Patricia, the future Lions coach, has taken something from every coach he’s been with, starting with his father, Ed, and ending with Bill Belichick
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Long before Matt Patricia was a coach, he was the son of a coach, and that experience — plus his dealings with many of the other coaches in his life — helped shape the philosophies he brings to the football field today.
Patricia will coach his final game as New England Patriots defensive coordinator Sunday against the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LII .
Next week, he’s expected to be introduced as Detroit Lions head coach, and some of his players already are wondering what he’ll be like.
“I looked him up,” tight end Michael Roberts said during an appearance on radio row this week. “Just a quick little Google search. If Google don’t know, don’t nobody know.”
That’s often the case with the all-powerful search engine, but Patricia said this week that his style is a mix of many of the coaches he’s been around in every sport.
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He wrestled and played football at Vernon-Verona-Sherrill High in central New York. He played football in college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His bio there said he also played tennis in high school.
As a coach, Patricia worked his way up from a graduate assistant at RPI, to Division III Amherst, to Syracuse, before spending the past 14 seasons with the Patriots.
“I think if you’re hopefully a student of the game or a student of coaching, you’re trying to take pieces that you think fit you as a person or your personality,” Patricia said. “And things that you think are good concepts that work and then also identify stuff that doesn’t fit the way that you’d want it done.”
Patricia declined to identify the three most meaningful relationships he has built through football.
“I don’t know if I’d want to pick three,” he said.
But it’s clear from the nearly three hours he spent fulfilling media obligations this week, plus separate interviews with his current and former coaches, teammates, players and staff, that the bonds Patricia has built with coaches are essential to him.
Patricia’s father, Ed, taught mechanical drawing and other high school art classes, he and coached wrestling at VVS during Matt’s grade-school years.
“He never actually coached (me),” Patricia said. “I remember distinctly being like, it was fourth grade and wrestling to me is a little bit, they’re a little nuts. They want you to like, when you’re young and they’re like, ‘Hey, you’re going to wrestle. You’re going to be like your old man,’ and all of that. I remember actually feeling the intimidation of it at such a young age that it was like, ‘I think I’m going to go play football.’ And he was like, ‘Go ahead.’ ”
Patricia was a heavyweight wrestler at VVS who lost about as many matches as he won, according to his Central New York Section III Hall of Fame coach Mark Peavey, and his biggest claim to fame was helping the Red Devils win a meet once by not getting pinned.
But while his father wasn’t on the mat with him, Patricia said he was the type of dad who “always kind of coached me up… as far as the details of things and paying attention and learning how to handle situations.”
“So start with him,” Patricia said. “I had some great high school coaches, great college coaches and definitely like I mentioned before the other night, guys that (were) really influential. At that stage, kind of as a young man between the ages of, say, 18 to 21 years old, those are huge years for men in the development of us as young adults. So a lot of guys that just, I appreciate.”
In college, Patricia played for Joe King, a coaching lifer who spent 22 years at the school and retired in 2011 as the winningest coach in RPI history.
“Coach King and (assistant coach) Bobby Jojo sat in my living room when they were recruiting me and I just remember, that’s kind of a hard situation for my parents saying, ‘OK, hey, we’re going to send him to school for you,’ ” Patricia said. “And then just kind of assure them like, ‘Hey, we’re going to take care of him. We’re going to make sure he goes to school, we’re going to help him with all the rest of it and put him in a good situation to succeed.’
“So Coach King was primary No. 1 as far as college is concerned as just a great example. He coaches with a lot of passion. He loved coaching us at the time, which was great. We felt it, we saw it, which I really admired that. And then he had a lot of great young assistants that helped us like not only with football but school and then just life in general. So great staff.”
King had a big enough impact on Patricia that when Patricia was trying to decide whether to give up a high-paying job in engineering and get back into coaching, he called King for advice.
“I just wanted to make sure that he knew what he was getting into and what he was giving up,” King said. “Coaching is a struggle. You know you’re going to start out and then you’ve got to be good at what you do and then you also have to get some breaks. He did and it took him a long time, and finally he made it to the top.”
One of the coaches that Patricia caught a break from was former Syracuse coach Paul Pasqualoni. Patricia joined Pasqualoni’s staff as a graduate assistant in 2001 and spent three seasons at the school before jumping to the NFL.
The two are close enough that Patricia is expected to hire Pasqualoni as defensive coordinator or defensive line coach when he finalizes his Lions staff in the coming weeks.
“Coach Pasqualoni is another guy that again was really kind of — they’re all influential and just a huge influence for me,” Patricia said. “It was obviously a great opportunity for me to go home. Syracuse was home for me, and when you grew up in that area there really is no professional sports, so at the time it was Syracuse football, Syracuse basketball, that’s kind of what it is out there. And to have that opportunity to go back and then just to see kind of Coach Pasqualoni’s, the way that he handled the team, the way that he coached the team and the way that just everything was in order, very much sort of how you would want a football team run.”
Patricia said other Syracuse coaches like George DeLeone and Dennis Goldman had a big impact on him on the time, as did colleagues from Amherst like Don Faulstick and E. J. Mills.
“Those guys that had coached with me and coached me in college, gave me that foundation,” he said. “When I got to Syracuse (they) kind of took it to that next level of hard work, and then obviously on to the Patriots where there was just again, more emphasis on hard work, coaching smart, learning in the game, looking at the game in a different manner, all those things.
