LIer Mike Pellegrino is super assistant for the Patriots

Here we are, another Super Bowl that Mike Pellegrino won’t get to enjoy because he has to work.

That’s the downside of Pellegrino’s job. There are others such as the long hours, relative anonymity, and the pressure to conform and perform to a standard that demands just about everything a person can give. Pellegrino, you see, is a defensive coaching assistant for the Patriots, one of the lowest rungs in the NFL, and he’s been there for four years. So that means this will be the third straight Super Bowl where he won’t get to do what his friends and most other 25-year-olds do: Kick back with a beer, scoop some guacamole, and just watch the game.

In fact, he’ll try to forget it’s even Super Bowl Sunday when he takes the team bus to Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta next week, rides the elevator up to his perch in the coaching box while wearing his Patriots polo short, puts his headset on, and focuses on the task at hand.

It’s a long way from the fields of Connetquot High School, where he as a sophomore and his older brother Joe, a senior, were part of a Long Island Championship team in 2008. Where as a senior he won the Newsday Hansen Award presented to the most outstanding high school football player in Suffolk County in 2010. It’s a long way from Johns Hopkins, where he went to play lacrosse, brought the Blue Jays to a Final Four, and said goodbye to the sport he calls his first true love – football -- only to be reunited with it four years later.

And it will be a long way from Long Island, where pockets of people who have spent their whole lives rooting for the Giants or the Jets – in other words, rooting against the Patriots – will find themselves pulling for the dynasty they are supposed to despise just so they can be a little bit closer to the kid whose name appears in fine print of the coaching staff roster and who they always knew would find success.

But none of that will be on Pellegrino’s mind. He’ll be fixated on the Rams offense and the wide receivers he’s been scouting and the Patriots defensive backs he’s been helping.

“It’s really just like another day in the office,” he insisted via telephone with Newsday earlier this week. “You just go in and try to do your best. From the aspect of being a fan and watching it, it was tremendous watching it as a kid. But it’s a job so I don’t even see it as being exciting anymore. It’s fun for everybody else, but we have a job to do and I have a job to do. I have to focus on getting it done. I really can’t think about that or all the other distractions.”

In other words, Pellegrino doesn’t get to appreciate it the way the others in his life will.

“Man, I just do my job,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Road to Patriots

So how did a kid from Oakdale get to Super Bowl LIII, nevermind the two previous ones?

“It comes down to being in the right place at the right time,” he said. “I didn’t do anything particularly special.”

That’s not exactly the way others see it.

Pellegrino grew up wanting to play big-time college football. His dream, he often told Mike Hansen, his coach at Connetquot, was to play that sport for Michigan. He even turned down an opportunity to go to St. Anthony’s High School because they wanted him to focus on lacrosse and wouldn’t let him on the gridiron.

On Long Island, he was a star. A two-time All-Long Island first-team selection, he led Connetquot to the Division I playoffs for three straight years. As a senior, he rushed for 1,363 yards and 18 touchdowns in nine games on offense and moved from defensive back to linebacker where he recorded 111 tackles, nine sacks and three forced fumbles.

“He’s the greatest athlete I’ve seen come out of Connetquot since I’ve been here,” Hansen said. “And it’s not because of his athleticism, it’s because of all those other ‘it’ factors. He wasn’t the biggest kid, he wasn’t the strongest kid, but I think people see that in him.”

What big-time college football programs saw was a 5-foot-10, 180 pounder way too small for their liking. He could have played for a more off-the-radar school had he wanted to. Lacrosse? That was a different story. Pellegrino was one of the nation’s premier long-stick midfielders in high school and he committed to Johns Hopkins.

“It was pretty hard,” Pellegrino said of choosing lacrosse over football (or, really, having lacrosse choose him when football did not). “I wanted to play, but I knew I had a tremendous opportunity so I didn’t want to do anything to ruin that. You get a chance to play lacrosse at Johns Hopkins, why wouldn’t you take it? I had to.”

What he did not know at the time was that Hopkins coach Dave Pietramala – a fellow Long Islander – had a budding relationship with a certain lacrosse-loving NFL coach up in New England. Bill Belichick has always been a fan of the sport with the sticks. He played it in college, his sons played in college, and his daughter is the current head coach of the women’s team at Holy Cross.

During Pellegrino’s junior year at Hopkins, Pietramala casually asked him what he wanted to do after graduation. It was a common response.

“I’d love to get into coaching,” he said.

“Ok,” Pietramala said, well-prepared to help in that career path, “we can talk to some of the lacrosse coaches around the country about jobs.”

“No,” Pellegrino said. “Football.”

Pietramala had never recommended anyone to Belichick, but he sent Pellegrino, a two-time captain, up to Foxborough to work as an intern in training camp that summer of 2014 before his senior year.

“When you have a connection like we have with the Patriots, you’re very hesitant to use it,” Pietramala said. “I just felt comfortable recommending Mike because I knew whatever would be asked of him he would do. I didn’t think the hours would be too long because he was a grinder. I didn’t think if they were tough on him that he might handle that poorly because we were tough on him. He had all the qualities of a guy that you say: I give him my highest recommendation. I would give him my highest recommendation for any endeavor because he’s just that kind of young man.”

