Before the white confetti shot into the black Superdome sky, Ron Wolf stood on the sideline in a dark suit watching the clock tick under three minutes left in Super Bowl XXXI.
Wolf held his hands out in front of his chest, rubbing them at first, then squeezing them slowly, left over right, five times. His teenage sons, Jonathan and Eliot, flanked him on either side, hands down and happy. They both wore Packers jerseys, light jeans and flashed a full smile that their father, Green Bay’s general manager, wouldn’t allow himself quite yet. Finally, Green Bay toppled the Patriots, 35-21, completing a long-awaited climb back atop pro football.
It had been almost 30 years to the day since the Packers’ first Super Bowl win in 1967. Eliot, just 14, witnessed every step of the climb.
That season, he joined his father in the draft room for a fourth straight year. He sat on training tables next to Brett Favre and Reggie White, as Green Bay staffers tended to their battle wounds and his curiously persistent case of in-grown toenails. He played high school football at nearby Notre Dame Academy, but plotted a career in scouting, absorbing lessons from four future general managers on the Packers’ staff.
Sometimes, though, scouting could wait. Eliot would bug John Schneider, now the Seahawks GM, to escape for a game of H-O-R-S-E.
“It was a really cool group of people, a special group of people,” Schneider said. “(Eliot) was a little brother to a bunch of us.”
Of course, Eliot was foremost his father’s son. Ron Wolf cemented his Hall of Fame legacy that night in New Orleans, having resurrected a dead franchise originally known as the NFL’s first dynasty. While a photo of that sideline moment lives in his Florida home, Wolf does not count Super Bowl XXXI as the crowning achievement of his life.
His wife, Eliot’s mother, Edie, explains years later over the phone.
“If you’re not living the football life, it may seem that winning a championship or going to the Hall of Fame become these sort of all-encompassing events. But in reality, we’re a family, like every other family,” she said. “We get up, we go to work, we go to school, we do whatever. And these are wonderful things that happen along the way, and we’re proud of each other when they happen. But it’s not like life stops in any way because of these things.”
Edie, a Newton native, devoted her early life to the study of psychology, earning her bachelor’s at Wellesley, then a Master’s and PhD at the University of Kentucky. In Green Bay, she worked part-time out of a home office specializing in marriage counseling and child behavior therapy. Edie also raised her two children in clear and certain terms.
“They’re so honest,’” Eliot said. “I think that’s the key, is being genuine. I think that builds trust.”
Trust in others, trust in self. Jonathan never ventured into pro football, choosing passions of music and aerospace as a high schooler. Today, he runs a veterinary clinic on the island city of Sitka, Alaska, with his wife; about as far removed as one can be from the all-consuming, myopic world of pro football.
Meanwhile, Eliot, as a high school junior, quit the football team midseason. He was smart enough to read his own scouting report. Too small, unable to withstand regular contact in his father’s game. He and Ron never spoke at length about his decision.
“To me, it wasn’t a big deal,” Ron said. “You like what you do, or you don’t like it. He didn’t like it, so why do it?”
What Eliot liked, as a quiet kid with an elephant’s memory who kept his own counsel, was experiencing football as an intellectual exercise. He still follows his father’s scouting system, a simple numbers-only grading scale.
“In my system, you either can or you can’t,” Ron says.
By the accounts of several NFL general managers, current and former colleagues and those close to him, Eliot can. But will he?
Will Eliot, the Patriots’ de facto GM, rebuild in New England? If he succeeds, stories will be written describing Eliot as following in Ron’s footsteps, the NFL’s latest dynasty resurrected after its first.
But this is the central myth of his public life.
Eliot walks a parallel path, a distinction he learned to draw as a child that allowed him to preserve a sense of self within Ron’s shadow.
One afternoon, after the Wolfs moved to Green Bay in the early 1990s, Eliot came home from school visibly upset because his classmates had disparaged his dad.
“I said, ‘Look, you’re in a fishbowl now. People are going to say things to you about dad. And you just have to listen politely, tell them that you will share their thoughts with their father and move on,’ ” Edie remembered. “And it was only a one time thing. If it happened again, he never told me about it.”
“That’s just his personality,” she continued. “He isn’t terribly bothered by what other people think.”
