Colts Head Coaching Search Wish List: Matt Patricia
By Andrew Ites
Matt Patricia has become a hot head coaching candidate during his time in New England. Would he be a good fit as Indianapolis’ next head coach?
Résumé
The résumé section of these coaching candidate articles has usually been pretty straight forward, but Matt Patricia’s path to the NFL has been extremely unique.
He played his college football at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he got his bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering. Patricia chose to pursue a coaching career over a future in rocket science, and he began that journey as a graduate assistant at his alma mater in 1996.
He then changed his mind and entered the engineering field for a couple of years, but he returned to coaching as Amherst’s defensive line coach in 1999. After two seasons at Amherst, he became an offensive graduate assistant at Syracuse in 2001.
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New England hired Patricia as an offensive assistant in 2004. He worked his way up from offensive assistant to assistant offensive line coach, to linebackers coach, then spent one season as the safeties coach before he was promoted to defensive coordinator in 2012.
The Patriots have been a “bend don’t break” unit during Patricia’s tenure as defensive coordinator, but that has been an extremely productive strategy with Tom Brady running the offense. He’s a three-time Super Bowl Champion as a coach, and he’s spent 13 years under the tutelage of Bill Belichick.
Matt Patricia’s Fit in Indianapolis
Patricia doesn’t have a single season of head coaching experience during his career, but being groomed under Belichick has made him a legitimate candidate for an NFL job.
However, it’s hard to separate him from Belichick, and it’s impossible to know how much credit Patricia should get for the Patriots’ success. With those unknowns and a lack of head coaching experience, it’s hard to put Patricia at the top of the list of head coaching candidates this offseason.
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Here are some of the other head coaching candidates the Colts could look at: