If Nick Caserio leaves, is Monti Ossenfort next man up for Patriots?

While Nick Caserio has been in the spotlight the last few days because of Houston’s interest in him as a replacement for Brian Gaine, there’s also been a lot of talk about the Patriots director of college scouting Monti Ossenfort as a potential successor to Caserio in New England, or as a fallback for the Texans if they can’t land Caserio for their vacant GM job. Here are a few things we’ve been able to glean about Ossenfort, with an eye toward giving you an understanding about what he’s meant to the organization over the last decade or so.


— Ossenfort, a 2000 graduate of the University of Minnesota Morris, was a two-year starter at quarterback, and graduated with a degree in economics and management. A Minnesota native, he earned a master’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree in sports management from Ohio University. Like many in the New England organization, he’s climbed the ladder, going from working as an intern with both the Vikings and Texans (where he also spent two years as a pro and college scouting assistant) to the top of the college scouting department. In 2003, he worked the team as a personnel assistant in 2003, but eventually became an area and national scout in New England a few years later, and the director of college scouting in 2014 -- he took over for Jon Robinson, who moved on to Tampa Bay to become director of player personnel.

— In the last five years as the Patriots’ director of college scouting, he’s done well to earn the respect of the New England brain trust. That much is evident in the draft room videos distributed by the team via their social media accounts -- the Patriots like to keep the operation as minimal as possible, but Ossenfort has been spotted in there in the past on multiple occasions. And on a fairly annual basis the last few years, Bill Belichick has frequently talked up Ossenfort and the work of the scouting department during his pre-draft press conference. This past April, he did it again.

“Monti and his staff, who have been working on the draft since the day after the 2018 draft – well, actually before that – but let’s call it the day after the 2018 draft,” Belichick said. “(They) compiled an enormous amount of information both from a football standpoint, character, medical and so forth on several thousand players, which gets whittled down to let’s call it 100 or so in the final analysis.

“It’s a very lengthy and tedious one that Monti and his staff have, I think, done a great job on,” he added. “Those guys certainly deserve a lot of the credit for the success that we’ve had, the players that we’ve been able to acquire and the enormous amount of work that they’ve produced, really, on a daily basis, but it adds up over weeks, months and years at a time.”