There is no separating Eliot’s story from his father’s, but once Eliot discovered how to live in Ron’s shadow, he flourished in the darkness where his dad raised his scouts; a place he’s since found prospects like old Packers stars Greg Jennings and Aaron Jones, and Patriots running back Rhamondre Stevenson.
“Ron would send them off to a dark room to write up a report and give ‘em a piece of paper. And they had to prove themselves in the dark room,” remembered Andrew Brandt, the Packers’ vice president from 1999-2008. “And that was Eliot. He was a scout.”
Months after Ron began remaking Green Bay in 1992, the Kraft family started taking steps to buy the Patriots. In doing so, the Krafts set into motion converging paths that would cross first in Super Bowl XXXI, and again almost three decades later at the most anticipated, most scrutinized draft of their tenure.
Growing up Green Bay
Ten years before he became general manager of the Buccaneers, Jason Licht cruised through Philadelphia on a work trip. He was the Eagles’ new assistant director of player personnel, but on this day, a chauffeur. Eliot Wolf rode shotgun.
Wolf had flown in for an interview with Philadelphia’s front office in 2004, a fresh-faced University of Miami graduate back on the scouting trail he had learned to walk as a kid. The position was a low-level scouting job. Licht quizzed him on the drive.
Tell me about this player. OK, now this one. OK, what about that one?
Wolf recited scouting reports on every one from memory. Licht dug deeper to test him. He rattled off third- and fourth-stringers, footnotes soon to be lost in football history.
Wolf read the fine print without squinting, voicing each player’s height, weight, speed and athletic testing score, their college and jersey number. The car stopped at the Eagles headquarters.
“I was amazed by his memory,” Licht said. “Almost photographic.”
During his visit, the Eagles brought Wolf into a private room with their “emergency board,” a wall bearing hundreds of labeled magnets. Each magnet represented a free agent the team was tracking in case it needed to replace a player due to injury.
Ranking likelihood of what Patriots do at No. 3 in 2024 NFL Draft
Wolf scanned the wall. He pointed to one magnet and turned to the team’s pro scouting director.
“He signed last week,” Wolf said matter-of-factly.
Then Wolf pointed to another. More bad news. That player was taken, too. The front office behind the NFC's next champion was a step behind an unemployed visitor barely old enough to buy beer.
The Eagles wanted to hire him. Wolf chose home instead.
In February 2004, almost four years after his father retired as general manager, the Packers announced Wolf’s hiring to a new position under head coach/GM Mike Sherman. He received his own press release. And soon flashed a smooth, new jumper.
“All of a sudden, he was this really good basketball player,” Schneider said. “And it kind of pissed me off.”
It was a homecoming, not for the son of Ron Wolf, but the scout who had spent the last few summers evaluating players and attending training camp practices in Green Bay. Those years followed previous summers in Atlanta, where as a kid Eliot picked up jockstraps in the locker room and held the cord that ran to the headset of head coach Dan Reeves, among other menial intern duties.
“He was not interested in your traditional summer camp,” Edie said.
Though Eliot’s interests did stretch beyond the sidelines, a place they live today. He loves baseball and reggae. He adores old Western movies, especially Clint Eastwood films; a love passed down from his grandfather to his father.
Movies helped bond Eliot to then Packers scout, fellow Western buff and current Patriots executive Alonzo Highsmith. The 59-year-old Highsmith is like many of Eliot’s friends: much grayer. There’s ex-Raiders GM Reggie McKenzie, 61; Packers national scout Sam Seale, also 61; even former Red Sox third base coach Dale Sveum, 60, who coached and briefly managed in Milwaukee.
“He was naturally able to bond with people. Like Edie, there’s a way you look at someone and know you can open up to them. He had that,” Brandt said. “You felt like this was a guy you can trust.”
Most importantly, under new general manager Ted Thompson, the Packers came to trust his evaluations. All those years as a teenager, learning from Schneider and McKenzie, observing coaches like Mike Holmgren and Andy Reid, fed a river of scouting knowledge that carried him faster than his contemporaries could climb the front office ladder.
“There’s no price for that,” Highsmith said. “To grow up in it every single day, what more could you ask for?”
Wolf rose to assistant director of pro personnel in 2008, director of pro personnel in 2012, then director of player personnel three years later and finally director of football operations in 2016; the same title Schneider and McKenzie held before becoming GMs elsewhere.
The league took notice, eyeing his footprints.
