Ernie Accorsi, the senior general manager in the National Football League, is in his ninth season as head of the New York Giants’ football operation. Accorsi joined the organization in 1994 as assistant general manager to George Young and was named general manager on Jan. 8, 1998. he previously served as general manager for two other National Football League clubs, the Baltimore Colts (1982-83) and Cleveland Browns (1985-92).

In his last 15 years as a general manager with the Browns and Giants, Accorsi has had eight playoff teams, including six division champions. The moves Accorsi engineered in the winter and spring of 2005 were a major reason the Giants won last season’s NFC East championship. Accorsi was cited as the NFL Executive of the Year by USA Today, the New York Post, the Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. he is one of only five general managers who have had teams play in four championship games, won a conference championship and had a team play in the Super Bowl.

Accorsi passed the 100-victory mark as an NFL general manager in 2001, The Giants, Browns, and Colts have own a combined 135 regular season and postseason games under his stewardship.

“I believe this job is a privilege,” Accorsi said. “For someone who first saw the New York Giants play in my hometown of Hershey, Pennsylvania, in a preseason game in 1951 against the Philadelphia Eagles, the dream that you could be in this position is really more than you could ever expect.”

Accorsi’s best season with the Giants was 2000, when the club went 12-4, won the NFC east in the regular season and defeated Philadelphia and Minnesota in the playoffs to reach the Super Bowl for the first time in a decade, with a roster in which 66 percent of the players were acquired by Accorsi after the succeeded Young.

Following the season Accorsi received many honors. He was named the winner of the Lamar Hunt Award as the Pro Football Executive of the Year, which is presented by the All-American Football foundation. Accorsi was also named Football Executive of the Year by the New Jersey Sportswriters Association, which said Accorsi was the “unsung hero” of the Giants march to the Super Bowl.

Accorsi was the recipient of the first John Steadman Award presented by the Ed Block Courage Award Foundation, an award that honors an individual who “continually demonstrates professional excellence and epitomizes the values of courage, character, compassion, commitment and service to the community.” Accorsi was a close friend of Steadman, the late, great and much-loved Baltimore sports columnist. Accorsi has been affiliated with the Ed Block Foundation since its inception in 1978.

In addition, Accorsi received the Jack Horrigan Award, which is presented by Professional Football Writers association of America to the NFL official who is helpful and cooperative to reporters covering the league.

Accorsi has long demonstrated a willingness to make bold moves to improve his teams, and his timely and vital acquisitions were a primary reason the Giants improved to 11-5 and were champions of the NFC East in 2005. He completed perhaps the most significant transaction of his career on the first day of the 2004 NFL Draft. In a blockbuster trade, he acquired quarterback Eli Manning, the No.1 overall pick, from the San Diego Chargers. Accorsi sent San Diego the Giants’ first round draft choice, quarterback Phillip Rivers, as well as a 2004 third-round choice and first and fifth-round picks in 2005 for Manning, a franchise quarterback who set 47 school records at the University of Mississippi. Manning became the Giants’’ starting quarterback with seven games remaining in his rookie season and started every game in the division championship season.

Last Year, Accorsi acquired free agents Antonio Pierce, Plaxico Burress, Kareem McKenzie and Jay Feely, all of whom were essential contributors to the 2005 Giants. Under Accorsi’s front office leadership, the Giants had previously added key free agents such as carols Emmons, Shaun O’Hara and Chad Morton, and drafted three-time Pro Bowl tight end Jeremy Shockey, NFC sack leader Osi Umenyiora, special teams Pro Bowler David Tyree and offensive linemen Luke Petitgout, David Diehl and Chris Snee.

Accorsi was executive vice president/football operations for the Cleveland Browns from 1985 until he resigned in 1992. During that time, the Browns made five consecutive playoff appearances, including four AFC Central titles and three appearances in the AFC Championship Game. With the Browns, Accorsi made the delicate and important supplemental draft trade that gave Cleveland the rights to then sophomore Bernie Kosar in the spring of 1985. Kosar joined the team in the summer, and the Browns went on to win four AFC Central titles and made the playoffs a fifth time as a Wild Card Team.

After leaving the Browns, Accorsi served as a special advisor to Maryland Governor William Donald Schaefer on NFL expansion. In that capacity, he was responsible for selling all 100 sky suites for the proposed NFL football stadium, as well as all 7,500 club seats. The sky suites were sold out in six weeks, while the club seating sold out in eight weeks, in addition, he also raised commitments of $51 million for Baltimore’s Expansion Efforts Premium Seating Campaign. Immediately before joining the Giants, Accorsi was Executive Director of Business Affairs for the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball.

Accorsi began his NFL career as the Baltimore Colts’ public relations director in 1970 and has since worked in virtually every phase of the football business. After five years in Baltimore, he moved to the NFL office, where he worked on Commissioner Pete Rozelle’s staff as assistant to the president of the National Football Conference in 1975 and 1976. he returned to the Colts organization in 1977 as the team’s assistant general manager. Accorsi later became the Colts last general manager in Baltimore for two years, 1982 and 1983, when he selected John Elway with the first pick in the draft. After learning of Elway’s trade by ownership on television, he resigned and joined the Browns following the season.

Accorsi was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where he played baseball all the way tot the American Legion level. A 1963 graduate of Wake Forest University, Accorsi served on active duty in the U.S. Army in 1964. He then worked as a sports writer for the Charlotte News, Baltimore Sun, and Philadelphia Inquirer. One of his first assignments in Charlotte was to interview Archibald (Moonlight) Graham, then 86, a former Charlotte minor-leaguer who played in one major-league game in 1905. a quarter-century later, Graham achieved some measure of fame in the movie, “Field of Dreams” as the obscure player upon whom Burt Lancaster’s character was based. Five years after writing about Graham, Accorsi broke the story of Wilt Chamberlain’s trade from the Philadelphia 76ers to the Los Angeles Lakers.

After leaving the newspaper business, Accorsi worked in the athletic departments at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and Penn State University before joining the NFL.

Accorsi is a lifelong, passionate sports fan with a strong sense of history and an appreciation fort eh games themselves and the people who play them. In addition to football, his favorite sports are baseball, college basketball and golf. He relishes retelling stories of an event he attendee 40 years ago or a nugget he heard on a sports highlights show hours earlier. His first NFL game was a preseason contest in Hershey between the Detroit Lions and New York Bulldogs. A year later he traveled to Philadelphia for his first major league baseball game and saw Jackie Robinson steal home. He still regrets not being in Hershey the night Chamberlain scored 100 points there in 1962; Accorsi was away at college.