Inside Pats exec Matt Groh’s rise to the top
For a story about a scout, let’s rewind the tape. It’s March 28, and Bill Belichick is in his unhappy place, a podium during the NFL owners meetings at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Fla. By press conference standards, he’s chipper. Then the first dozen questions hit every reason Belichick should feel differently: the Patriots’ playoff loss at Buffalo, penny-pinching in free agency, widespread doubt about his coaching staff. Even Malcolm Butler’s benching in Super Bowl LII is raised, just to tweak him. After eight minutes, Belichick perks up. A question about the new head of his personnel department, Matt Groh, prompts him to chatter for 40 seconds, as if he’s reciting Groh’s Wikipedia page from memory. Belichick mentions his family, background and front office experience.
Then Belichick pauses, ever aware of the power of his words and especially in public. Three silent seconds pass before he restarts on Groh, shaking his head.
“I think he ... ”
Belichick pauses again.
“He’s as good as anybody that we’ve had in that position.”
And just like that, Belichick has elevated Groh, barely six weeks on the job, next to co-architects of six Super Bowl-winning teams. A restrained smile freezes on his face.
Rewind.
A month earlier at the NFL combine, Groh steals a night out with his brother, Mike, at a steakhouse away from the prying eyes and league gossip pervading Indianapolis’ downtown. It’s an annual tradition they’ve shared since Groh entered the league as a Patriots scouting assistant in 2011. Mike is the Giants’ new wide receivers coach, a veteran of 10 NFL seasons and a dozen more at the collegiate level.
They were raised by football as much as their proud parents, Anne and Al Groh. Al is a retired coach who worked under Bill Parcells as a defensive assistant in the late ‘70s and ’80s and schemed with Belichick for the next decade. Mike’s career took off at the University of Virginia, where Al was head coach from 2001-09.
Mike, 50, is almost a decade older than his brother, a gap that robbed them of a childhood closeness fostered in athletic families through activities like playing catch or 1-on-1 in the driveway. But that same distance grants Mike a cleareyed perspective of his younger brother in adulthood; understanding what it meant to grow up Groh, how he rose in New England and why the two are inextricably linked.
“He’s got Patriot DNA running in his veins,” Mike said. “That’s who my dad was coaching for when (Matt) was in his formative years. He’s a Belichick disciple, for sure.”
Family and ex-colleagues describe Groh as down to earth, concerned with little beyond his family, friends and work. His lifelong friends line the South Shore. He prefers local craft beers and packs his fridge with a variety of Cisco beer, including hazy IPAs.
Groh is more than a Patriot. He’s New England.
Meanwhile, Al, a Harpoon loyalist and Dunkin’ regular, borrows an old Red Sox saying to explain his youngest son’s Belichickian consistency.
“He’s just Matthew being Matthew,” Al said. “As he’s always been.”
Back at dinner in Indianapolis, the check arrives, a time Mike typically reaches out to help his younger brother. Except this time, in a nod to Matt’s recent promotion, he leans back.
“All right, buddy,” Mike says. “It’s your turn now.”
Rewind.
Draft night, April 29, 2021.
Before selecting Alabama quarterback Mac Jones in the first round, Belichick gathered Groh, director of player personnel Dave Ziegler and consultant Eliot Wolf in the team’s war room.
It’s a seminal moment for Belichick and the Patriots, who were still reeling from Tom Brady’s exit. Jones’ arrival will mean hope, a new era. But thanks to a video captured and produced by an in-house production crew, the moment becomes a Groh show.
“We’re all good with this?” Belichick asks, as if there was any time left to object.
They nod in agreement and return to their battle stations. But compelled to involve his director of college scouting even further, Belichick bugs Groh again.
“Matt, you’re good on this?”
Silence. Groh starts pulling his head out of his laptop to answer.
“You’re good on this?” Belichick repeats. Befuddled, Groh nods.
According to a source, at that moment, Belichick was playing up to the cameras. The Patriots had been in universal agreement on
Jones for weeks. It was all staged.
“He wanted to make sure
Matt was a part of the decision,” the source said.
Because through that clip, Belichick could simultaneously deflate the hype for his new quarterback and steal that hot air to pump up an executive; a man groomed his entire life to become a general manager and whose front office has already begun to determine whether football’s greatest dynasty will extend or be extinguished.
Old friends, new beginning
Rewind.
It’s March 2011, and Groh, 30, steps into the foyer of a small Marriott on the outskirts of Richmond, Va., for a life-changing meeting. He’s called a career audible, hoping to transition from third-year associate at a mid-Atlantic law firm to low-level scout in an NFL front office. He’s early.
Pause.
Three years earlier, Groh graduated from Virginia law school, a decision Al claims was made to sharpen his critical-thinking skills and scratch an internal itch. Groh craved a scoreboard, and the competitiveness of the courtroom appealed, though not as strongly as football.
At Virginia, Groh stayed close to his father’s program by working out at the team facility and watching practice in the afternoons. He traveled to every game. While his father and brother prowled the sideline on Saturdays, he stood yards away, riding the referees for questionable calls and occasionally earning an earful in return. “He’s certainly passionate about his teams,” Mike said.