“Scouts, we know kind of who everybody is, and you pay attention. He was always somebody that worked hard," said NFL Network analyst Daniel Jeremiah, an ex-Eagles, Browns and Ravens scout. "Obviously when you have the family history that he does, it would have been easy to maybe try and coast or cruise. He never did that.”
The first calls to fly Green Bay’s nest came in January 2017. Wolf met with the 49ers and Colts about their general manager openings. The 34-year-old executive was known as a sharp, tireless evaluator with a famous father.
Both teams passed. No matter. He loved working for Thompson. He liked watching Aaron Rodgers effortlessly whip spirals on Sundays. He trusted head coach Mike McCarthy.
But that all ended when Thompson transitioned into a new role the following year, vacating Green Bay’s general manager post for the first time since 2005. Wolf interviewed to replace him, as did Brian Gutekunst, a Ron Wolf hire who also reported directly to Thompson.
The Packers picked Gutekunst. He hoped Wolf would stay at his side, but the spurned son of Green Bay declined.
Wolf’s Green Bay departure remains a sensitive topic. He handled it with grace, they insist. But whether it’s a pain they carry for him, or their own, it’s there. Sensitive to the touch, complicated. A family matter.
“I think he handled it professionally, very well. Obviously, he was disappointed. I think the reasons he was given had holes in ‘em. But it’s all past," Ron said. "It’s over.
What home could no longer offer him, he had to find elsewhere.
New places, new faces
Weeks before Covid-19 brought the world crashing down around him, Wolf’s phone buzzed to life inside his suburban Cleveland home.
His caller ID showed an unknown number. Wolf often ignored these calls. Yet something inside tugged at him. Boredom or perhaps a premonition.
“Hello?”
Bill Belichick was on the other end.
Like a half-dozen other teams, Belichick had interest in hiring Wolf. He was a free agent again after serving two years as the Browns’ assistant general manager that ended with a time-honored Cleveland tradition: regime change.
Belichick peppered him with questions, working to answer his own question of whether Wolf could fit as a rare outsider in New England.
At the time, Belichick sensed he could soon lose his top lieutenant and future Texans general manager, Nick Caserio, who left a year later. His director of college scouting, Monti Ossenfort, was also playing out the final months on his contract. They hung up with an agreement to stay in touch.
Wolf, then 37, eventually reached a handshake agreement to consult for Schneider’s Seahawks. He traveled to the combine working for Seattle and called the other teams, updating his status. Belichick didn’t pick up, so Wolf left him a voicemail.
A minute later, his phone buzzed again.
“Can you get out of it?” Belichick asked.
Wolf said yes, but needed specifics. So he met Belichick at his J.W. Marriott hotel room in downtown Indianapolis, where Belichick offered him a job that would find its shape with time.
“That was very important to me, making sure I was involved,” Wolf said. “And that was sort of new and unique, especially when you talked to some of the people here that had been working here for a long time and didn’t have access to (Belichick).”
But first, Wolf had to break bad news and his commitment to an older brother. Schneider didn’t hold him to it, realizing the conversation was much harder on Wolf than it was for him.
Wolf had all but cut ties when former Seahawks coach Pete Carroll again called a pass play late against the Patriots. This time, a Hail Mary.
“Don’t you want to bet on yourself?” Carroll asked Wolf.
To Carroll, that meant turning the Patriots’ offer down and proving himself to Seattle over the next two months. Earn your role here among friends.
“On the drive home from the combine, I thought a lot about it,” Wolf admitted. “But in my mind, betting on myself meant going to New England.”
He called Belichick, and took the job. He bought a house near the single New England connection he had: his aunt, Edie’s sister, lives five minutes away. Wolf finally moved east around July 4.
The Patriots’ next personnel head, Dave Ziegler, appreciated the leap Wolf had made. He was another outsider, who started his career in Denver before moving to New England in 2013 and rising through the ranks. Initially a curiosity, Wolf became a like-minded ally. A friend.
“He loved watching tape, talking football, talking about players. That was evident even over Zoom calls,” Ziegler said. “If you worked in New England during that time, it’s not one of those places where there was a lot of conversation outside of football. It’s kind of a tough environment to come into.”
Once Wolf finally entered the building within the NFL’s new covid protocols, he began leaving footprints in Belichick’s program.
