Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll's coaching journey began when he suffered a career-ending injury playing for the University of Rochester.
Brian Daboll was born in Welland, Ontario, but grew up in Buffalo.
He attended the University of Rochester where he played football and earned a degree in economics.
During more than 20 years as a coach, he earned five Super Bowl championship rings with the Patriots.
Twenty-six autumns ago, John Snell was sitting in the stands under the Friday night lights at St. Francis High School outside Buffalo, searching for candidates to play football for the University of Rochester.
Meaning, they usually had good players, and one he certainly liked was Brian Polian, the son of then-Buffalo Bills general manager Bill Polian. But that night, there was another Red Raider Snell liked even more.
“I saw this skinny little safety who was tougher than nails,” said Snell, who, for the past 24 years has worked at Baldwin Wallace University, first as an assistant football coach, later for 15 years as the head coach, and now as the school’s assistant athletic director.
Snell did indeed meet him, talk to him, and ultimately persuade him to come play for the Yellowjackets at Fauver Stadium. His name was Brian Daboll, who returns to Rochester for Buffalo Bills training camp this week in his new role as Buffalo’s offensive coordinator.
Like anyone who has made football his life’s work — be it as a player, coach, or administrator — Daboll’s journey has taken him to so many places that it’s tough to keep track of it all. But make no mistake, the place where it all began was over on Wilson Boulevard on the banks of the Genesee River.
Daboll played sparingly as a freshman, but he earned a starting role as a sophomore and he was in on 51 tackles and made two interceptions that year, a prelude to what took place on Sept. 9, 1995, opening day of his junior year, when Daboll played his greatest game, one of the greatest games ever by a UR defensive player.
In the season opener at Case Western, Daboll intercepted three passes, the last in the end zone with nine seconds remaining to secure a 9-5 victory. And what made it all the more memorable is that one of his best friends growing up in Buffalo, wide receiver Brian Flynn, caught the go-ahead touchdown pass with 54 seconds to go.
Daboll doesn’t talk much about his playing days, but he did say of that game, “That was a good one."
One that wasn’t so good occurred two months later, a 44-7 season-ending loss at Union, the game that turned out to be the last one Daboll ever played. “I got dinged up; I’ll leave it at that,” Daboll said, the memory still difficult to reflect on.
While making a helmet-to-helmet tackle, Daboll suffered a neck injury that left him prone on the field. Thankfully, Daboll was able to get up and walk off, but after he was examined in the days after, the determination was made that it was no longer safe for him to play football because the next neck injury could result in paralysis.
Football was Daboll’s passion, and to have it taken away so suddenly at the ripe old age of 20 was traumatic. Yet, in a way, one of the worst moments of his young life turned out to be the first step in what is now a two-decades plus coaching career, 17 of those years spent in the National Football League during which he has collected five Super Bowl rings with the Patriots and one college football national championship with Alabama.
When he got hurt, Daboll still had a year of school remaining to complete his degree in economics, and though he couldn’t play, he felt he could still help the team. He had knowledge, energy and a burning competitive spirit, and there was no way he was going to waste it, so he asked Parrinello if he could work the 1996 season as a volunteer coach, and Parrinello agreed.
Eric Thurley, who is a social studies teacher at Webster Schroeder, where he also serves as defensive coordinator of the Warriors football team, was a teammate of Daboll’s for two years at UR and he still can vividly recall the passion that permeated from Daboll.
That year Daboll spent helping the Yellowjackets defense had an impact on Thurley, especially gameday mornings, when Daboll would call Thurley with heavy metal music blasting in the background to get the junior defensive captain properly fired up.
Jeff Smith of Hilton could attest to that. When Smith made his college visit to UR, Daboll was his host.
“Brian was one of the first guys I met at UR during my recruiting trip,” said Smith, who decided to quit football and went to the University of Maryland, but then realized he missed playing so he transferred to UR after his freshman year and joined the Yellowjackets the season Daboll was coaching.
