Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM APRIL 2022 17 Al Golden Biography PERSONAL INFORMATION Born: July 4, 1969 Hometown: Colts Neck, N.J. Education: Penn State University (1992, pre-law) Playing career: Penn State, 1989-91 (tight end) COACHING CAREER 1993: Red Bank Catholic High School, offensive coordinator 1994-96: Virginia, graduate assistant 1997-99: Boston College, linebackers 2000: Penn State, linebackers 2001-05: Virginia, defensive coordinator 2006-10: Temple, head coach 2011-15: Miami (Fla.), head coach 2016-17: Detroit Lions, tight ends 2018-19: Detroit Lions, linebackers 2020-21: Cincinnati Bengals, linebackers 2022: Notre Dame, defensive coordinator Notre Dame lured Golden back to the col- lege ranks after he spent six years in the NFL as a position coach. PHOTO BY CHAD WEAVER scheme," Freeman said. "I was also looking for a person that didn't want to come in here and just drop this play- book, and say, 'Hey, this is what we're doing.' No. Al Golden was a guy who said, 'Let me evaluate what you all are doing, let me evaluate your players and let's put together the best scheme.'" In the end, it will be Golden's scheme, and the defense is his to control. He is calling the plays and leading defensive meetings. The starting point for craft- ing it is an already successful structure that yielded a top-15 finish in scoring (19.7 points per game) and No. 11 final rating in the Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI). Freeman is open to tweaks — if they're rooted in building on a strong foundation rather than a teardown. "I'm not hiring him to run my sys- tem," Freeman said. "I want him to evalu- ate what we've done and find out how can we enhance from this as a beginning point. "It's only fair to the players to kind of say, OK, what do they know? There's only so many different ways you can play defense. If we can try to keep some ter- minology the same, I think that's going to help tremendously." Golden's career path lends itself to flexibility and diversity. He's not arriving with a defense he installed in his last job and will cling to with Superman's grip. In that sense, his 17-year gap between call- ing defensive plays could help him with his initial assignment at Notre Dame. As far as 29-year coaching veterans go, Golden appears as malleable and adaptable as possible. He spent the last six years in the NFL gathering ideas from different bosses and learning dif- ferent philosophies, all while watch- ing modern offense and current college trends bleed into the pros. In his two years as the Detroit Lions' linebackers coach, he even saw a new way of run- ning the first defense he called. From 2001-05 at Virginia, Golden used the scheme then-Cavaliers head coach Al Groh learned from former New York Giants head coach Bill Par- cells. (Groh worked for Parcells for three years in New York). Matt Patri- cia, the Lions head coach during Gold- en's 2018-19 stint working with line- backers, came from the Bill Belichick coaching tree and was his defensive coordinator. Belichick, of course, was a longtime Parcells assistant. "The bookends for me were Al Groh taught me the defense and we ran the defense," Golden said. "When I got back with Matt, he was the retro of that tree. He had another cutting edge to what we had done. I've been fortunate. I haven't been in a rush." Yet he felt Notre Dame tugging at him as that initial curiosity turned into occa- sional phone calls and Zooms with Free- man. One week before the Super Bowl, he came to South Bend to interview. He left with confirmation that what he watched in that press conference was real and spread beyond Freeman. "This is a unique place," Golden said. "Just being around t h e p l aye rs to d ay, m a n , I wa s l i k e , 'These guys remind me of where I just came from.' I can go on and on about the guys in Cincinnati." If Freeman went another direction, Golden would have happily stayed in the pros. The Bengals have the makings of a team on the rise. He had job security. An NFL defensive coordinator position could have been in the cards before too long. A chance he didn't see coming and a head coach's vision he shared coaxed him out of it. Three days after coaching at the NFL's peak, he stood in front of a dais in the Notre Dame Stadium media room decked head-to-toe in team-issued garb. He uncorked two months' worth of ex- citement that started boiling when he typed some variation of "Marcus Free- man press conference" in a web page. "I told my agent when I went to the NFL, there's probably only a couple places that I would leave the NFL for," Golden said. "Obviously, this was at the top of the list." ✦ "I'm not hiring him to run my system. I want him to evalu- ate what we've done and find out how can we enhance from this as a beginning point." FREEMAN ON GOLDEN