Why isn’t Scott Pioli running an NFL team?

BigDogsHunt · Nov 27, 2008

Why isn't Scott Pioli running an NFL team? - NFL - Yahoo! Sports

Last year, the Miami Dolphins and Atlanta Falcons had bottomed out. After years of blown draft picks and other blunders, the once-proud Dolphins, 34 years removed from their last league title, won only one more game than they’d lost during the 17-0 perfect season of 1972. The Falcons, in contrast, managed three wins - but they did so amid the embarrassment of Mike Vick’s incarceration and an Alcatraz-style escape by coach Bobby Petrino.

Nearly twelve months later, both teams find themselves in the thick of the playoff race.

How has it happened? In Miami, owner Wayne Huizenga knew that it was time to hand the reins to someone with a proven track record, and get out of the way. In Atlanta, owner Arthur Blank realized that G.M. Rich McKay needed to be nudged from the football side of the operation, and that the hiring of a coach and the crafting of the roster should be entrusted to a guy with the chops to build a winner.

And the men who have reclaimed these two franchises have something important in common. Both have close ties to Patriots V.P. of player personnel Scott Pioli.

Pioli once worked for Miami V.P. of football operations Bill Parcells, and Parcells saw fit to allow Pioli to marry one of his daughters. (Securing Parcells’ approval was likely no small feat for Pioli, undoubtedly involving a portable polygraph machine and/or a cat that can’t flush a toilet.) Through last season, Falcons G.M. Thomas Dimitroff worked for Pioli in New England for six years, most recently as the director of college scouting.

So why isn’t Pioli, who yields final say on personnel matters to coach Bill Belichick, running a team of his own?
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