John DeFilippo moved across the country so many times as a child that he has since lost track of the number of places he’s lived – which has prepared him perfectly for his adult life.
The son of a football coach, DeFilippo moved somewhere around 18 or 19 different stops, he guessed. His father Gene grew up in Massachusetts, coached football in Ohio and Tennessee, and was in college administration in South Carolina, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and, while DeFilippo was in college in Virginia, back in Massachusetts as the athletics director of Boston College.
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“I think that’s a major reason why I’m sitting here talking to you today,” DeFilippo, 39, said after being named the Vikings’ offensive coordinator. “I think as a kid when you grow up and are forced to put yourself in different situations, meet new people, make new friends, it forces you to put yourself out there. The same as a coach. I think the more you’re exposed to different things, the more you learn.”
That’s led to a dozen different jobs with 10 different teams for DeFilippo since he graduated from James Madison University in 2000.
But even since he was coaching quarterbacks at Fordham University the fall after his own graduation, the coaches that have helped groom DeFilippo describe a man that’s been working toward his new job for two decades — and one they say may be ready for an NFL head coaching gig soon.
“He may be young in years, but he’s got tremendous quality of experience,” said Bob Shoop, who hired DeFilippo in 2003 to coach quarterbacks at Columbia. “Here’s a guy who has already been at five or six different stops along the way. To watch his success has really been fun to do. And especially this year with the job he did developing Carson Wentz and then when he went down to prepare Nick Foles for as good a run as there has been in some time. It was really an impressive job. At one point, I thought he may be getting some considerations for a head-coaching job this season — and I still think he will some day.”
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When Mike MacIntyre arrived at San Jose State in 2010 and hired DeFilippo to coach his quarterbacks, the Spartans were coming off a 2-10 season. They had averaged 14 points per game under the previous regime.
MacIntyre made it clear to DeFilippo that finding a good quarterback was central to the turnaround they hoped to deliver.
So before he coached in a game for San Jose State, DeFilippo recruited a quarterback from Texas who played for Mount San Antonio College and didn’t have a single Division I scholarship offer.
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By the time that quarterback, Matt Faulkner, became the starter in 2011, DeFilippo had become the offensive coordinator and began installing, “the run-pass option type stuff before it was a big deal,” MacIntyre said.
Faulkner finished that season with the third-most single-season passing yards in program history and the second most completions in a single season, part of what helped DeFilippo earn a promotion to become the Oakland Raiders’ quarterbacks coach the following season.
But before he left San Jose State, he helped recruit one more little-known quarterback, a California kid who was playing for a nearby community college. He, too, didn’t have any FBS offers, MacIntyre said.
David Fales, DeFilippo’s final recruit for San Jose State, broke every major passing record in school history and became a sixth-round draft pick in 2014.
“He’s not going to be a cookie cutter,” Mike MacIntyre said of DeFilippo. “He utilizes his talent and he finds a way to have them be as successful as they can be.” (Credit: Bill Streicher/USA TODAY Sports)
“John just has a great eye for talent, and he can take a quarterback and see what his strengths are,” said MacIntyre, now the head coach at Colorado.
In the NFL, DeFilippo was again responsible for seeking out quarterbacks.
With the Raiders, he studied passers available in the 2014 draft, before urging the team to draft Derek Carr, which they did in the second round. Carr has since been to three Pro Bowls.
After one year as the offensive coordinator of the Cleveland Browns, DeFilippo was hired as the quarterbacks coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, another team interested in a quarterback. As they weighed their options, they flew DeFilippo to North Dakota to meet with an FCS quarterback named Carson Wentz.
In front of general manager Howie Roseman and head coach Doug Pederson, DeFilippo put Wentz through a test.
On a whiteboard, DeFilippo drew out a few plays of the offense. Then he erased the entire board and moved on to another topic for about a half hour. After the time had passed, DeFilippo changed gears and asked Wentz to diagram the four or five plays he had initially drawn on the board, a test of Wentz’s ability to recall and digest plays.
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Wentz passed the tests, the Eagles drafted him No. 2 overall, and DeFilippo helped develop him into an MVP candidate this season before an injury in Week 14. At that point, most figured the Eagles’ Super Bowl aspirations were over. Surely, there was no way they could rely on their backup quarterback in the biggest games.
