Should the New England Patriots win their second Super Bowl in three years Sunday, do not expect their front-office guru to make the late-night talk rounds or become the subject of best-selling nonfiction.
Operating as the stealth administrator between coach and cast, the rock and a hard cap, Scott Pioli asserted on Wednesday that there was no place in football for a front-office celebrity, for the equivalent of Billy Beane.
"It's about the team winning championships," he said. "If you're in this for the trappings of the game, you're in this for the wrong reasons. And that higher-profile garbage is part of the trappings."
Tell that to Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who is the gilded genius of the book "Moneyball." Tell it to Isiah Thomas, the mayor of Madison Square Garden. From Pat Riley to Joe Torre, other sports have their power bench people, but in far more cases than in the NFL there is at least acknowledgment of the working partnership that generally is a stipulation for success.
Elsewhere in New England, front-office trappings come with the territory. If the region should find itself with a World Series champion by next October, you can bet that Theo Epstein, the young Red Sox architect, will be the Election Day preference for president, not John Kerry.
Pioli? He enjoyed his 15 minutes of round-table fame on Wednesday at the Patriots' hotel but was more interested in returning to his room to continue preparations for the 2004 college draft. "I don't care that people don't know who I am," he said.
Officially, he is the Patriots' vice president for player personnel, or the chief operating officer of Bill Belichick Inc. Not that Belichick is a serial attention-seeker, far from it, but this is how it goes in the sport of coaching monarchs, on teams where sideline-generated heat is often the primary motivational tool. He who dons the headset indisputably wears the crown.
"Coaching has more of a play in football than it does in any other sport," Marty Hurney, the Carolina Panthers' general manager, said.
Like Ernie Accorsi, the Giants' front-office honcho, Hurney is a former sportswriter, which must mean he knows what he's talking about. He covered the Redskins for The Washington Star, which is now defunct, and later The Washington Times before landing a job on the Redskins' public relations staff. The rest is history and the mastering of the football science known as capology.
There are more players in football, more arcane rounds of the annual college draft than in basketball, more negotiations, more year-to-year roster manipulations in a system with few guaranteed contracts and wanton free agency.
"You've got so many things that go into it, especially the cap," Hurney said. "Then again, you say it's a hard cap, but what makes it hard is that it's not really hard. You can manipulate it any way you want for the present, but it's going to get you in trouble for the future."
If the Panthers win Sunday night, Hurney can count on getting no national recognition for cracking the cap code, for Carolina's turnaround from 1-15 two years ago, for reeling in two vital free-agent offensive cogs, running back Stephen Davis and quarterback Jake Delhomme.
John Fox, the charismatic coach Hurney helped hire, will have a book offer before he gets to Disneyland, not that Hurney, the old Redskins beat guy, cares any more about that than Pioli.
RSS