The Patriots front office looks a lot different than it did a few years ago.
On Tuesday night, Nick Caserio reportedly agreed to become the Texans’ next general manager and he isn’t close to the only executive to leave New England in recent years.
Last offseason, Monti Ossenfort left for Tennessee to be its director of player personnel and then a few lead scouts have left too. DeJuan Daniels went to Las Vegas in 2019 and then Pat Stewart went to Philadelphia the year before. And lastly, also in 2018 national scout James Liipfert departed for Houston.
That’s a lot of turnover for what is a small personnel department, which brings us to the Patriots replacing Caserio.
If assistant director of player personnel Dave Ziegler doesn’t leave for Denver, after he was reportedly requested to interview for its GM opening, he likely will slide into Caserio’s title as director of player personnel. And Eliot Wolf, who was hired as an executive earlier this year, could be asked to do more. But, it feels like the Patriots need to do more.
Given all the turnover in recent years, it would benefit the Patriots and Bill Belichick in particular to bring in someone with experience to help the organization in what is one of the most important offseasons in the last 20 years.
Fortunately, there are several former executives available and could be intriguing to Belichick. Those include Bob Quinn and Thomas Dimitroff, who were fired by the Lions and Falcons respectively, as well as Scott Pioli.
Any of these three would be benefit the organization given not only their experience with Belichick, but also their experience around the league. One of the knocks in recent years is Belichick isn’t challenged as much as he should be with decisions, and these any of these three certainly would not be afraid to do so given who they are.
Getting different points of view is very important when making big decisions relating to the roster and recently it seems like there hasn’t been much of that. In addition for these three, Quinn and Dimitroff in particular, rejoining the Patriots front office could help get their careers back on track after being fired this season.
So when it comes to replacing Caserio and his personnel duties, Ziegler and Wolf are obvious names, but don’t sleep on some former members of the organization currently without jobs.