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After Wentz’s injury, DeFilippo sat down with Foles and asked him a few questions.
“What are your best concepts?” he asked Foles. “What do you see yourself doing well?”
The methodology was simple, DeFilippo said.
“We’re not the ones out there throwing it. He is,” DeFilippo said. “So we really sat down and spent some time with Nick on what he felt comfortable doing. And to me, that’s coaching. Why would you ask a player to do something that he’s not comfortable with? That’s good coaching to me.”
Foles, of course, went on to become Super Bowl MVP in Minneapolis with a three-touchdown performance, used during that run in a much different way than Wentz was.
That’s one of DeFilippo’s strengths, his former colleagues said, utilizing his players’ strengths rather than asking them to play a certain way.
Nick Foles’s success in relief of Carson Wentz this season helped vault DeFilippo even further into the national spotlight. (Credit: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)
“He’s not going to be a cookie cutter,” MacIntyre said. “He utilizes his talent and he finds a way to have them be as successful as they can be. I think you kind of saw that this year with the way he coached Wentz and then changed things for the strengths of Foles. He’s not going to try to stick a square peg in a round hole, he’s going to stick with what the strengths of his quarterback are. That’s what he’ll build his offense around.
“Of course you have your certain fundamental things, but you have to tweak it to what your quarterback does best — especially in the NFL. And he’ll do that. I think he can adapt really well and I think he adapts to his quarterbacks.”
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DeFilippo had other tactics to get the best out of his quarterbacks.
When he arrived in Philadelphia, he implemented “body language fines” during training camp. If he caught one of his quarterbacks slouching or looking disappointed after a poor play, he’d hit them with a $20 fine.
“It’s not substantial,” DeFilippo said with a laugh while he was in Minneapolis before the Super Bowl. “But everyone is always watching you. Your teammates are watching you, the coaches are watching you, the fans are watching you, ownership is watching you, and if they see you with bad body language, it’s just kind of a deflator. It just kind of looks bad, so we always want to exude confidence on the field, exude confidence on the sideline, and we always want our teammates to know who’s in charge.”
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Even while he was a quarterback at James Madison, DeFilippo spent his offseasons doing summer internships in the NFL, twice with the Carolina Panthers and once with the Indianapolis Colts.
He enjoyed playing, those around him said, but was even more interested in becoming a coach, specifically in the NFL.
But when Shoop first hired him at Columbia in 2003, he too saw the potential of a head coach — but one in college, not the NFL.
“At that point, he hadn’t had NFL experience, so I saw it in a different perspective,” said Shoop, now the Mississippi State defensive coordinator.
He saw a terrific recruiter who excelled at interacting with people and shined in front of parents in the living room of a high-school player.
In Minnesota, John DeFilippo sees a special opportunity.
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— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) February 9, 2018
“He was one of the best recruiters I had,” Shoop said. “He really has the polish to be a head football coach. But in talking with John, I think the thing he really enjoys about the NFL more than the college game is the industry is different and he doesn’t have to spend as much time on recruiting. He was excellent at it, but he really enjoys the relationships with his coaching colleagues and the players and that professional environment a great deal. And he’s certainly put himself in a position, whether it’s a year or two from now or five years from now, that it won’t surprise me to see him be a head coach in the NFL.”
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That would be a swift rise through the coaching ranks, but not entirely shocking for a 39-year-old who hasn’t held a single job for more than three years, even if he downplayed a question about how long he’ll be with the Vikings.
“My mom and dad blessed me with a one-day-at-a-time mindset,” DeFilippo said. “And I try to do my job to the best of my ability every single day. There were certain things that came up during Super Bowl week and my agent tried to call me — but he and I wouldn’t even talk. I said I don’t even want to talk about it, because the more I talk about it, that’s time I’m taking away from the quarterbacks of the Philadelphia Eagles. That’s not fair to them, that’s not fair to the team. I’ve been very blessed with a one-game-at-a-time mindset. There have been times in my career I’ve had to pick myself up and dust myself off. There have been times where I’ve ridden down Broad Street in a Super Bowl parade — and everywhere in between. I’m very fortunate to keep things one day at a time.”
(Top image: George Gojkovich/Getty Images)
