The man seems born for the job of general manager. He’s been with the team for years in an assistant and advisor’s capacity. He just guided the personnel department through their first post-Bill Belichick offseason. He just ran point on the first draft of head coach Jerod Mayo’s career. He’s largely viewed as a rising star among the decision makers of NFL rosters. He was raised by a man who scouted players and ran football clubs for nearly four decades.
Everything lines up for Eliot Wolf as the next GM of the New England Patriots. So what’s the holdup in hiring him?
It’s complicated, even though it’s not, and shouldn't be, but is, and, well, it is what it is.
According to NFL Operations, the Rooney Rule is in place to ensure minorities be given an equal opportunity for any coaching, GM or coordinator position. We hear about it the most every January when head coaches and coordinators lose their jobs or move on, and thus a search begins with minority candidates being given a chance to interview alongside any preferred candidates a team has. This all makes sense.
Where things get confusing for the Pats is how we heard they were in compliance with the Rooney Rule before the draft and now aren’t, and thus candidates are being invited in to interview for a job most presumed to be Wolf’s. We’ll get to that in a second.
For now, according to the Boston Herald’s Doug Kyed, because nobody held any personnel director title - Head of Ops, GM, etc - in the Belichick era, this was no big deal. He was everything and that’s how it went. Now that the Patriots are creating the position and reinstituting it, the Rooney Rule must be complied with before any decision is made. Hence why the Patriots have been making a show of making requests all week to bring in candidates.
Except it seems most of the candidates are fully aware of the Patriots’ desire to hire Wolf, so nobody wants to come in for the interview.
The Patriots have invited Buffalo Bills director of player personnel Terrance Gray, Cincinnati Bengals senior personnel executive Trey Brown and former Arizona Cardinals VP of player personnel Quentin Harris in for interviews, and all have turned them down, or “politely declined” the opportunity.
External candidates, no matter their race, gender or experience, seem to believe that Wolf is going to get the job and that this is merely a formality. Thus, even when it seems they’d like to stay out of the headlines and get back to focusing on building the 2024 team, they find themselves in the center of a potentially awkward situation for all.
Nobody wants to interview for a job they likely won’t get, and yet the Patriots have a league mandate they have to be in compliance with. This could create a bit of a stalemate, or at least delay, in the organization hiring Wolf or whomever, especially given what Wolf has done for the team in running the operations and draft prep for months.
Sadly in this case what is of noble cultural intent in the Rooney Rule now feels like a potentially obsolete obligation. Creating opportunities for minorities is quite necessary for a league that wants to bolster the number of minority coaches, coordinators and ownership, given the racial demographics of the league. But if the team knows who they want then, as Marvin Lewis said years ago when interviewing for the Dallas Cowboys coaching job he knew Mike McCarthy was going to ultimately land, “this is somebody's business, this is somebody's franchise, and nobody's going to tell them who to hire.”
Do the Patriots call on favors from executive friends around the league? Are there personnel people who want the practice of going through the interviews for potential opportunities down the line? Could someone else really make a run at what seems to be Wolf’s job for the taking? Or will we be in turnaround here for some time as the team and league try to figure out how to handle this sensitively without making an optics show to placate masses and factions. A tricky situation to monitor over the coming days. As if rebuilding a football team and finding the person you believe is best fit to rebuild that team isn’t difficult enough.