In the fall of 2020, Wolf visited Oklahoma and became the first Patriots evaluator to rave about a running back prospect named Rhamondre Stevenson. Early the next offseason, Belichick tasked him with “red-lining” the assistant coaches’ scouting reports ahead of free agency and the draft. His job was to sharpen their scouting skills and use of language, so the coaching staff and front office could better understand one another.
Later, in the second round of the 2021 draft, Wolf closed a trade with Cincinnati that yielded the Patriots’ second-best pick that year: Alabama defensive tackle Christian Barmore.
After a full year, Wolf had made a home. His professional life was smoothing out, even though the gap between his philosophy and Belichick’s would never fully be bridged.
Which brings us to Wolf’s favorite Belichick story.
Ahead of the 2021 draft, Wolf argued for a prospect whose tape and traits he believed spoke for themselves: Penn State linebacker Micah Parsons.
Before Parsons started on his Hall of Fame track in Dallas, he was a prospect with an other-worldly combination of power, speed, quickness and explosiveness. Wolf raised these traits in a meeting, arguing for a player whose profile seem to speak for itself. But he was rebuffed. Specifically, by Belichick.
Belichick criticized Parsons for ducking blockers on tape, a problem in his defense where linebackers are required to take on offensive linemen head-on and slam into them. This wasn’t sound football.
Wolf fought back. Belichick dismissed Parsons again, indicating he wasn’t a fit. Wolf stood his ground.
“He kept talking about the athletic skill set, the potential and upside of the player,” Ziegler remembered. “We can teach him to do those types of things, but do not overlook (him) just because he doesn't do that one thing.”
The memory of that exchange brings a smile to Wolf nowadays. Belichick, he believes, was testing him. Wolf knows he passed.
“I mean, (Belichick) thought Micah Parsons was athletic,” Wolf said. “It was kind of seeing if he’d get any pushback, which he definitely did.”
The Cowboys drafted Parsons with the No. 12 overall pick, three spots ahead of where the Patriots selected quarterback Mac Jones.
Weeks after the draft, Ziegler hosted the Patriots front office at his house for a party. Ron and Edie happened to visit that weekend, so Ziegler extended the invite to them, as well as Eliot’s wife, Regan, and young girls. Soon enough, Ron was holding court on the Zieglers’ back patio, with roughly a dozen Patriots scouts and executives.
He took questions about trading for Brett Favre. His best draft pick ever. Then one front-office member wanted to know what the Hall of Famer seeks in quarterbacks, the secrets that led him to Favre, and his successors in Green Bay to Rodgers and now Jordan Love.
He shared his wisdom by naming three traits.
Arm talent, accuracy and anticipation.
Frustration and promotion
In January 2022, the Raiders hired Ziegler away as their new GM, meaning for the second time in four years, Wolf was a candidate for the top job in his own front office.
Belichick’s best internal options were Wolf and new director of college scouting Matt Groh.
Belichick chose Groh, partly for the reason he drafted prospects and signed free agents. Fit.
Groh knew the system, believed in the system, grew up in the system. He was a Patriot from the days he shadowed his own father, former New England assistant Al Groh, at training camp in the mid-90s.
Still, some in football operations expected the job to be Wolf’s.
“There was some surprise initially why he didn’t get it versus Matt,” one team source. “But there was a relationship there with Matt and coach Belichick, and he really developed Matt to prepare him for that kind of role.”
Wolf’s consolation prize was a new title: director of scouting, the same he holds today.
Belichick leaned on him more over his final two years, but Wolf’s role remained largely unchanged. Groh and Wolf effectively served as personnel advisors to Belichick, with Groh having the largest hand in the draft, and Wolf utilizing his vast network of league contacts to help free agency and, basically, wherever else he could.
The Patriots struggled that season, an 8-9 campaign doomed by dysfunction and bad coaching. Meanwhile, fruitless debates behind closed doors continued.
“I could sense some frustration, based on the way we scouted and placed our board,” a team source said. “It wasn’t just Eliot, but others in the front office, too.”
Frustration became a way of life last year, an unmitigated disaster that cost Belichick his job. It was as close to broken as Wolf has ever felt in his career.
“Just the amount of negativity and lack of hope on the roster and things like that. It was a challenging year professionally, and I was a part of it,” he said. “Like (outside), everyone was pretty quick to blame Bill for everything. But we were all party to being 4-and-13.”
Highsmith, then the general manager at their shared alma mater, the University of Miami, remembers commiserating with Wolf almost weekly.
