Dave Birkett

Detroit Free Press

NORWOOD, Mass. – Foxboro Stadium was a rathole of a place when Bob Quinn arrived there as an intern in the winter of 2000, a few credits shy of his master’s degree in sports management from UConn.

The impersonal old stadium with crumbling concrete had none of the amenities of modern NFL life, but for a few months that year, it housed the best think tank in football.

Bill Belichick took over as New England Patriots coach in late January, and he brought Scott Pioli with him as director of player personnel.

Pioli set up shop in one room inside the football office, right next to a library filled with scouting tapes and the team’s draft room.

Quinn spent his days back then running errands for scouts. He shuffled the draft board when needed, he put together tapes on prospects, and he made airport runs for the team.

When he wasn’t doing those things, Quinn usually retreated to his cubicle in the back of the draft room and listened intently as Belichick, Pioli and guys like Jason Licht, Eric Mangini and Charlie Weis discussed players.

“He would just listen during these meetings that Pioli and Belichick would run with us as scouts,” said Licht, a college scout with the Patriots back then and the current general manager of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “And he would just sit behind this wall, so you couldn’t see him, but you knew that he was just sitting there just scribbling down notes furiously. He was one of those guys.”

Quinn soaked up every bit of information he could.

He saw the dysfunctional side of the NFL as Pioli tried to get the holdovers in the personnel department to conform to his and Belichick’s teachings.

“Some got on board, and some didn’t,” Pioli said.

He saw the politics of the league, as people in the department worked to align themselves with Pioli or former Patriots vice president of player personnel Bobby Grier, who stayed on through the draft.

Mostly, he saw the methods the Patriots used to pick their players, how Belichick wanted certain traits at every position on the field and how Pioli and his staff, with plenty of spirited debate, set out to find them.

The Patriots won a Super Bowl in Quinn’s second year in New England, and his fourth, and his fifth. And as he started his own climb up the ladder, he was surrounded by a council of experts he learned from every day.

“It was the perfect environment,” Licht said. “It’s like getting the best education you can. It’s like going to the Ivy League of scouting.”

Sixteen years after he first enrolled in classes with no idea what he was studying, Quinn graduated with honors last week when the Lions named him their new general manager.

At the news conference to announce his hiring, Quinn thanked Belichick, Pioli, Licht, Patriots director of player personnel Nick Caserio and two more former New England execs — Bucko Kilroy and Atlanta Falcons GM Thomas Dimitroff — for their tutelage.

And though he said he won’t “cut and paste everything” he learned in New England into his new gig with the Lions, Quinn made it clear the Patriot Way is coming to Detroit.

“Things in New England, when I started there 16 years ago, didn’t happen overnight,” Quinn said. “It’s a step-by-step, day-by-day, month-by-month process. One of many things I learned in New England was, we’re always striving to get better, whether it’s scouting, whether it’s coaching, whether it’s in the weight room, nutrition, analytics. If we can get one step better every day, that’s putting this organization in the right direction.”

‘Real smart kid’

Quinn grew up a Patriots fan in the Boston suburb of Norwood, about 8 eight miles north of Gillette Stadium, where the team plays its home games today.

He lived on a cul-de-sac across from Willett Pond, and neighbors remember the skinny kid running through the streets playing sports.

“He had a basketball hoop out on the side of his house that his father put up,” said Ed Leary, who still lives across from Quinn’s childhood home. “He was out there every day. He’d come home from school, the first thing he’d do was pick up the basketball and start shooting.”

Baseball actually was Quinn’s love growing up, and the favorite sport of Norwood, too.

Three Norwood High graduates played in the majors in the 1970s — Richie Hebner, Billy Travers and Skip Lockwood — and every kid who joined Norwood Legion Post 104 wanted to be just like them.

Pete Wall, Quinn’s high school and legion coach, said Quinn was a slick-fielding shortstop who was fair with the bat but usually delivered in clutch situations.

“He had a big hit against Needham,” Wall said. “It was a 3-3 tie game, top of the ninth, and Norwood’s pretty well known for baseball, and he had a big hit that game, drove in two runs. We won, 5-3.”

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In basketball, Quinn was known as a standout defender, too, a wing man who usually drew the opposing team’s best player.

“He played varsity for me for three years in basketball, and I was also in charge of student government when he was there, and he was involved in that, too,” said Dave Powell, Quinn’s coach at Norwood. “The first thing that impresses you about him is that he’s really a real smart kid. He’s real cerebral. He’s one of these athletes who had good athletic ability, but he was really smart in terms of breaking things down. Even when he was in high school he was like that. He was almost like a step ahead of the other kids. Sometimes two or three steps ahead, to tell you the truth.”

Quinn worked behind the counter at the 7-Eleven not too far from his home, where Wall used to buy lottery tickets, and he spent his summers working in the town’s recreation department.

He refereed gym hockey games and kept an eye on the basketball court, but one thing he never did was play football.

Quinn’s father, Bob Sr., said he wouldn’t let his son play football for fear of injury and because he didn’t want him to ruin a promising baseball career.

In college, though, Quinn found himself working in the equipment room with the UConn football team, where he befriended then-Huskies coach Randy Edsall.

Edsall started at UConn in 1999 and turned to the young, personable equipment assistant for insight on his new team. Who were the leaders? What was the locker room like? How did players interact off the field?

“I’m the type of guy, I just kind of sit back and observe and watch people to see how they conduct themselves and interact with people, and I was just very impressed with how Bob went about his job and what he did,” Edsall said. “And then talking to him, there was just things that I knew that this guy had and he could be trusted. He was going to give you the information that you needed to make the team and the program better. And so that was the thing that always impressed me about him.”

