A Football Giant: The Ernie Accorsi Story

Every NFL player, general manager, coach, and other personnel has a hometown, a favorite team, and a million stories to tell. For one, his stories originate in a small town in Central Pennsylvania that isn’t really a town at all.

Hershey is home to many things, like one of the most famous chocolate brands in the world and one of America’s youngest and brightest soccer stars-- Christian Pulisic-- but its most successful man might just be one who most people wouldn’t have recognized if he walked past them on the street, and that's just how he liked it.

Ernie Accorsi loved his hometown. So much so that he returned to that hometown during the COVID-19 pandemic. He left New York to be back here.

“The streets are the same; the high school baseball team’s still playing on the same field I played on in Teeter Ball," Accorsi said.

"When you're in New York, you know, you're in a sense you're shielded from all that because you're so preoccupied with just living there, let alone working there,” Accorsi said. “And I loved it there. I never would have moved out of there for wouldn't have been for Covid.”

The late Colts, Browns, and Giants general manager moved to New York in the late 1990s when he was hired to be assistant general manager to George Young. After a few seasons as the No. 2 man, Accorsi was chosen as Young’s predecessor in New York. But it wasn’t an easy path for Accorsi; he had spent more than 20 years in the NFL to that point and would spend many more working for the Giants, but his love for football traces back to his time in Hershey.

“I went to Hershey High School; I played on the golf team. I wanted to play baseball, but everybody always told me I was a better golfer than baseball player,” Accorsi explained. “I lived there until I went away to college.”

As a young man, the NFL was prominent in Hershey. The Philadelphia Eagles spent their summers in Hershey for training camp, and each year the Eagles played the Baltimore Colts in a preseason game. With training camps seemingly in his backyard, Accorsi developed a love for the game of football and even got to witness some of its top talent at the time, all right there in his hometown.

“Johnny Unitas threw his first touchdown pass there,” Accorsi explained. “In fact, his first NFL pass, that was not in a league game. But he had been drafted by the Steelers in ‘55, he didn't play a down.”

Unitas was cut by the Steelers after the 1955 season and was quickly picked up by the franchise where he would make his career, Ernie Accorsi’s favorite team, the Baltimore Colts. But before Unitas was an NFL legend, he was a no-name quarterback being inserted into a random preseason game in Hershey.

“I would go to all the preseason games. I think it was $2.50. And they had had the rookie of the year before, George Shaw as a quarterback, and we were all excited about that,” Accorsi recalled. “They took Shaw out after one quarter. It’s 1950, I’m 15 years old, booing and complaining and, about 'who was this guy Unitas?' Okay. So the guy beside me was from Baltimore, and he said, ‘Calm down, kid, this guy threw six touchdown passes in their intersquad game this past Tuesday.’ I didn't know anything about evaluating talent, but all of a sudden he's throwing lasers all over the field and threw a touchdown pass to, I think, a guy named Dick Nyers. And that was the first touchdown pass [Unitas] ever threw in an NFL uniform.”

After spending his childhood in Hershey, Ernie went to college at Wake Forest University, where he befriended future NFL running back Brian Piccolo. Accorsi and Piccolo lived on the same floor during their freshman year at Wake Forest, and that connection ran deep. Piccolo played in the NFL for 5 years, and midway through his fifth year, he was diagnosed with embryonal cell carcinoma, a disease that would cause his death in 1970.

“I knew he was a Sloan-Kettering. I knew what was wrong. You know, I didn't know how bad it was. I knew he had been operated on,” Accorsi said about Piccolo.

Teammate Gale Sayers famously mentioned Piccolo in a speech in 1970. Sayers had just won the George S. Halas Courage Award and discussed Piccolo, his roommate in the NFL, just weeks before his death. Proclaiming “I love Brian Piccolo,” Ernie Accorsi was there to witness it, and was steps away from Piccolo when an NFL legend stepped in front.

