Pioli’s new focus more patriotic than ever
Scott Pioli is behaving more like a patriot than ever.
He no longer works for the Patriots, the Foxborough football team for which he helped launch a dynasty with Bill Belichick. Instead, he’s proselytizing patriotism (small p, big ideal) in pro sports, the type that comes from selecting candidates on a ballot instead of players in the NFL Draft or free agency.
Pioli’s new Patriot Way is focused on voter participation and fair democratic process.
The former Patriots vice president of player personnel who was Belichick’s team-building partner from 2000-08, sharing credit for three Super Bowl champions, wrote an op-ed in Sports Business Journal advocating for stadiums and arenas to serve as polling places to facilitate more people casting votes.
He has gone from assigning players the franchise tag to pursuing franchisement for more of his fellow Americans this election cycle.
Pioli’s passion for this endeavor stems from a personal experience. He was assistant general manager of the Falcons in 2016, the season they reached the Super Bowl and lost to the Patriots in the 28-3 comeback. On a rainy, chilly day, Pioli went to his local polling place, a church basement in midtown Atlanta, at 7 a.m. There was a slow-moving serpentine line brushing the parking lot. Pioli wasn’t able to cast his ballot before work.
Once he arrived at the Falcons’ facility, he shared his frustration with his friend, thengeneral manager Thomas Dimitroff, another ex-Patriots front office member.
“He said, ‘Why didn’t you go down the road 2 miles to [tony] Buckhead and vote there?’ ” recalled Pioli. “Sure enough, I went there on my way home and there was cookies
and warm drinks and everyone there looked like me. I remember thinking, ‘Wow.’ "
The proficiency in utilizing stadiums and arenas as early-voting venues or election day polling places was witnessed in the 2020 presidential election. According to a case study done by the Civic Responsibility Project, a political organization focused on promoting voter registration and voting rights, 48 stadiums and arenas from the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLS were used for early and election day voting in 2020.
Going from ballgames to ballots is a natural fit. Sports edifices are programmed to accommodate large crowds and move lots of people quickly through lines. The study said voters waited an average of 26 minutes at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena. Other locales in Fulton County, Ga., saw voters wait as long as four hours.
Pioli, a five-time NFL executive of the year as a personnel evaluator, is used to having his moves secondguessed. He knows some people regard mixing sports and politics as anathema.
“This is not about politics. This is about equity and democracy. This is about giving people full access to the ballot,” said Pioli, who hasn’t worked in an NFL front office since departing the Falcons in 2019. “And there are people from marginalized communities that don’t necessarily have access. This isn’t about something partisan.
“Why shouldn’t we be finding ways to get people to vote?”
As part of this crusade, Pioli was connected with Tova Wang, a senior researcher in democratic practice at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Wang studies voter participation and was one of the authors of the Civic Responsibility Project study.
The two were introduced by Michigan’s Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson. Pioli worked with Benson on the board of directors of RISE, the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality, founded by Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.
Wang said hosting voting is a noncontroversial way for teams to get involved in the political process. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that 69 percent of Americans supported using stadiums and arenas as polling places, while only 51 percent supported athletes expressing views on social and political issues.
Athletes are still citizens. They don’t forfeit their rights to participate in the democratic discussion or social debate because they’re athletes. That’s foolhardy thinking.
But in an increasingly polarized electorate, using sports venues for voting has widespread support.
“I’m a huge sports fan. I have been since I was a small child,” said Wang. “When I saw in early fall of 2020 that stadiums were being used as polling sites I got excited because my personal passion and my professional passion were coming together. I immediately thought: ‘I wonder what kind of difference it’s making?’
“For anyone who is a modicum of a sports fan that would be a more exciting place to go vote than some other places, and that could bring in or raise the interest or awareness of groups that might not otherwise pay attention.”
Wang stated there was no cross-section of people politically or racially that utilized or benefitted more from sports site voting.
Multiple secretaries of state and at least one governor have reached out to Pioli and Wang about the 2024 election.
Nevada is looking at establishing Allegiant Stadium, site of this past season’s Super Bowl and home of the Raiders, as a voting site. There are plans, according to Wang and Pioli, for the twotime defending WNBA champions Las Vegas Aces to open their practice facility for ballots.
Locally, Fenway Park was an early voting site in 2020, allowing people from across Boston to vote there, regardless of neighborhood residence. A Red Sox spokesperson said the team has yet to hold discussions with the city regarding this election cycle. Early voting could conflict with MLB’s postseason (insert your joke here).
TD Garden spokeswoman Tricia McCorkle said it wasn’t something the Garden was considering at this time.
In Massachusetts on election day, you can only vote in your prescribed precinct. There hasn’t been as much demand for early voting with the rollout of vote-by-mail, according to Deb O’Malley, spokeswoman for Secretary of State William F. Galvin.
Still, Pioli hopes you listen to him for more than his great impression of Belichick’s longtime X’s and O’s éminence grise Ernie Adams in “The Dynasty” docuseries.
“He and his wife called me right after the first two episodes, I said, ‘How did you like the impression?’ He was belly-laughing” said Pioli.
Democracy is no laughing matter, however. Pioli knows some people believe he should stick to his work as a NFL Network analyst.
“When people say stick to sports, I disagree because those of us in sports are given this platform,“he said, “and I think we have an obligation to serve the communities that serve us.”
Christopher L. Gasper is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at christopher.gasper@globe.com. Follow him @cgasper and on Instagram @cgaspersports.