Connecting with players crucial for Patriots DC Patricia
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — It might have been his last game in New England, and Matt Patricia wasn’t ready for it to end.
The Patriots defensive coordinator went back onto the field long after the AFC championship game was over and the team had advanced to the Super Bowl for the sixth time in his tenure.
There, he tossed around a football with his son before flopping onto his back on the confetti that had fallen during the team’s celebration.
“(It was) just fun to have him out there running around and just seeing the excitement that he had to be out on the field,” Patricia said this week as he tried to maintain his focus on the Super Bowl and not his expected next step — as coach of the Detroit Lions. “That’s always just kind of a special little moment for myself and him and my wife.”
Most identifiable by his bushy beard, backward-facing ball cap and cargo shorts or cutoff sweatpants, Patricia will be on the Patriots sideline Feb. 4, when they face the Philadelphia Eagles.
Then he will reportedly be hired as the Lions coach.
Patricia has declined to comment on the Detroit job other than to confirm that he “went through the process that the NFL allows us to go through during the bye week.”
The Lions confirmed that they interviewed Patricia, but they cannot make it official until after the Patriots are done playing.
“We’re just trying to get the win,” defensive lineman Trey Flowers said on Friday. “That’s all it’s about here.”
But for Patricia, that’s not all it’s about.
Players say he takes a special interest in them, talking to them not just as players but also asking about their families.
“It’s not just to coach you up,” linebacker Elandon Roberts said. “That’s a must for him. That shows what kind of man he is outside of the building.”
Taking a rarely followed path to the NFL, Patricia graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with four varsity letters and an aeronautical engineering degree.
He bounced around a few colleges in the Northeast before landing on Bill Belichick’s staff with the then-defending Super Bowl champions.
Moving up through the team’s coaching ranks, he became the Patriots defensive coordinator in 2012.
“It just lets us know he has our back,” safety Duron Harmon said. “He has our back. We’ve got his back. It’s nothing more than just a relationship that he’s built with everybody throughout the defense.
“And when you’ve got that from your coach, knowing that he’s going to go down for you and you’re going to go down for him, it makes you want to go out there and lay it down for him.”