His one year of coaching was enough to convince Daboll that a job in the real world could wait, so after graduation, he asked Parrinello whether he could make a couple calls. “I didn’t have a set plan on what was going to happen, but I really enjoyed it and I thought there’s no better time to give it a try than when you’re young,” Daboll said.
Parrinello recommended him to William & Mary College coach Jimmy Laycock, and off he went to Williamsburg, Virginia, to serve as a restricted-earnings coach (meaning about $2,000 for the season) for a team that had an undersized, tough-as-nails safety in the Daboll mold named Sean McDermott.
At the end of 1997, Laycock kept the ball rolling for Daboll by calling Nick Saban to see if he had a spot on his Michigan State staff. After two years in the Big Ten working as a graduate assistant, Daboll got his big break when Saban suggested him to his pal Bill Belichick, who was taking over as head coach of the New England Patriots in 2000.
Daboll started as a defensive assistant — he jokingly called it a 20-20 job, meaning 20 hours a day for about $20,000 per year — before getting promoted to receivers coach in 2002.
After Smith graduated from UR, he moved from Hilton to take a job in Boston around the same time Daboll started with the Patriots. Smith remains a big Bills fan, even though he still lives in Patriots territory. However, it was tough to root against the Patriots when his buddy was coaching there, especially when that buddy brought him along to two of New England’s Super Bowls, Nos. 38 and 39 in Houston and Jacksonville, where they beat the Panthers and Eagles, respectively.
“We had some good times, especially when they were going on their Super Bowl runs,” said Smith, who said the first playoff game he attended was the infamous Tuck Rule game when the Patriots defeated the Raiders in the snow thanks to one of the most controversial non-fumble rulings in NFL history.
That ended when Daboll left after 2006 for New York to become quarterbacks coach of the Jets under his former Patriots colleague, Eric Mangini, with one of those years spent coaching Brett Favre. He then went with Mangini to Cleveland, where he served two years as offensive coordinator, followed by one year as OC for the Dolphins, one as OC with the Chiefs, and then a return to the Patriots for four more years with Belichick as tight ends coach.
When Lane Kiffin quit as Saban’s offensive coordinator at the end of 2016, Saban asked Belichick to return the favor from many years earlier and send Daboll back to him for 2017, and as OC, Daboll helped the Crimson Tide win yet another national title. All of which has led Daboll back to his hometown as McDermott, at the end of his first season as the Bills’ head coach, fired Rick Dennison and hired Daboll.
And you could count Daboll as one of those. He never knew his father, a Canadian who abandoned him after he was born in Welland, Ontario, in 1975, so his mother moved back to Buffalo to live with her parents. His grandfather was a farmer who also worked as a groundskeeper for the West Seneca school district, his grandmother took care of their home, and Daboll’s mother worked several jobs through the years, all three playing a key role in raising him.
“A lot of respect for my grandparents and my mother trucking me back and forth to different places,” Daboll said.
Usually, that meant sporting events because as a kid, sports were everything, and he played whatever was in season. Hockey was a particular favorite, and he was good enough to be on a travel team, a grinding right winger who scored “some junk goals” along the way. Eventually, he homed in on football because that was the sport he thought he’d have a chance to play in college.
Buffalo was a great place to grow up, and now his own family will get to experience that.
Daboll had two children with his first wife, and his second wife, Beth, had two children when she and Daboll got married in 2009. Those four are now all teenagers — the oldest, his son Mark, will be the first to head off to college in the fall — but Brian and Beth wanted children together, and they now have a 2-year-old and an 8-month-old as part of their brood.
Throughout his football journey, Daboll always held out hope that he’d get to come back to Buffalo, and now that he has, he feels like this is right where he belongs.
When he returns to Rochester, he’ll be busy at St. John Fisher College, but he hopes to have time to reconnect with some of his old friends from UR because the four years he spent there remain a special time in his life.