept saying, ‘We don’t need a quarterback, we don’t even have a backup tackle, or we don’t have a starting nickel corner. . “We’ve been going through this process.

“So we talked about it in the fourth round and fifth round. We actually drafted a guy before Brady in the sixth round. We drafted a defensive tackle before Brady in the fifth round, but Deep down we felt like Brady was ranked higher, but we were like ‘We can’t take a fourth quarterback, we need to start building this football team.’ “

After selecting Virginia safety Antwan Harris with the 187th pick in the sixth round, the Patriots could no longer ignore Brady.

“I will never forget, there was a gentleman named Bucko Kilroy, one of the greatest football figures in the history of our football, he was so old that Bucko Kilroy was a Playing for a team named Steagles when the Steelers were in World War II and the Eagles had to consolidate their rosters, he became the Patriots’ general manager.

“I always keep Bako around and want him around because when I need help, he’s experienced and I think he’s the right guy for me.

“In the middle of the draft, Barco looked up and said, ‘I don’t know what happened to that guy, but someone better call and see if he’s dead or alive, because no one’s taking him!’ ‘.

The Patriots found out their time was up. This Brady guy is still sitting there.

Quarterbacks coach Dick Rabin likes him, offensive coordinator Charlie Weis likes him, Belichick likes him.

“We finally looked at each other and said, what are we doing?” Pioli said.

They pulled the trigger. As they say, the rest is history. Pioli won three championships while with the Patriots before serving as general manager of the Kansas City Chiefs in 2009.

Belichick won three more rings with Brady until the latter left for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he won an impressive seventh in Bruce Arians’ first season with the team. ring.

Pioli cited the influences of Mike Vrabel and Teddy Bruschi, Larry Izzo and David Givens, Dion Branch and Antoine Smith, and the most important message is that this It was never just about Brady and Belichick. That was always the attitude within the Patriots.

“This team brought me back to reality, to the truth of football as I understood it. Football as Bill understood it was always more about the collective.”

“I don’t think we were this perfect team until the championship team in 2004. We were about the team.

“In the first Super Bowl, when we were told the players were going to be introduced individually, our players said ‘fuck them,’ and then they ran on the field as a team. Owner Robert Kraft said, ‘ We will pay the fine, we don’t care”.

“I look back at the first three championships. They were everything I thought we stood for at the time. The way we built our football team was we had a lot of players that other teams didn’t want. Other teams abandoned players and their salaries were very low, Because they’re not star players yet. They come to our team.

“They did the work, they made the sacrifices, and I think looking back, one of the things that makes me sad is that because our players bought into the philosophy of the team so much, they never got enough of their performance. public respect.”

Three-time Super Bowl winning executive Scott Pioli will join Sky Sports NFL for Week 3 coverage this weekend; watch the Los Angeles Chargers take on the Minnesota Vikings starting at 6 p.m., followed by Watch the Chicago Bears take on the Kansas City Chiefs at 9:25 p.m.