New York Giants head coach Joe Judge is one of four Bill Belichick disciples currently leading an NFL team. Another one of those head coaches, who just happened to interview for the Giants’ job a few short years ago, is Matt Patricia of the Detroit Lions.
From 2012 to 2017, Patricia and Judge worked side-by-side with the New England Patriots, each of them cutting their teeth at the NFL level. And it didn’t take long for Patricia to realize that Judge had head coaching chops.
“Offensively and defensively, a lot of times we’re just working with our side of the ball, coaching our side of the ball, unless you’ve cross-trained at all,” Patricia said, via Giants.com. “He, from day one, hits the entire team. So, he’s very much so used to being up in front of everybody, commanding the room that way, drawing their interest, their respect, and trying to get players to play better. So, from that aspect, when you see that and you see his natural ability to do that in front of the room, you say, ‘OK, this guy can handle coaching an entire team.’
“He spent a lot of time learning about the roster, how to build that, how to put a team together. So, I’m excited for him. I think it’s a great opportunity, it’s obviously a great organization, and there will be challenges that come up that are unique for him and his position, but certainly things that we’ve talked about already that just are things that you have to be ready to experience as a first-time head coach.”
Patricia doesn’t not expect a seamless transition for Judge, however. Drawing from his own experience, he knows Judge is going to face some unexpected pitfalls along the way.
“There’s just a lot of things that come up that are a challenge,” said Patricia. “A lot of them you really don’t know what they are because you just haven’t experienced it, you haven’t seen it, you don’t understand what it is. There may be something that doesn’t exist in the prior place that you were at. So, I would say that unknown factor of walking into a new building and trying to identify, what are the challenges for that organization? There is obviously a reason that you’re there. There’s a reason they brought you in. If it was an organization that didn’t need a lot of change or didn’t need some improvement, then you probably wouldn’t be there.
“Honestly, depending on when you start that process, it takes a long time to figure it out. There’s a lot of things that pop up that you just, you know, you look at and say, ‘OK, this isn’t really how we want to do things. This isn’t necessarily the direction we want to go,’ or ‘These are the areas we really need to get better at quickly in order to help this team.’ It’s not all the same answer, it’s different everywhere, but it’s all the same kind of underlying example of they are there for a reason and that’s because there are things that need to change and things that need to be fixed. Because if there wasn’t, then you probably wouldn’t be there.”
Luckily for Judge, he’s surrounded himself with an extremely experienced staff that includes offensive coordinator Jason Garrett and, quite possibly, former Cleveland Browns head coach Freddie Kitchens, who is rumored to be joining the team.
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