New England Patriots defensive coordinator Matt Patricia signals from the sideline in the first half of an NFL preseason football game against the Green Bay Packers Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015, in Foxborough, Mass. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
Inevitably, Matt Patricia was going to move on. The guy was too smart, too talented, too damn good at his job to stick in one spot for too long, even if it was a position in which he immediately excelled and, by all accounts, thoroughly enjoyed. Well-liked, tireless, engaging and super passionate, Patricia had been the perfect hire years ago. He caught on quickly, taking just months -- not the customary year or so -- to adjust to how the organization operated. In the words of one former staffer, "there was never an ego with Matt; it was all about getting the job done." Combustion Blower
"A good fit for our organization," another said. But, according to someone with direct knowledge of Patricia's thinking, his departure had been considered a "distinct possibility" for quite some time. Another source was aware that Patricia had opportunities to leave. He just hadn't taken them. Until....
Full disclosure: The sources are Jim Ward, Joe Markert, Dave Shanahan and Bill Fisher. You don't know them. Matt Patricia does.
And the organization was Hoffman Air & Filtration Systems in East Syracuse, N.Y., where Patricia worked for two years back when he was just a regular guy, long before he became a Super Bowl champion defensive coordinator with the Patriots, and long before he landed on the interview lists for multiple NFL head coaching vacancies.
OK, maybe it's unfair to say Patricia was just a regular guy, because nobody from Hoffman would characterize him as just that. But, among other descriptions, he was that. He was part of a tight-knit office, working his first job out of college for a highly successful company. He threw snowballs at his boss. He threw snowballs at other departments with his boss. He made million dollar sales. You know, regular stuff.
An aeronautical engineering major and the center on the football team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Patricia graduated in the spring of 1996, then interned with the RPI football team for the fall season. It was off to the workforce in the spring of 1997, as Jim Ward hired Patricia to be one of eight or nine application engineers at Hoffman Air & Filtration.
"One of my favorite employees of all-time," Ward said. "I've been doing this 25 years."
Without getting too far down the engineering rabbit hole, Hoffman produced multistage centrifugal blowers, so Patricia had to A) Understand what the hell that meant and B) Sell the technology (the blowers/compressors), design the project based on plant size, bid the project, close the order, manage the order and startup the project.
Hoffman primarily sold to wastewater treatment plants; the company's blowers provided airflow, adding oxygen during the treatment process.
Patricia also worked on projects with coal-fired power plants, refineries, chemical plants for oxygen and nitrogen, boosters and landfills. He dealt with independent reps across the country -- Florida, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas. The job involved constant interaction with the reps because, as Ward said, "we're supporting them so they can sell our product."
"I mean, the reps loved him," Ward said.
"Matt was an engineer," said Joe Markert, who held the same position at Hoffman. "But he had a great sales personality."
Most of the work was done from the office, where Patricia and the other sales engineers sat in an open bullpen setup. No cubicles. This created constant chatter, as guys could shout out questions to the group when they worked the phones.
No shirt and tie was required. Business casual. And Patricia conformed to normal workplace attire; only later in life did he land a job where his direct supervisor truly did not care about dress code.
And this was Matt Patricia pre-beard, and immediately post-football, so he was a tad slimmer, although he was going through what every athlete experiences after retirement: Craving the same hearty diet minus the same workout regimen.
As for Patricia's trademark pencil behind the ear? He didn't pick it up at Hoffman. Nor did he drink coffee or coke, or Red Bull or Mountain Dew.
He started in 1997, pre-Google (founded in Sept. 1998), so when important questions arose, the group of sales engineers always had a sports almanac handy. They made too many miscellaneous bets to remember. Many were on sports, the answers in the almanac. Others involved random workplace occurrences. The wager was almost always the same. Not dollars, but Dinos.
"We would go down to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que -- it's pretty well known -- and you'd have to buy the guy's lunch if you lost," said Dave Shanahan, another former sales engineer. "We'd record it as a Dino."
Dinosaur and Mother's Cupboard, a double-wide trailer diner known for its outrageous portions, were the go-to spots when Patricia worked from the office, which was the majority of the time. The job required some travel, as Patricia would visit reps in the field. He'd also be on the road with Ward for trade shows. At least one of the trade shows was in New Orleans.
"I don't know if you've ever been out with Matt," Ward said, "but he knew how to have a good time."
Didn't affect his work, though.
"When we'd do trade shows and stuff, we'd all be hungover," Ward said. "He'd be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. He had a very good recovery."
Patricia knew how to keep it light in the office, pranking co-workers on the pager system, which broadcast throughout the sales office and the adjacent factory. Other times he took a more direct approach.
"You could always count on Matt pegging somebody between the buildings with a snowball," Ward said. "And we had an engineering department in the back part of the building. We always used to like to just chuck snowballs up at the window and piss them off."
As Ward said, Patricia "made work fun." Markert took it a step further.
"If you didn't like Matt," he said, "you needed to get yourself checked out."
Markert called the clique of sales engineers the "clown club." A number of them, Patricia included, were not too far removed from college, and Ward, their boss, wasn't much older. Of course, it's easy to joke when business is good, and business was rolling at Hoffman. A sale of seven or eight centrifugal compressors -- machinery manufactured next door, sometimes as large as six-feet tall and five-feet wide -- could be a $1 million order. There wasn't as much competition within the industry as there is today, and the Clown Club made for an excellent team.