Before Virginia, Groh double-majored in psychology and backup quarterbacking at Princeton. Player evaluation always called to him, even as a child when his interests lie with the superhero He-Man and most subjects in school. He was quiet, observant.
His father explains Matt derived his academic excellence from curiosity, whereas Mike viewed school as a vehicle for competition. Those same approaches later helped explain their divergent career paths, one experiencing football from a distance as more of an intellectual practice, the other more hands-on.
“Matthew was always genuinely interested in a lot of things and wanted to get good grades because of that,” Al said. “Michael made very good grades, but because he didn’t want somebody to beat him.”
Even when Al was away, coaches were close. Former Patriots offensive coordinator Charlie Weis became one of Groh’s first babysitters in 1988 when Weis worked under Al as a young assistant at South Carolina. Months later, Weis followed Al to New York, where Parcells hired them both to his Giants staff. Over the next 12 years, Al coached for four NFL teams and moved his family three times, exposing his sons to a lifestyle they would adopt themselves. Adaptability and preparedness were the family’s way of life, traits Matt exemplified at an early age that later jump-started his career in scouting.
“If he had a paper due on Friday, he finished it on Wednesday,” Al said. “Matt has a plan for everything he does.”
At Patriots practices in the mid-90s, former offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia remembers visiting with the Groh boys. During training camp, Parcells would tutor Mike, a quarterback at Virginia, on how to read defenses and be a leader. Matt watched.
“I knew Mike better because he was older, but they were both around,” Scarnecchia said. “So you made efforts to get to know them.”
Once Groh told his father he intended to pursue the NFL, Al called a few friends, including Nick Caserio and Kyle O’Brien, then a Patriots scout and today a Giants executive. He asked only that they offer advice, but O’Brien, who knew Groh peripherally when he was a kid, did one better.
With Caserio’s blessing, he arranged an informal interview in Richmond over breakfast. O’Brien and former college scouting director Jon Robinson, now the Titans’ general manager, were touring the southeast evaluating defensive line prospects. But their most critical scout awaited in Virginia.
“A lot of times you have to make sure they understand what they’re getting into (as a scouting assistant). But Matt, with his family ties, knew exactly what this was about,” O’Brien said. “There can be literally a week before you see the sun. There’s no glory.”
Play.
Over an hour-long sitdown, Groh strikes Robinson as intelligent, thorough and well-spoken. He invites him to Foxboro for a formal interview in mid-May.
Fast-forward.
Days ahead of the 2022 draft, Robinson is asked to guess how Groh earned Belichick’s utmost trust and belief since Richmond. Except he doesn’t guess. He explains.
“It’s earned through interaction, through honest discussion about the football team and a lot of hard work. That’s a tough circle to crack with Bill,” Robinson says. “It took me a while to get in there, and he doesn’t let everybody in that circle. But it’s a pretty cool thing when you get in.”
‘Go home’
Turning out of his office inside the Patriots’ personnel department, Robinson strides down a long hall midway through the 2013 season. Annoyed, he stops at a desk in the back and towers over a seated Groh.
“Man, leave. Just leave and go home,” he orders. “Watch the Red Sox or Bruins or something to go exhale for a little bit. Don’t come back here.”
Groh has just returned from a 12-day trip in his debut season as the Patriots’ west coast scout, skipping a stop home to return to work. He covers prospects from Washington to Arizona and Los Angeles to Colorado, the largest geographic area of any scout; a clas
sic example of Belichick forcing his underlings to drink from a football firehose.
Even for Robinson, who admits any notion of work-life balance in his business is laughable, this is too much.
“He was always around,” Scarnecchia said of Groh. “Always around.”
Groh’s life now revolves around scouting, down to what he eats for lunch. From the team cafeteria, Groh picks only food he can consume while walking back to his desk.
“It was always a bowl of damn soup or chowder,” Robinson remembered. “He was at maximum efficiency with every waking second because it saved him another five minutes to make another tape on a player we weren’t going to draft anyway.”
Pause.
To his ex-colleagues, anecdotes like these epitomize Groh’s work ethic and diligence, which should dispel any notion that nepotism drove his ascension. They bristle at the thought.
“You don’t rise in that organization if you don’t know what you’re doing,” Scarnecchia said. “Bill sits in all of those meetings with the scouts, and he listens to what people say. You’ll know pretty quickly the value of what one guy says.”
Their view is the Patriots door may have swung open for Groh, but he walked through it, He survived. He thrived.
“He’s earned everything,” O’Brien says. O’Brien adds only a quarter of applicants who interview for scouting assistant positions get hired. Candidates are grilled over an entire day, meeting with most members of the front office for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. Afterward, they’re left alone in a windowless room to study film and write a comprehensive report.
Meanwhile, Patriots decision-makers convene to discuss what they’ve gleaned from their respective interviews, as if debating a college prospect.