“I went up to tell [Piccolo] that I had gone to college with him, and I it was somebody in front of me, but I didn't realize who. And then I realized it was Vince Lombardi, and I heard Lombardi say, ‘Gail, you're a great American.’ And he turned around and tears his eyes."

By then, Accorsi was just starting his own NFL career, working with the Baltimore Colts in the PR department. He would be there from 1970-1974 and in that time, Accorsi got to work with the quarterback that he watched growing up.

“The Hall of Fame called and said they knew it was [Johnny’s] last game,” Accorsi said.

They wanted Unitas’ uniform from his final game ever. But Unitas was not quick to give it up. He did give Accorsi most of his game clothing, but Unitas kept his cleats. He told Ernie that he planned to wear those game cleats while he mowed his lawn. But the most important article of clothing-- Unitas’ game-worn jersey- would never make the Hall of Fame’s collection.

“The equipment manager's name was Mike McVay. [Johnny] said, Mike, you give me a white jersey, because we always carry two jerseys in case one got destroyed. So he gave them the white jersey, the unused one. John threw me [the other] one. So says just as yours. I put it as deep as I could in my briefcase. I don't want anybody to know it, but I still have it.”

Accorsi kept that Unitas jersey in his home in Hershey until his death.

Unitas retired from the NFL after playing a year with the Chargers in 1973, and Accorsi would leave the Colts one season after that. Ernie was destined for something greater than Public Relations and took a job with the NFL league office for the 1975 season.

“I started to do scouting. The personnel director, Upton Bill, would take me on road trips and I’d do scouting reports, and so did George Young, who was assistant personnel director. So what he would do was look at people that he thought were promising and he'd bring them to these two jobs that were in the NFL that he had created. They weren't PR; they were administrative. They were called assistant to the president of the NFC in the AFC. So he offered me the job for the NFC.”

Accorsi worked underneath NFC President and Chicago Bears Owner George Halas, and at the time, Pete Rozelle was the NFL commissioner.

“You sort of worked for George Halas because he was the director and you were the assistant director. But you worked for Pete Rozelle. So I was there two years, and it was really a training ground job where you were you transitioned from being a PR director. You worked the schedule, you helped make the schedule, you handled all the administrative work.”

Accorsi credits his time in the NFL office as a major contributor to his success as a general manager.

“That sure baptized you, you know, into the front offices of the NFL.”

After spending a year working for the league, Accorsi found himself working for the Baltimore Colts again, this time as their assistant General Manager. He would spend his next four years in that role before he was promoted to Colts General Manager in 1982.

“I had been given the GM job late that year. I was really not qualified; I was the youngest general manager in the league. I was 41 years old.”

Accorsi was given a failing Colts team, one that would go 0-8-1 in the strike-shortened '82 season and end up with the first pick in a draft chock full of quarterback talent. John Elway, Dan Marino, and Jim Kelly headlined a class of six major quarterbacks that would go in the first round. The most famous and successful was, of course, Elway, who would be the controversial No. 1 pick of the 1983 draft. It was well known around the NFL that Elway had no desire to be a Baltimore Colt. Accorsi, then Colts GM, knew this to be the case, but dreaded the idea of trading the man he felt was the best prospect he had ever seen.

“In my mind and, and probably in the minds of most people in this league, he's the greatest prospect, at least in this generation. I want the greatest return in this generation,” Accorsi said of his trade demands. “No one had ever given three number ones, so I wanted two in this draft; one of them had to be in the top five because I wanted to pick Marino, and I thought he wouldn't last past the first five. The other one can be for the following years.”

Nobody would make the deal with Accorsi and he ultimately had his Colts select Elway with the first overall pick. Elway was not happy, but Accorsi was determined to convince him to sign with Baltimore.

“I told the owner that it was going to cost $5 million for five years. Now that's peanuts today; no one that signed for $5 million for five years,” Accorsi said. “I think that scared the owner off because he lived in Chicago and he and his attorney ran off and traded him to Denver without me knowing.”

Elway was traded to the Denver Broncos six days after he was drafted. Accorsi was blindsided; he found out while watching the NBA playoffs on ESPN. In return, the Colts received Chris Hinton, the fourth overall pick in 1983, Mark Herrmann, and Denver’s first round pick in 1984.