The job was a standard 8-5, but they usually worked 50- or 60-hour weeks. Patricia "lived and breathed what he was doing," Ward said. His former co-workers describe him the exact same way his current employees do. Seriously, if we sync all quotes to the present tense, it's nearly impossible to distinguish what was said by his Hoffman buddies and what was said by the Patriots.
1). "You don't have to tell him twice how to do things. Matt's just the kind of guy who wants to grab as much work as he can, do as much work as he can."
2). "He's the kind of guy that he's got 10 projects going at once and then you're like, 'Hey, Matt. Can you do this and do that?' 'Oh yeah, no problem.'"
3). "He doesn't leave any stone unturned with anything. He covers everything you could possibly think of."
4). "He always brings new ideas for improvement, and he's never afraid to tackle a problem, no matter the magnitude."
Your answer key: No. 1 was Ward, his supervisor at Hoffman. No. 2 was his, um, supervisor in New England. No. 3 was Nate Ebner, who works under Patricia in the defensive backs division. And No. 4 was Markert, who once had a problem that Patricia fixed.
Markert had "way underbid" a wastewater treatment project in Mississippi. The contractor that won the bid was, in Markert's words, "ready to take us to the cleaners," and to make matters worse the rep for the contractor wasn't too fond of Yankees. Markert turned the project over to Patricia, who "somehow was able to befriend this guy and somehow make the project profitable."
The job required the fusion of technical knowledge and social skills, creating the ideal landing spot for a math whiz who, at his core, was just a regular dude.
"He just connected well with people," Ward said. "And people like to buy from people they like. When you combine his engineering expertise with his responsiveness and his personality, I think that's a winning combination."
Patricia predated the millennial generation, and he embraced the family environment at Hoffman. No one believed he was looking to jump ship immediately. But there was the thought that he'd leave because the opportunity for advancement at Hoffman was limited; it was a small company with young employees like Ward in management positions. According to Markert, Patricia did have offers within the field. He was talented, and he was sought after.
Additionally, Patricia had an aeronautical engineering degree, so Ward figured he'd eventually seek a job in aeronautics. Or maybe something more in line with the design side than sales.
As they'd come to learn, there was also a third reason for Patricia's potential departure.
Sometime before the fall of 1997, George Mangicaro, longtime head football coach at Liverpool high school, had a visitor at his office.
"I didn't know who he was, I don't know how he got my name, I didn't know where he was working," Mangicaro said. "But he came in and just had a love for a game."
He was Matt Patricia, and he was working about 10 miles east of Liverpool. He was inquiring about any openings on the Liverpool football staff.
Mangicaro had already filled out his staff for the season, but he listened to Patricia's credentials and welcomed him as a volunteer coach. He assigned Patricia to work with the varsity offensive and defensive lines, assisting Liverpool O-Line coach John Giannuzzi, who played behind current Patriots offensive line coach Dave DeGuglielmo at Boston University.
Working with Giannuzzi, Patricia taught blocking fundamentals and principles within the program's freeze option system, the same offense George DeLeone ran at Syracuse. Giannuzzi felt comfortable delegating responsibility to Patricia because, well, "he was really, really intelligent."
"Who knows how much he really knew?" Giannuzzi said.
Giannuzzi knew Patricia was an engineer, and like the guys back at Hoffman, he knew Patricia was serious about coaching. Why else would he be working as a volunteer assistant position coach for a high school team?
At Hoffman, Ward allowed Patricia to rearrange his schedule so he could make it to practice, which started when school got out. Ward said Patricia would "make it work," sometimes coming to the office on weekends.
He spent some nights and mornings volunteering at the Syracuse University program, trying to get his foot in the door. As ex-Orange coach Paul Pasqualoni told The Boston Herald, this involved everything from picking up players at the airport, running curfew checks in the dorms or setting up cones for on-field drills.
By 1998, Patricia had left Liverpool. He began volunteer coaching with the Syracuse Storm, a semipro team in the Empire Football League. And when we say semipro, we mean hardly professional at all. Players didn't get paid to play; they paid their way to play. These were ex-college and high school athletes who simply wanted to stay in the game.
Patricia worked with the Storm's offensive and defensive lines in the spring and fall of 1998. According to Bill Fisher, he "took it very seriously."
Less than two years into the job at Hoffman, Patricia began discussing his next step with his co-workers. The decision wasn't final, but he was leaning toward leaving the engineering field and trying his hand in coaching. He told Ward that he didn't want to be 40 or 50 years old saying, "God, I should have went after that."
"I didn't want to lose him as an engineer because he was a solid engineer and was really beginning to blossom and do well at his profession," Ward said, "but also when somebody says that's what they've always wanted to do, you've got to follow your dreams."
If it didn't work out, Ward told Patricia he'd take him back. And if Ward didn't have a spot, Patricia still had an aeronautical engineering degree to use. There wasn't monumental risk associated with leaving the company. As Shanahan pointed out, "there were all sorts of different things Matt could have done."
So Patricia worked at Hoffman through 1998. In '99, he became the defensive line coach at Amherst, a gig that paid $8,000, according to The Herald. From there he went to Syracuse, and then joined the Patriots in 2004 as a coaching assistant, and then...
A decade later, Markert tells The Matt Patricia Story. He tells it multiple times each year to his kids, who someday must choose their paths in life. The message of the story is simple: "If you believe in something and you've got a passion for it, then you find a way to do it," Markert said.
But the actual details of the story are truly unbelievable: A promising young sales engineer/volunteer assistant high school offensive line coach wins a Super Bowl, designs and constructs one of the best defenses in football, and positions himself to perhaps someday take reigns as head coach of an NFL franchise.
Here's to whoever bet a Dino on that.
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