MIGHTY QUINN
Falcons coach’s long journey from Jersey to Super Bowl
In just his second season, Falcons coach Dan Quinn has his team in the Super Bowl. It’s a journey that began in Morristown, N.J. BRIAN COSTELLO,
Long before Dan Quinn studied film to break down Tom Brady and the Patriots, the future Falcons’ coach sat in an office at Morristown High School in New Jersey, studying the Roxbury Gaels and the Morris Knolls Golden Eagles. Quinn was a football junkie from his early days. Back at Morristown, his coaches and friends thought he was just oddly obsessed with the game. There was no way to realize he was beginning a football life that would lead to next week’s Super Bowl. “He was a student of the game way back then,” said George Bellias, who coached Quinn at Morristown in the late 1980s. “All he thought about was football. He loved football. He wanted to watch film all the time and learn more about the game. Even his friends remarked that, socially, all he wanted to talk about was football.” Nearly 30 years l ater, Quinn will lead the Falcons onto the field next Sunday at NRG Stadium, the realization of a life around football. Quinn grew up the youngest of six children in Morristown. His four older brothers and he played all sports, but football was Dan’s love. The boys set up a football game in the living room that involved pretending they were Patriots fullback Sam “Bam” Cunningham jumping over the couch for a touchdown. Quinn did not permit friends and family to talk to The Post for this story. A few shared stories, but asked not to be quoted, and they painted a picture of a boy who knew football would be his life at an early age.
“I always knew I wanted to coach,” Quinn told The Seattle Times in 2013.
His father, Jim, played baseball at Northwestern before raising his family in Morristown, about 30 miles outside of New York.
The 46-year-old Dan Quinn’s organized football life began as a 7-year-old for the Twin Town Tigers in Morristown. He played Little League Baseball then got involved in track in high school. He would go on to set records in college in the hammer throw.
All along, though, football remained his passion.
“Most kids during the season are into it, but he was into it all year round,” Bellias said. “Even though he did other sports, football was his love. He was always asking other people about the game. He was enamored by the sport at an early age.”
Quinn’s older brother Peter described him once as “the biggest little kid we knew” to The Daily Record of Morristown. By trying to keep up with his brothers, Quinn excelled at sports.
Peter told The Seattle Times that it always was easy to find his younger brother because he was usually watching football if he was not playing it.
“He would be staying up watching the New Mexico State-Hawaii game at 2 in the morning figuring out what plays they were running,’’ Peter told the newspaper. “He was always a student of the game like that.’’
On the field for the Colonials, Quinn became a two-year captain for Bellias. He played center and linebacker and was all-conference his senior year.
“He was super tough,” Bellias said. “Nothing fazed him. The tougher it was, the better.”
During his junior year of high school, Quinn injured his neck. It would be an injury that bothered him for the rest of his football career.
“He played all the time and gave everything he had,” Bellias said. “He even played injured. He had hurt his neck in his junior year. His junior and senior year he played injured most of the time. He could have been a lot better than he even was.”
Quinn was entering his senior year in the summer of 1988 when the Giants moved their training camp to Fairleigh Dickinson in nearby Madison. Quinn would go and study the practices, watching his idols, Lawrence Taylor and Harry Carson. He also took notice of coach Bill Parcells and how he ran practice. Another person on the field at that time was a young defensive coordinator named Bill Belichick. Quinn will square off with Patriots coach Belichick, who now is considered one of the greatest coaches of all-time, next Sunday.
Bellias said Quinn loved to be challenged in workouts. They would get together in the summer to train, and Quinn could not get enough.
“The more physical it was, the more he liked it,” Bellias said. “You can see that now in his games.”
Quinn graduated high school in 1989 and went to Salisbury State in Maryland to continue his football career. After graduating, he nearly returned to Morristown as a teacher, but could not find an opening.
“I thought he was going to get into teaching,” Bellias said. “His first love was to be a high school teacher and coach. He applied at a couple of schools in the area at the time, and then something opened up at the college level and he took that.”
That something was an entry-level job at William and Mary in Virginia helping the defense. He then worked at Virginia Military Institute and Hofstra before getting a job in the NFL.
After the 2000 season at Hofstra, then 49ers coach Steve Mariucci hired him for a defensive quality control job after getting a recommendation from two former Hofstra players on the 49ers at the time. That led to defensive line coaching jobs with the 49ers and Dolphins before landing with the Jets under Eric Mangini in 2007-08.
The Seahawks hired him in 2009 under coach Jim Mora Jr. He was one of two assistants retained when Pete Carroll took over. But he left in 2011 to go to the University of Florida as their defensive coordinator. After two years back in the college ranks, he returned to Seattle to replace Gus Bradley as defensive coordinator. Seattle won the Super Bowl in his first year back and lost to the Patriots in his second year.
Back-to-back Super Bowl appearances and leading the Legion of Boom defense helped Quinn become a hot head-coaching candidate in 2015. He interviewed with the Jets, whose Florham Park headquarters are a short drive from his childhood home in Morristown. But eventually he landed with the Falcons.
Now, Quinn is back in the Super Bowl as the man in charge in Atlanta. You can bet he will spend some extra time looking at film this week, just like he did all those years ago in Morristown.
about “All washe thought football. He loved football. He wanted to watch film all the time and learn more about the game. Even his friends remarked that, socially, all he wanted to talk about was football.” — George Bellias, Dan Quinn’s high school football coach