Oceanside High School has NFL executive connection
Brothers Matt Caracciolo (left) and Pete Caracciolo (right) are from Oceanside and both are working in the NFL. Credit: Caracciolo Family
At some point during Sunday’s game, Matt Caracciolo may look up and think about his first "job" in the NFL.
That was back in 1995, when he was a sophomore at Oceanside High School. He and his dad were at a Jets-Raiders game at old Giants Stadium. Worst seats in the house. Last row, upper deck, end zone. They were so high up they were next to a cement pillbox, where camera operators for the two teams filmed the action from way above the field. Peter Caracciolo, Matt’s father, started chatting with the Raiders’ cameraman, Jim Otten. By the time the game was over, Matt Caracciolo was helping Otten schlep his equipment downstairs. The next year, when the Raiders came back to town, Otten hired Caracciolo and his older brother Pete to be his Sherpas.
"I learned the value of making connections and extending your hand and meeting people early on," Caracciolo said of that day.
It’s something he can reflect upon Sunday when, as head of football operations for the Cardinals, he will be part of the team’s smaller-than-usual traveling party for the game against the Giants at MetLife Stadium. The seats he sat in a quarter century ago are no longer there. Heck, the entire stadium is no longer there. But he’ll be on the same site and feel the same spirit – that thrill of being a part of the NFL – as he did as a teenager who was just pitching in.
That, after all, is pretty much what football operations is all about. Caracciolo calls it the "bridge" department because he connects and supports all the various elements of the franchise, everything from scouting to community relations to training camp logistics to travel for road games like this one.
That sounds like a complicated job. In 2020 it’s been nearly unfathomable.
"It’s been a year like no other," he told Newsday in a phone interview, referring not only to the COVID-19 regulations that he has had to adhere to from both the NFL and local authorities, but also the recent welcome of the 49ers to the Cardinals’ facility for the rest of the season. They had to move to Arizona because Santa Clara County – where their facility and stadium are located – issued a ban on sports late last month. The Cardinals became the NFL’s AirBnB.
"I like to say it’s another puzzle, there are just a lot more pieces to put together this time," he said. "And for me that’s the fun of the job, trying to figure it out and make it work."
Caracciolo, now 41, is one of the hundreds of NFL employees and executives who have been working behind the scenes to make sure that the league is functioning as well as it can in these strange times. It has taken some creative thinking and abstract scheduling, but through 14 weeks of the regular season the league has yet to miss a game.
He is part of an even smaller fraternity, too. He is one of three Oceanside natives currently working at high levels of NFL front offices, joined by his older brother Pete, 44, and Pete’s high school classmate Rob Lohman, also 44. All three were in the high school at the same time in the mid 1990s.
While many can name most of the prominent players who have made the jump from Long Island to the NFL on the field (Newsday has a database of them if you can’t!) and even Oceanside has a rather famous one of those in quarterback Jay Fiedler, who had a 10-year playing career, these three and others from various communities show that when it comes to making it in professional football, being a star athlete isn’t the only track.
They all had different routes to the NFL. For Matt Caracciolo, he was first enamored by the sport when he was 5 or 6 years old and had a chance to meet Tom Foley, a defensive back who had been on the 1972 Dolphins’ undefeated team. Caracciolo doesn’t remember Foley, but he remembers his Super Bowl ring. "I just kind of got completely overwhelmed with the idea of football," Caracciolo said.
Then he went to that Jets game with his dad. It led to other opportunities, including a summer internship with the Raiders for himself and his brother Pete. Pete, in fact, never left and has been with the organization since, now serving as their director of operations.
"It’s a great family organization," he said.
Matt bounced around a bit more, including a graduate assistant position at Syracuse followed by jobs with the Dolphins and Patriots before he moved to the Cardinals seven years ago. He’s now their vice president of football operations and facilities.
As for Lohman, he likes to say the first player he ever scouted was himself. It wasn’t pretty. He called himself "a fourth-string wide receiver on a wishbone team." He also had knee issues that limited what he could do physically. But he loved football and wanted to be around the sport so Oceanside coach Frank Luisi gave him a uniform but used him as a manager, secretary, assistant coach. Just about anything that needed doing for the program, Lohman was willing to do. In exchange, Luisi advocated for him to earn a scholarship to attend the University of South Carolina’s sports management program, then set him up as an unpaid assistant for Joe Gardi’s team at Hofstra.
Eventually Lohman drifted away from coaching and into scouting – "I didn’t have the patience to be a coach," he said – and for the past 14 seasons he’s been in the Lions’ front office. Since they fired their head coach and general manager late last month, Lohman, the team’s director of pro scouting, has been part of the group of remaining executives who have been running the organization. He was interviewed by the Lions for their GM vacancy.
Luisi, who no longer coaches at Oceanside but serves as an adviser to the district’s NCAA-bound athletes, said he often speaks about Fiedler, the star player he sent to the NFL. But he also tells current students about the three other Oceanside products who are in the NFL… even if they are not on the field and their names are less recognizable.
Just as it is Matt Caracciolo’s job to get the Cardinals where they need to be, he also serves as a trailblazer to others who want to reach the NFL in ways that don’t necessarily involve tackling or passing or receiving.
"I’m so proud of them," Luisi said. "Theirs is a story of hope and belief. I tell the kids about them all the time. It’s important because they see that they can get there from here. It’s a beautiful thing."
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.