Ohio State hiring Matt Patricia as defensive coordinator makes zero sense for Buckeyes
Ohio State has found their replacement for former defensive coordinator Jim Knowles, and it figures to annoy Buckeye faithful considerably.
According to ESPN’s Pete Thamel, former Lions head coach Matt Patricia is taking over for Knowles, who left to take the same position at Penn State this offseason.
Patricia has had a truly fascinating career as a football coach; where most coaches stick to one side of the ball or the other, Patricia has bounced around between offensive and defensive position coaching, before settling in properly as a linebackers coach, and eventually defensive coordinator in New England. Prior to that, most of his experience had been on the offensive side of the ball.
While bringing in a coordinator with Patricia’s level of experience is normally a good sign for a football program, in this case he comes with a fairly sizable number of red flags.
Patricia comes from the Bill Belichick coaching tree, which has a track record of producing…less than stellar results when those birds leave the nest. And it’s not like Patricia was all that good during his stint as New England’s defensive coordinator; in six years, the Patriots ranked outside the top 25 NFL teams in yards allowed more times (three) than they ranked in the top 10 (two) in that category, although they did rank in the top 10 in scoring defense throughout those six years.
That solid, if unspectacular showing, coupled with Patricia’s Belichickian pedigree, was enough to earn him a head coaching gig with the Detroit Lions. And, as was the case with most all of Belichick’s assistants who have ventured out into the big wide world, things did not go well for Patricia in Detroit.
Patricia took over a team that had gon 9-7 in back-to-back seasons under Jim Caldwell, and had two playoff berths during his tenure as well (for context, those two playoff berths tie Caldwell for the second-most of any Lions head coach since the NFL-AFL merger, behind only Wayne Fontes, who rode Barry Sanders to five playoff berths in eight seasons. Winning is hard in Detroit). They were a pretty good team, hoping to become a great one.
Unfortunately for them, Patricia immediately turned the Lions back into a doormat. They went 6-10 in his first season, 3-12-1 in his second, and were 4-7 in year three when Detroit decided they’d seen enough and canned him. The defense improved slightly in year one under Patricia, going from ranking 21st in points and 27th in yards to being ranked 16th and 10th respectively, but cratered under him the next two years.
From there, Patricia returned to New England for two years, and became the offensive playcaller for the 2022 season. That went disastrously, and he was fired and scooped up by the Eagles to help them continue to build an elite defense (they’d ranked second in yards and eighth in scoring in 2022)
Not only did Patricia and defensive coordinator Sean Desai fail to build on the previous season’s success, resulting in Patricia becoming playcaller near the end of the season, they turned what was previously a top 10 defense into one of the league’s worst. Making matters worse, once Patricia was out of the building after last season, Philly’s defense immediately went back to being the league’s best, ranking first in total yards and second in scoring this season, en route to a dominant Super Bowl title win.