Accorsi was blindsided by then Colts owner Bob Irsay; he decided it was time for him to find another franchise. And it was good timing for Accorsi, as his childhood favorite team was destined for Indianapolis.

“I didn't want to be there anymore anyway after that Elway incident, but I was not going; [there] was no way I was going to Indianapolis.”

Irsay snuck the Colts out of Baltimore in the middle of the night in late March 1984, approximately a year after Accorsi resigned from his position as general manager. As Accorsi prepared to take a new job as the Cleveland Browns general manager, he received a phone call from a friend in Baltimore.

“I knew [it] was an internal number at the facility I said, "What are you doing? It's 11:00 at night." He said, ‘The Colts are moving.’ I said, ‘You haven't been drinking a little bit, have you?’ He said, ‘No, they're moving their stuff out. I'm here protecting my equipment.’”

Not believing his original source, Accorsi phoned another friend in Baltimore who lived near a hill overlooking the Colts facility. That friend drove to the top of the hill and watched multiple tractor-trailers roll out of Baltimore, bound for Interstate 83 and a secret route through Pennsylvania on their way to Indianapolis.

“You'd normally go to Frederick and Breezewood; it's over 70 miles. They took the 17-mile trip because the legislature of Maryland had passed an eminent domain suit that day, a law which meant that [the state of Maryland] could take possession of the franchise the next day. And they didn't want to get stopped because it was Maryland law before they left the state.”

Accorsi’s favorite team growing up was gone. But Ernie was no longer a Colt either and began to focus on his own future. In 1985, he began his job with the Browns, quickly searching for a quarterback to take the Browns to the promised land. He and Coach Marty Schottenheimer landed on University of Miami quarterback Bernie Kosar. But it wasn’t without some quarterback controversy, something Accorsi was used to at this point.

Kosar was acquired via the supplemental draft in 1985, which, at the time, was controversial. But after striking out with Elway, Accorsi knew how to work the system and find his guy. Kosar would help lead the Browns to multiple AFC Championship games with Schottenheimer and Accorsi at the helm, but Schottenheimer left the Browns as a power struggle with Browns owner Art Modell ensued. After hiring Bud Carson to coach the Browns for a year and a half, Accorsi was searching for a new coach and landed on the young Defensive Coordinator for the New York Giants, Bill Belichick. It was Belichick’s first NFL Head Coaching job, and he was hired by Ernie Accorsi.

During his time with Cleveland, Accorsi led teams that made three AFC Championship games, but fell short all three years. It is considered by many to be one of the most, if not the most, successful tenures in Browns history. Just a few years after he resigned with Cleveland, Accorsi took another job with one of the NFL’s most historic franchises, the New York Football Giants.

His Giants tenure began with Accorsi as the Assistant General Manager to George Young, with whom he had worked in the NFL office many years earlier. Once Young retired in 1998, he handed the keys to Accorsi.

During Accorsi’s first few years, the Giants enjoyed some success, even going to the Super Bowl in 2001, but losing that game to the Baltimore Ravens 34-7. Giants quarterback Kerry Collins, a product of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, was controversial, but was steered right by Accorsi.

Many consider Collins to be among Accorsi’s major success stories when it came to quarterbacks.

“I really researched, and everybody, just about everybody I had been to Penn State would work with, was still there, including Paterno,” Accorsi began. “I thought, look, he was a great kid to start with. He got a little off the rails, but you can always get it back if you start off character. Joe really swore by him. So we brought him in and we put him on a we had a tremendous psychologist named Joe Goldberg, and he was part of the organization. And he put them on a rigid, you're going to report to me and make sure you, you know, stop drinking or, and, so we brought him in. If you use a model football player for us and, you know, he played great.”

Collins' NFL career to that point had been marred by a mix of drinking problems and mediocre play, but Accorsi was determined to bring Collins aboard and succeed with him. Collins went on to have great success in New York, including leading the Giants to the Super Bowl in 2001. The Giants lost that game, but Collins and the team remained relatively successful until 2003.