Rising through the ranks

Edsall and Pioli worked together at Syracuse in the late 1980s, and that connection helped Quinn make a smooth transition in New England.

Pioli was looking for young, entry-level scouts to mold for the Patriots’ personnel department, the only prerequisites being thick skin and a penchant for hard work. Quinn and his intern-mate Kyle O’Brien, the Lions’ new director of player personnel, fit the bill.

“One of the sayings that we used to have was, ‘No job’s too big, and no job’s too small,’ ” Pioli said. “And he lived that. And one of the other sayings was, ‘The more you can do, the more you can do.’ Essentially it was the more that you showed you could do — again, whatever the assignment was — if you showed that you could do it, you did it with energy and you did it as a team player, well, then the reward wasn’t money. The reward wasn’t gifts. The reward was more work. That’s part of our core philosophy. And he understood that it wasn’t his right to be in the NFL. It was a privilege, and he always treated it that way.”

Quinn got more and more work thrown onto his plate over the years and eventually some pretty impressive titles to go with it.

The Patriots made him a pro scout in 2002, and two years later, after he had proved his aptitude for the game, they promoted him to a regional college scout covering schools in the northeast.

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In 2008, the Patriots elevated Quinn to a national scout, and a year later, after Pioli left for Kansas City, Quinn became the team’s assistant director of pro personnel. The kid with the thick Boston accent who started off as an intern trading harmless pranks with his office mates was now helping the Patriots plan their attack in free agency.

“He defines coming up through the ranks,” Licht said.

Licht, who did stints with Patriots from 1999-2002 and 2009-11, said Quinn’s last seven years in New England’s pro personnel department should help his transition to GM.

“The best education that he got was being in the office day to day, seeing how things, different circumstances and different situations pop up out of nowhere and how to basically put out fires,” Licht said. “And that’s the toughest job of a general manager, is you no longer can just go into your office, shut the door and watch tape ... for eight hours, 10 hours, and evaluate 10 players in a day like you did when you were a director of pro personnel or a director of college scouting. You basically walk into your office, and you have an open and closed sign, and as soon as you get there it’s open, and it’s all day long.”

Caserio, the Patriots’ director of player personnel the last seven years, said Quinn was a quick study in the process of team building and will likely follow a similar blueprint in Detroit.

“It’s kind of a bittersweet thing, because when you have good people, you want to keep good people,” Caserio said. “But when they have an opportunity like this, they’ve earned the opportunity because of their performance and hard work, and it’s a credit to him and what he’s done over the course of the time he’s been in the league.”

Finding that next player

Matthew Slater got to know Quinn well over the last few years, at least better than most players know their personnel directors.

The two would bump into each other in the weight room two or three times a week after practice, and inevitably their conversations would turn to football.

“I would ask him about a special-teams player on a team from three years ago, and he would know all about him,” said Slater, the Patriots receiver and special-teams star. “It was great. He’s got a lot of knowledge.”

That comes with the territory, of course, for a director of pro scouting, the position Quinn assumed in 2012 after Licht left for the Arizona Cardinals. But even in an organization in which Belichick so clearly calls the shots and Caserio is his trusted No. 2, Quinn was given plenty of other responsibilities.

Edsall, who left UConn to coach Maryland in 2011, said Quinn paid regular visits to the school even after his college scouting days were done. In 2013, after watching tape of Maryland’s draft prospects, Quinn told Edsall he liked an undersized defensive tackle named Joe Vellano.

“He told me, ‘He’s a free agent, but he’s a guy that plays the way that the Patriots like to play,’ ” Edsall recalled. “And it was good to see, because he was exactly right.”

The Patriots signed Vellano as an undrafted free agent that spring, and he started eight games and had two sacks his rookie year.

Caserio said Quinn came to him with another idea to bolster the Patriots’ defensive line in the fall.

Quinn liked what he saw in New Orleans Saints defensive tackle Akiem Hicks, thought he might be expendable from the Saints’ point of view, and engaged New Orleans in trade talks that eventually brought Hicks to the Patriots.

“He had a thought on a player, what about, at the time, one of our players relative to one of their players,” Caserio said. “And one thing that I was able to do with him is, I had a lot of trust and confidence to just let him handle that. So he kind of talked to New Orleans, relayed the information, ‘Hey, they might be interested.’ So he kind of got the ball moving a little bit.”

Quinn said at his introductory news conference that one of his chief roles with the Patriots was “to find that next player, and I feel like we’re going to have to do that here with the Lions.”

Those who’ve worked with Quinn say they expect him to build extraordinary depth as Lions GM because of his diligence as an evaluator, his tireless work ethic and his willingness to listen to those around him.

More than that, they expect Quinn to excel in his new role.

Pioli praised Quinn’s passion and smarts, and said he’s fortunate to have a “built-in consigliere” in advisor Ernie Accorsi to help him navigate choppy waters.

Licht called Quinn “one of the brightest evaluators” he knows, someone who “definitely kicks the weeds looking for everything.”

And Caserio said he expects Quinn to build a “smart, tough, competitive team” full of solid people while taking a few calculated risks along the way.

Whether that’s enough to vault the Lions into a new stratosphere of success remains to be seen, and Quinn, in true Patriots fashion, wasn’t about to make proclamations to that end last week.

“I’m not making any timetables about how fast we’re going to win championships around here,” he said. “This is a day-by-day, month-by-month process that we’re going to do this thing the right way. We’re not going to build it for the quick. We’re going to build it for the long haul.”

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Download our Lions Xtra app for free on Apple and Android!