Hired scouting assistants were tasked with menial jobs: chauffeuring players and prospects to and from Boston and creating “point of attack” (POA) tapes ahead of free agency and the draft. These tapes are designed to be representative samples that capture everything about a player in 70-80 plays, so other evaluators and coaches, including Belichick, can get up to speed.
“A lot of times you watch the same Alabama or Georgia game 20 or 30 times to make different POAs, and that never got old for him,” Robinson says. “There was never a task too big, never a task too small. He was just steady.”
Fast-forward.
It’s May 2015, and Groh has been promoted to scout the southeast, the richest area for football talent on Earth. His notes run deeper than height, weight and speed, covering players’ mannerisms after good plays and bad, how they relate to teammates and learn. His law school background has served him well.
“Every scout needs to learn to debate, not argue,” O’Brien said. “You present your case and fight for your guy, but then leave it be. Matt did that well.”
The Patriots draft two players from Groh’s region in 2016: Alabama cornerback Cyrus Jones and Georgia receiver Malcolm Mitchell. After assembling a four-player class in 2017, signs of his expanding influence emerge when the Patriots select 11 players from the southeast over the next two springs.
Belichick promotes Groh again to national scout in May 2019, a significant leap. National scouts cover half the country and primarily focus on top prospects, leaving grunt work to, well, the grunts.
“You can see as people grow and develop, who can do more,” Caserio said. “And I Bill has a lot of faith and trust and confidence in him.”
A year later, director of college scouting Monti Ossenfort leaves to reunite with Robinson in Tennessee. In January 2021, Caserio’s exit creates another void, one Belichick protected against by quietly elevating Ziegler under Caserio the year before so he could step into his role. Ziegler employs a collaborative approach and begins revamping the team’s scouting systems and processes with Groh and Wolf.
As the Patriots’ new college scouting director, Groh assembles the draft board, a laborious process of gathering intel, facilitating discussion and representing the totality of the front office’s efforts before Belichick walks into the war room. He continues to scout, of course, and runs into Robinson and O’Brien at Pro Days.
By the time the 2021 draft concludes, the Patriots have unknowingly struck gold. Mac Jones will soon key the franchise’s return to the playoffs, a success Ziegler parlays into his first general manager job in Las Vegas. Groh and Wolf, the son of a Hall Fame general manager, are the top contenders to replace him, men raised from childhood for a moment that can now only shine on one.
A foundation for the future
The way Anne Groh tells it, the first time her Matt vocalized his lifelong dream was during a visit to Giants Stadium sometime in 1989 or 1990.
Bill Parcells often invited his assistants’ families into the office and enjoyed mentoring young people.
So one day, Parcells asked Matt Groh, just 9 or 10, what he wanted to do when he grew up.
Groh looked into the piercing blue eyes of the man whose coaching tree would support and push and enable his answer for the rest of his life.
“I want to be a general manager,” he said.
Fast-forward.
It’s Feb. 12, the eve of Anne’s birthday. After putting his two children to bed in his parents’ Hingham home, Groh has happy news to break.
Next week, the Patriots will announce his promotion to director of player personnel. He made it. They toast in celebration.
“When Matt sets his mind to something, he’s going to get it done,” O’Brien says. “But he’s also a really good family man. When we see each other, it’s always about family.”
Groh knows the upcoming weeks will test him in ways he’s never experienced.
“There’s a lot of new moving parts that come flying in at you,” says former Buccaneers general manager and SiriusXM analyst Mark Dominik. “There’s no training to prepare you to become a GM.”
Belichick will shield Groh from most of these duties, especially the noise. In March, the Patriots weaned Groh onto free agency, allowing him to negotiate a few re-signings while Belichick and Wolf tackled the larger contracts. Belichick set an example Groh must follow himself.
“You have to delegate now because you can’t do everything,” Robinson says of transitioning to GM. “And delegate to those that you trust.”
Trust is never more fragile than the closing days of the draft, when teams like the Patriots can glean whether a quarterback like Jones might fall to them at 15th overall or they can trade back from No. 21. Knowledge is power, but secrets and sources are weapons.
“The main thing is phone calls with agents, trying to make sure you understand what the board’s gonna look like, how it’s gonna play out. And it’s time to actually call all the clubs and really set the table for trades,” Dominik says. “It’s not watching tape anymore.”
Years before his life consisted of travel and tape, sometime when football was first planted deep in his soul, Groh began to embody a Sun Tzu quote that today binds the Patriots’ football operations as much as steel and concrete hold together Gillette Stadium: “Every battle is won before it is fought.”
Scouting is a business of dogged preparation, but its essence is what you see when everyone else is looking. What Belichick sees in Groh is surely what he’s seen for a decade: shades of himself.
“Matt’s always kind of been the same guy,” Mike says. “He’s really smart, studious and serious about whatever it is that he puts his mind to.”
Yet what Groh sees now from atop the Patriots’ personnel department may be more crucial, starting with Thursday’s draft.
What he unearths on the scouting trail and from the tape will lay a foundation for the franchise’s future, perhaps a future even beyond Belichick. Each brick laid carefully, one rewind, pause, fast-forward and play at a time.