That backing did little for Pellegrino other than get him in the door. He spent the summer driving golf carts, running off photocopies, and filling Gatorade bottles. Hardly glamorous stuff.

The next summer he returned to the Patriots for the same role, this time as a Hopkins graduate. And this time having learned a little more about the team and what would be expected of him.

“When I was there I just helped out, helped the right people I guess, and I didn’t leave,” he said. “I helped out with the coaches and they just kind of kept me around. I signed a contract at the end of the year and I’ve been there ever since.”

He stuck with lacrosse for a while, too, playing for the Boston Cannons in MLL (he was initially drafted by the Long Island Lizards). Eventually, that became too much. Once again he had to decide between football and lacrosse.

This time, football won.

True Patriot

Pellegrino is fully immersed in the Patriots’ Way, which means saying as little as possible and assuming even that is too much. He refuses to go into any detail about what he does for the team.

“Whatever the coaches need I’m there, from Coach Belichick to Coach Flores (the current defensive coordinator) to any of the coaches on the staff,” he said. “Whatever they need I’m right there. I do whatever they need.”

Such as?

“However far your imagination goes, I do it,” he would only say. “Just about anything they ask me to do.”

Pellegrino is so deep in the New England Culture that he refuses to admit who he was rooting for in Super Bowls XLII and XLVI when the Giants – the team he and his father grew up rooting for – faced and beat the Patriots. He was still in high school during those games.

“No comment,” he said, referring instead to an era before he was even born. “I’d say I was a Belichick fan when the Giants won their Super Bowls with him. We’ll leave it at that.”

But despite the near brainwashing, Pellegrino has not forgotten his roots on Long Island. He returns when he can, and he often visits with Hansen and the Connetquot football team. It’s usually in the spring during the offseason, but last fall he made a trip back and even delivered a pregame address to the players before the game against Floyd.

Connetquot lost that one.

“But he gave a great speech,” Hansen said.

Pellegrino has come back to Connetquot with the Super Bowl ring he won when he was on the Patriots staff two years ago, and the players and assistant coaches got a kick out of trying it on and taking pictures with the bling. Connetquot even has a defensive package in their playbook that comes to them directly from Foxborough and the mind of Bill Belichick.

“He’s worked with my defensive back coach and given him pointers,” Hansen said. “He’s shown us some blitz packages and stuff that they do which is interesting. Obviously, they’re NFL players, so not all of it works on our level, but we have one blitz that we use that we got from him.”

Coming back home is one thing. Getting home to come to him is a little more difficult.

Joe Pellegrino Sr., Mike’s father, has skipped the past two Super Bowls. He prefers watching at home surrounded by close friends and relatives rather than being in a noisy stadium. It’s a little less big that way, a little less stressful.

He watches most of the Patriots games that way, rooting from his living room in Oakdale, occasionally catching a quick glimpse of Mike on the broadcast as he walks past a pregame huddle or if, for some reason, the cameras pan up to the coaches’ booth.

This year, though, Joe Pellegrino is attending his first Super Bowl.

“I’m real excited,” Mike Pellegrino said. “I’ve been trying to get him to come. I’m very happy.”

Joe and his childhood pal Mark Barrett of Copiague are going down to Atlanta on Thursday and they’ll be in the stadium for the big game on Sunday.

Joe saw Mike play at plenty of games at Connetquot and Hopkins, but this will be different. This time, Joe won’t be able to see Mike on the field. He won’t be able to actually watch his son, who will be up in a sanitary booth with a headset on doing… whatever it is he does.

Joe has no idea if he’ll even have a sightline to Mike from where he’ll be. “I’ve never been to Atlanta, I don’t know where I’m sitting,” he said. And he has no idea how much time he’ll get to spend with Mike in the days before the game, though he assumes it will be limited given the demands on the coaches.

Having him out of view for the most part makes it no less nerve-wracking, though.

“All you do is you want a good result,” Joe said of the parallels between rooting for his son the player and his son the coach. “It is funny. I know he’s up in the booth and some of his personnel assignments, so it’s definitely interesting. To know he’s involved in some way with the game, it’s exciting for me. It’s exciting.”

The Pats' formula

One of the reasons the Patriots have been so successful over the years is their uncanny knack for plucking players from obscurity, determining what they do well, amplifying those skills, and turning them into productive cogs in a Super Bowl Machine. Tom Brady was a sixth-round pick who developed into the greatest quarterback ever. Chris Hogan was an undrafted college lacrosse player who bounced from NFL roster to roster before the Patriots turned him into a go-to receiver. New England – and Belichick specifically -- often sees out-of-the-box talent to which other teams appear blind.

That’s true for the coaching staff, too, and Pellegrino is just the latest example. Belichick saw something in him – likely the same thing Pietramala saw, the same thing Hansen saw — and is nurturing it.

