The Patriots now officially have their top post-Bill Belichick pieces in place, naming Eliot Wolf their executive VP of player personnel nearly four months after hiring Jerod Mayo to replace the coaching legend on the sideline.
Filling these two jobs involved a historically low-volume search. After language in Mayo’s contract allowed the Patriots to work around the Rooney Rule — which mandates two external minority candidates be interviewed for HC positions — the team met with only two outside candidates for its de facto GM position. And the process leading to the Wolf hire proved to be a box-checking operation, as a few candidates around the league effectively predicted.
During search that saw three executives — the Bengals’ Trey Brown, the Bills’ Terrance Gray and former Cardinals staffer Quentin Harris — decline interviews, the Patriots met with Eagles scouting director Brandon Hunt and former Panthers exec Samir Suleiman. Neither interview took place at the team facility, according to SI.com’s Albert Breer, and the two candidates who agreed to interview did not meet with anyone beyond the Krafts.
Widely expected to end with Wolf being given the keys on a full-time basis, this Patriots search brought the combined total of outside candidates interviewed for the HC and GM jobs to two this offseason. By comparison, the Panthers met with 11 outside candidates for their HC post and eight non-Carolina-based staffers for their GM gig. The Chargers spoke with nine GM candidates and met with 13 outside coaches. The Commanders’ HC-GM search covered five GM aspirants and seven outside HC interviewees. The Raiders’ search most closely resembled the Patriots’, as they only met with two non-Antonio Pierce candidates for HC and five GM candidates.
The Pats, who have not given out a GM title in more than 30 years, gave Wolf a trial run by installing him as their acting personnel chief months before the draft, Breer adds. It would have been borderline shocking to see the team allow Wolf to select its hopeful long-term quarterback (No. 3 overall pick Drake Maye), turning down Giants and Vikings trade-up offers along the way, and then go with another candidate to lead the way post-draft. Most around the league correctly predicted New England would stick with Wolf, a longtime exec who had worked as the No. 2 man in Green Bay and Cleveland. Wolf later became a finalist for the Bears and Vikings’ GM jobs in 2022.
Wolf, 42, has changed the Patriots’ scouting system by replacing Belichick’s setup with what he used with the Packers; the Patriots will also switch up their workflow by having both Wolf and Mayo report to ownership. While this format can cause division, other teams have both their HC and GM meet directly with ownership rather than use a top-down approach.
Prior to Belichick’s exit, Matt Groh worked as his top lieutenant. The Patriots have employed Wolf since 2020, but the Krafts saw enough in the second-generation personnel man to vault him past Groh and into their top front office spot. Groh remains with the organization, but it will be Wolf — likely with more input from ownership compared to the Belichick era — leading the way.
Ownership did not conduct thorough searches to reach its Mayo-Wolf endpoint. That stands to be an important footnote as the team prepares for its first post-Belichick season.
I hate articles like this.
The author bent over backwards insinuating racism in the hiring process but didn’t have the cahones to call it out. And of course, he’s wrong.
And I quote; “After language in Mayo’s contract allowed the Patriots to work around the Rooney Rule — which mandates two external minority candidates be interviewed for HC positions — the team met with only two outside candidates for its de facto GM position”.
Mayo is a Diverse Hire. But they are still supposed to interview two external Diverse candidates anyway?
Just a terrible and divisive take.
The Patriots didn’t meet the Rooney Rule and got around it. It’s not an outcome rule, it’s a process rule. It’s what happened. The author didn’t say it was a good thing or bad thing, you got pissed that it was mentioned.
Focusing on the process so much it distracts from the coach as a person is disrespectful and patronizing. The discussion of Mayo should be focused on him being a talented young coordinator hand picked by one of the greatest coaches of all time to be his successor to the point it was in both of their contracts. Guys like Mayo getting these kinds of opportunities is the whole reason the rule exists in the first place. Instead, the discussion is drown out by “well the Patriots hired a black coach but they didn’t interview the required number of minority coaches so let’s debate if we should give them a pat on the back or ding them for a technicality for months on end.”
No one thinks of Mike Tomlin as that black coach. No one thinks of Ozzie Newsome as that black VP of Player Ops. You know who people think of as a Rooney Rule candidate? Leslie Frazier who half the teams interview to check a box on the coach hiring checklist. Enough of this hyper fixated Rooney Rule obsession.
I don’t think it is a divisive take, but I agree it is not needed in the article. The article overall is well written and does not need that Rooney Rule detail added as it is not entirely germane to the Eliot Wolf hire.
Just glad it all worked out, I love happy endings.
I still wonder what would happen if the Packers added Wolf over Gute for GM way back when.
The Patriots must have some dirt on Roger Goodell, as he is always letting them slide when it comes to following league rules.