Scott Pioli gives Sports Illustrated a glimpse of life as Chiefs GM, including learning about Twitter and dealing with aggressive pit bulls

Former Kansas City Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli explained in a Sports Illustrated column why he didn’t build a better football team. Pioli wrote that he was too busy dealing with off-the-field distractions. 

“Less time is spent doing the job you fell in love with, which in my case is the purity of the game and competition,” Pioli wrote. And he went on to give a couple of examples.

One instance involved a player, who Pioli didn’t name, making “terribly offensive” comments on Twitter. Pioli wrote that this took place in 2009, and he didn’t even know what a tweet was.

“The player’s comments had apparently ‘gone viral” (another new phrase for me) and we had big problems,” Pioli wrote. “The time lost due to meetings and phone calls and diplomacy was three to four hours a day for about a week, but that wasn’t the end of it. The player filed a grievance that unfairly cost the organization and me at least another 40 hours in prep time for the hearing, and time spent with in-house and league attorneys, and with owner Clark Hunt. Think of that: A tweet cost us a good week of work time.”

The unnamed player has to be ex-running back Larry Johnson, who in October 2009 took to Twitter to blast then-coach Todd Haley and told one Chiefs fan that he had a “fag pic.” 

And then there’s this gem: 

“Once in my tenure, we had to advise a player to disassociate himself from friends who were living with him,” Pioli wrote. “They were raising pit bulls on his property – very aggressive pit bulls. He did not want the dogs on his property, but didn’t know how to get rid of the dogs or his friends. We had to help him solve both problems and that was not an easy task. It cost us at least 10 hours of work, the equivalent of a full day we could have been spending trying to make our team better. It also cost the player a lot of money.”

No idea who this player might be. 

Pioli’s column gives an inside glimpse of his tenure in the Chiefs organization, although it’s heavy on excuses (as you can see from the above examples of why he couldn’t do his job).

Read the full column for his thoughts on fantasy football, NFL life for a family and agents. However, he stays quiet on the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide, an omission but one that he’s likely hoping to forget.