“If it wasn't falling apart, then we would not have been in the number four position to be able to strike to get Eli.”

Once Manning’s name was in the mix, Ernie was determined to get his franchise quarterback once and for all. The Giants had the 4th overall pick in the 2004 draft after the season ended, and with the San Diego Chargers, a team Manning outwardly did not want to play for, came calling, Accorsi went to work.

“When the Chargers selected Eli, he put the cap on so he was going to go. He wasn't going to say I wasn't going to report. But the genesis of it was I didn't know AJ Smith at all, who was the general manager of the Chargers. But at the NFL meetings in March, the story had surfaced that [Manning] didn't want to play there. So I approached [Smith], and I said, look, I was in your situation; no one knows your situation better than I do. If you're going to stand fast on this and pick him no matter what, more power to you; this conversation is the last one we'll have. If you're willing to trade him. I want you to know, I'm interested.”

The one caveat to a trade: the Giants were not willing to give up star pass rusher Osi Umenyiora under any circumstances. The Chargers tried, but Accorsi refused.

“That's a no-brainer for me if that's going to be the requirement. We can't make a trade because I'm not trading Umenyiora,” Accorsi recalled telling Smith.

As Draft Day approached, the Chargers did not waste time taking Manning with the first overall pick. But AJ Smith was not done negotiating with Accorsi, and Ernie was still determined to make Eli a Giant.

“Larry Fitzgerald was picked ahead of me, but they could have picked Roethlisberger very easily. And I got no quarterback unless I want to pick Rivers,” Accorsi said.

After Robert Gallery went second to the Oakland Raiders and Fitzgerald to the Arizona Cardinals, it was the Giants' selection. And seven minutes into their draft clock, Ernie Accorsi received a call from San Diego.

[Smith] said, ‘If you want to make this trade, you got to give me Umenyiora.’ I said: ‘AJ, I told you this for two months. There is no way I'm trading Osa,” but the two weren’t done negotiating. “He said, ‘Would you give me next year's number one?’ We had already agreed that we would do that. I said, ‘Yes.’”

Both sides called the league office, and Eli Manning was a New York Giant. He’d run the show in New York for more than a decade, retiring after the 2019 NFL Season. Twelve years before that, Manning did exactly what Accorsi brought him to New York to do.

The 2007 Patriots were considered one of the greatest teams in the history of football to that point, going undefeated in the regular season on their way to the Super Bowl in Glendale. There, they’d meet a Giants team hoping for revenge. The Patriots had beaten the Giants on the last game of their undefeated regular season, a game Accorsi hoped to cheapen.

“I told Coughlin, I said, ‘play all the scrubs; cheapen their unbeaten season. The hell with them,’” Accorsi recalled.

The two teams met in the Super Bowl, weeks later, and it was New York’s time to have their moment.

“I was with my son, who had coached at Maryland and Virginia, so he knew something about football. And [Manning’s] got the ball, four minutes to go. And I said to my son, ‘This is what we drafted him for.’ I said, ‘If he's as good as we think he was going to be, we thought he was going to be he does it now. October 15th. Doesn't matter now.’ And he has this magnificent drive, aided by that catch by Tyree,” Accorsi explained. “It was an incredible feeling. I mean, it was to have gone through all that. And believe me, between those two Super Bowls, it was a lot of suffering, I could tell you that, a lot of near misses, but it sort of validated everything for me.”

Although Accorsi’s NFL career had ended, the Giants still honored him with a Super Bowl ring from that season and enshrined Accorsi in the team’s Ring of Honor in 2016. Accorsi was only the second Giants General Manager to make the Ring of Honor.

Accorsi spent the next few years working as a consultant for multiple NFL teams, including the Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, and Arizona Cardinals. He moved back to his hometown of Hershey during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he never left.

“I think it's the most unique town in America.”

Accorsi passed away on September 19th, 2026. He was 84 years old.