Where it will lead no one is sure. Pellegrino refuses to think about it because he’s too busy focusing on day-to-day, week-to-week improvements. “It distracts,” he said of long-term plans. “If you are setting a goal for the next couple of years you get distracted in this year, what you’re supposed to do, and how you’re supposed to improve this year.”

He doesn’t even discuss it with his father.

“He enjoys it very much,” Joe Pellegrino said of his son and coaching. “He’s only 25, a young man, so I would think that this may be something he does for a very long time. But that’s just a guess from me.”

What is clear is that Pellegrino is gaining momentum, even if his actual title hasn’t changed since he was first hired.

“Coach has had nothing but glowing comments,” Pietramala said of the feedback he has gotten from Belichick. “Obviously, initially, there was a tremendous learning curve. You’re a guy who hasn’t played football since high school, you know the high school level of football, but haven’t experienced it in college and never in the pros, never dealt with a pro athlete. So the learning curve was really great and Coach was very honest. Mike had a lot to learn. But they were very patient with him… He’s gaining more responsibility every year. I think that’s indicative really of how they feel. They can tell me he’s doing a great job, but if he stays in the same role then clearly he’s not growing.”

It’s been an unorthodox path, for sure, and Pellegrino is happy to admit that the education has been somewhat startling.

“I mean, you think you know football, but you don’t know anything about football,” he said. “That was a little shell-shocking. You think you work hard? You have no idea what it takes to work hard consistently.”

Now he does. At least a little.

And if he wants to continue in coaching, well, there may be no better farm on which to grow than the one in Foxborough. Other teams often try to capture some of Belichick’s magic by harvesting his underlings for head coach vacancies — next week Flores will be the latest when he is hired by the Dolphins — and Patriots assistants who make the grade are routinely promoted to fill the vacancies left behind.

It’s not just a Patriot thing. The two coaches in this Super Bowl, after all, each began their NFL careers the same way Pellegrino did. Someone knew someone else, put in a good word for him for an entry-level job, and off he went. For Belichick, that was decades before Pellegrino was born. For the Rams’ Sean McVay, that was just a handful of years ago.

“It is pretty eye-opening,” Joe Pellegrino said of seeing McVay, at age 33, just eight years older than his son, in charge of the Rams this week.

Maybe one day Pellegrino will be a head coach of an NFL team in a Super Bowl. Maybe one day sooner than anyone expects. The people who really know him would say that would be shocking and astounding and a surprise. But would it really? The true stunner will probably be if he isn’t.

“In anything he does in life he’s going to be successful,” Hansen said confidently.

So why not this?

And then perhaps Johns Hopkins or Connetquot or some other team or school will send a young intern Pellegrino’s way. To learn from him. Be shaped by him.

Be thankful to him.

“That would be awesome,” Pietramala said. “But for now I think he’s very fortunate to be with a guy like Coach and a franchise like New England. You give Mike a lot of credit. He had an opportunity, and not everybody does what they need to do to take advantage of their opportunities. He’s clearly done that.”

Deep appreciation

There may be one moment when Pellegrino gets to enjoy this Super Bowl on Sunday. That comes at the end, provided the Patriots win. It happened that way two years ago, when his team overcame a 28-3 deficit and beat the Falcons in overtime. His mother and brother were in the stands for that one. The rest of his family – blood or otherwise – was in his heart.

“As soon as the game is over, you can start to appreciate everything and all the people who helped you get there,” Pellegrino said. “Probably the realest thing for me was walking out on the field after that game and going, ‘Wow, how many people have helped me get to this spot in my life?’ There was a moment of reflection there. But until that moment, you’re just locked in.”

Last year, it didn’t end that way. The Patriots lost to the Eagles. What made it more difficult was that one of Pellegrino’s mentors, New England defensive coordinator Matt Patricia, was leaving to become head coach of the Lions. Patricia tried to get Pellegrino to join him in Detroit, but Pellegrino decided to stay in New England. Maybe he thought he had more to learn. Maybe it was for games like this Sunday’s.

How will this one end? That’s yet to be determined. It could be with Pellegrino scooping up handfuls of souvenir confetti from the turf, embracing Brady and Belichick. It could be with him reflecting once again on all of the people who helped him get there, like the lacrosse coach he said turned him from “a kid from Long Island into a Hopkins man.” It might mean that when the meeting to decide on the newest class for the Connetquot Athletic Hall of Fame gathers in early February, one of the shoo-in inductees in his first year of eligibility will have another NFL championship on his resume, another ring to bring back for the players and coaches to SnapChat and Instagram.

And for the first time it could be with him on the field after a Super Bowl victory trying to make eye contact with his father, the person who first taught him to love football, in the stands watching.

“That would be surreal,” Joe Pellegrino said. “That would definitely be something.”

Something Mike Pellegrino said he never imagined. At least not like this.

“I had no clue,” he said thinking back to his younger self and the path he has taken from Long Island to three straight Super Bowls. “Maybe 17-year-old Mike thought I was going to play in one, but I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that I’d be on the coaching end of this and doing it this way.”

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.