Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi (right) swung a blockbuster draft-day trade in 2004 that landed quarterback Eli Manning, teaming him with coach Tom Coughlin.
Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi (right) swung a blockbuster draft-day trade in 2004 that landed quarterback Eli Manning, teaming him with coach Tom Coughlin.
Ernie Accorsi’s résumé reads like a page out of the NFL’s history books. If you were lucky enough to know Ernie Accorsi, you know how much that meant to him, how the arc of a professional journey from blue-collar streets in Hershey, Pa., to blue-blood football franchises in Baltimore, Cleveland, and New York was a particular source of pride for a man who devoured history the way most of us eat lunch.
What you might not know is how close the Patriots came to being a fourth team on that illustrious list.
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“When I became the Patriots’ GM, the first call I made was to the Colts to see if they would let me talk to him to become my assistant GM,” recalled Upton Bell.
“They refused.”
Seems the Colts saw the same potential in their young public relations director that Bell, just 33 years old in 1971 when the Patriots made him the youngest GM in the NFL, was hoping to add to his staff. Both views were proved quite accurate, with Accorsi, who died last Saturday at the age of 84, at the start of a 37-year NFL career that ended with his 2006 retirement.
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The first line of Accorsi’s football obituary was written in his last stop, with the blockbuster 2004 draft-day trade that landed Eli Manning on the Giants. Paired with the veteran, hard-nosed coach Accorsi had hired just a few months earlier, Manning and Tom Coughlin earned lifetime New England villain status for two Super Bowl wins over the Patriots.
Plenty of that lingering ire can be turned toward Accorsi, too, for daring to assemble just the right roster to upend the then-perfect Patriots after that 2007 season, and watch that same core do it again four years later. Super Bowl XLII belonged to Accorsi as much as it did to anyone, yet when I made sure to share that thought with him in the quiet aftermath of the victory, he deflected.
It was his way. Humility. Brilliance. Humor. Intellect. Charm. Authenticity.
Ernie Accorsi had them all, a one-of-a-kind human who rose to such impressive heights but never let his feet leave the ground. Upon hearing the news of his death following a short battle with cancer, I found myself searching out old interviews I’d done with him, rereading old emails, and wiping away tears. While grief is held most deeply for those closest to him, his family, and dear friends such as Bell — “I feel like I lost a brother,” he told me Monday — Accorsi made everyone feel special in their own way.
He helped me out for these pages one last time about two years ago, sharing stories of having drafted Dan Campbell, the unlikely tight end-turned-coach who had his Detroit Lions on the cusp of a Super Bowl. Accorsi answered his phone the same way he did almost every Tuesday morning from 2001-03, when I would call his office for my weekly reporter’s notebook on the Giants. That was my first professional beat as a sportswriter, and though Accorsi and I had barely met before I took it on, he was gracious, informative, and patient.
Of course we talked about the Giants. We also talked about books, the way we both had Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels” on our all-time list. History, my own major as an undergraduate. Religion. Much like my dad, Accorsi had grown up under the tutelage of strict priests, brothers, and nuns, and could still recite the answers in Latin. He loved recalling the priest who would say Mass for the Giants during the season, and how, when they made the playoffs, he would call it a Sunday in “extra-ordinary” time.
I peppered him with questions about his college classmate Brian Piccolo, and how the two would thumb rides from their dorm at Wake Forest to get to church on Sunday, being two of maybe three Catholics on the whole campus. And how it was strategic, since cars would screech to a halt to give the star football player (and his little-known friend) a ride. We talked about Piccolo in 2001, when ABC remade the famous 1971 tearjerker of a movie, and again in 2020, when Gale Sayers, Piccolo’s great friend and teammate with the Bears, died.
Accorsi, like Bell, was at the Americana Hotel banquet when Sayers, accepting a football writers’ award for courage, asked the crowd to give their love to an ailing Piccolo instead.
In typical Accorsi fashion, there was more to the story.
“After the banquet I went up to tell Sayers I was a classmate of Brian’s at Wake Forest,” he said. “The man in front of me in line with his back to me told Sayers, ‘Gale, you’re a great American.’ He had tears rolling down his cheeks. The man was Vince Lombardi. I turned and walked away. How could I follow that moment?”
No one can follow Accorsi. He could regale you for hours, yet it felt like minutes. Having started his professional life as a sportswriter, the man knew how to tell a story. He was a consummate communicator, and it served him well.
In all those years after the Manning trade, Accorsi never wavered on the conviction he held about the skills of the youngest Manning brother. Over and over he would tell me how the roster that Manning had at Ole Miss was not close to Manning’s level. No NFL-caliber linemen, no NFL-level receivers to be found. But the quarterback never let that stop him. “He made everyone around him better,” Accorsi said.
A fitting tribute indeed, and one I would return in kind. Ernie Accorsi made everyone around him better. He is missed.