“We were losing to, like, Georgia Tech, and I would call him. And he would be like, ‘Well, we scored zero points,' ” he said.
The Krafts, according to sources, began asking league contacts about Wolf late last year. After officially parting with Belichick on Jan. 11, ownership held two meetings with him, first asking about his plan to fix the team, and then offering him final say over the roster roughly one week after Jerod Mayo took over as head coach.
Wolf called his wife first with the news. Ron was next. Highsmith heard not long thereafter, and was later offered a job in the Patriots’ front office.
“I told my wife (a Miami native), ‘I’m sorry. It’s a no-brainer. I want to help him,’ ” he said.
Days later, Wolf informed most of the team’s scouts and executives in a small meeting. He overhauled the Patriots’ scouting system the next day. Team sources describe their draft preparation as a “grind” under Wolf, though they’ve felt more heard.
“He’s really trying with the collaborative approach,” a source said. “Putting trust in the scouts that watched the players through the entire process and trying to trust their opinions.”
In late March, Kraft explained his decision to promote Wolf.
“Well, the major decisions in life that I’ve made, I’ve gone with my instincts. Sometimes people don’t agree,” Kraft said. “But I think Eliot has good training, good pedigree.”
That pedigree is something Eliot stays in touch with daily. He calls Ron, and they discuss each day’s transactions. His father watches with a curiosity common to several of Eliot’s former friends and colleagues about what he will do next.
There is also a belief.
"I think he's gonna do fantastic things,” said Gutekunst, the Packers’ GM, “just because of how tremendous he is at what he does.”
Parallel paths, again
One week before the draft, Wolf is sitting across from me alone in a conference room at Patriots headquarters.
He rests his forearms on a long mahogany table and leans forward, wearing a pressed, navy button-down. Stubble coats his boyish face. He clasps his hands together, thumbs still.
The man I’ve heard about is the man I see. Wolf makes steady eye contact. He’s forthcoming, yet understated. Now, let’s see about this famous memory.
I relay part of a story one of his old teachers, Carolyn Brown, shared with me from his high school days. After the draft one year, Brown told Wolf that her son, then a student at Texas A&M, was disappointed that a classmate had been drafted later than expected. She emailed saying the prospect’s name was “Toonen,” which wasn’t a match for any player in Texas A&M history, but sounded close enough to Chris Ruhman, a 1998 third-round pick.
Wolf listens to my retelling of this decades-old story. He pauses.
“No, it was Cameron Spikes,” he remembers. “She said her son was, I think, best friends with him. And she said that he was upset Cameron went so late and probably wasn’t going to make the team. And I was like, ‘No, he’s gonna make it.' ”
Spikes, a fifth-round pick, not only made the team — he won the Super Bowl. Spikes appeared in five games for Kurt Warner’s 1999 champion Rams and played five more seasons in the league.
Our interview continues, touching on his call with Belichick, the Micah Parsons story, his parents, growth in Green Bay and more. We finish exploring whether Wolf can separate what he does from who he is; a line some in his new position, consumed by the power, legacy, responsibility and possibility it brings, never draw.
He pauses again, then starts on his love of team and competition. The feeling instilled by chasing victory, together. It drives and, Wolf admits, defines him to a significant degree.
All those years his father was absent scouting on the road, football left its own imprint. And what is love if not footprints on an open heart? Tracks that lead us back to the things that left them there in the first place.
Like turning on film, listening to reggae or flipping on a Western.
Yet despite the hold scouting has on his soul, Wolf believes he will walk away one day because of another set of footprints: his father’s. Ron Wolf retired comfortably at 63, then traveled the world with Edie, moved twice and all the while resisted the siren song of an NFL return.
“I don't think he ever wanted to get back in,” Eliot said. “And if I can have a fraction of the success that he had, or even my predecessor here had, I think I'll be able to be that way.”
The standard Belichick left dictates success means returning the Patriots to the Super Bowl. If Wolf ever hoists a Lombardi Trophy, a public light will shine permanently on the space that always existed between his path and his father’s. History will know him both as the son of Ron Wolf, and the architect of a champion.
Not that he will care to bask in that limelight.
Wolf is a scout.
For as long as he could, and for as long as he can, he will opt for the dark. To sit and study another player. To revisit the steps that bring him Ron’s joy and allow him to chase his own triumphs, leaving fresh footprints all his own, wherever they might lead.
