The impact and influence of Panthers OC Joe Brady, the NFL’s youngest coordinator
In reality, Joe Brady didn’t need another story written about him.
If you haven’t heard about the rise of the Panthers’ “Boy Wonder” to become the youngest offensive coordinator in the NFL at just 30 years old, well, maybe that’s your problem.
But this isn’t a story of his journey from a player and then a coach at William & Mary to Penn State to the New Orleans Saints to LSU to Matt Rhule giving him a phone call and asking him to join his new staff before Rhule had even chosen between the Giants’ and Panthers’ jobs. The story of his rise and the people who gave him a hand in the coaching world has been told and will continue to be told. This is the story about the people and experiences that shaped him to be who he is today.
Talking to the people who have known Brady best over the years, you learn a few things quickly.
First, there’s no constant when it comes to what name he goes by. Joey, Joe, Brady, Brody.
Second, they all believe that there’s no one who can outwork him. He’s typically the first person in whatever building he’s working in, often by 4 a.m. Trust that many of his former colleagues have tried to beat him to work and failed. He’s intelligent and rarely fazed.
And no one, absolutely no one, loves “The Office” more.
Brady, by his own account, doesn’t get nervous before games or big moments, but instead embodies a “humble confidence,” a phrase Rhule introduced, that he earns through the hours of preparation.
When he’s shown on TV Sunday calling plays with all eyes on him or while orchestrating a key drive, you won’t see him flustered. The steps he took to get there, even his game day routine, keep him calm and confident.
That hard work brought him to where he is today, with his name having popped up on future NFL head coaches lists before he ever called a professional play. And he got here with the help of a football-loving family and the lessons that they taught him.
Livin’ the Dream
Joseph Clifford Brady IV will coordinate two NFL games before he reaches his 31st birthday on Sept. 23, but drawing up plays isn’t something that is remotely new to him.
In fact, Brady is living out a career path that his father could have envisioned for himself.
When asked what it’s like to see his son rise through the coaching ranks, Joseph Brady III said with a laugh, “other than the fact that he has my dream?”
Brady grew up a coach’s son in Pembroke Pines, Florida. His dad played running back in high school and almost played in college, enrolling briefly at Clemson. He coached Brady in youth football, and gave him a harder time than any other player on the field.
“I probably should apologize for what I made Joe do to let the (rest of the team) know, I’m not hard on your kid without being twice as hard on mine ... I had to prove that he had to work harder than everybody else. That was a bad thing, but I did it,” Brady III said. “He did get pretty mad a couple times and went to the commissioner, and said, ‘I don’t want to play for dad anymore.’ I was a little rough on him.”
Brady picked up on football quickly. He played quarterback before deciding to transition fully to receiver. When he was 8, his father can remember him leaving his spot to run over and shift a player who was lined up wrong.
He played football and baseball at Everglades High School in Miramar, Florida, and always talked football with his dad, even telling him if he disagreed. To this day, Brady calls his dad at any time of the night to discuss football and what happened at that day’s practice or why he called a specific play.
When asked where his love of football came from, there wasn’t a specific memory, just a son’s connection with his father.
“I don’t know if my father and I talk about anything besides football ... to me, my love for football started with my father and just he coached me a lot growing up and he was hard on me,” Brady said. “I had season tickets going to Miami Dolphins games growing up and we would go to the practices. That’s why having (the Panthers’) Fan Fest and not being able to see the fans and the kids out there, that was actually hard on me because I remember how much I appreciated that.”
His mother, Jodi, spent some time as a cheerleader, and Joe Brady III played football and baseball. Sports were always going to be in the cards for the Brady children, Joe and Jacey, who were encouraged to pick two extracurricular activities to focus on. Whatever they chose, they had to see through.
Brady chose the same sports as his father played, and for a time, there was a third — he tried Kung Fu until one day his parents found him asleep at the front door in the process of taking his shoes off; they decided two activities were enough.
Football has been ingrained in Brady’s life beyond his own play. His grandfather was one of the original season-ticket holders for the Miami Dolphins. Those tickets were then given to his father. The family had three seats and Joe went to almost every game, even when he was so little that he would fall asleep in his seat. His dream, transformed over time once playing professionally became out of the question, was to make it to the NFL.
His sister, Jacey, is two years younger and chose cheerleading. She found out she made the Dolphins cheerleading squad while Brady was a graduate assistant at Penn State.
“Who would have thought the first Brady to make it in the NFL would be my sister?” Brady texted his family when he learned the news.
Viewing Party
While Rhule is used to having his coordinators on the sideline with him, Brady prefers to call a game from the box up above the field. For him, the game slows down when he’s able to view it from the sky.
His vision or the attention to detail — what he sees on the field — is a large part of his job, and seeing what others don’t is what makes him special. Though he often wears contacts during practices and games, his Clark Kent-like glasses have become a part of his look. He has always had a certain “swag” to him. The framed black glasses (and don’t forget the gold chain around his neck) are part of that style.
As a kid, he excelled at sports and school, and he did that despite hardly being able to see.
It wasn’t until he was in about middle school when at a sports bar with his maternal grandparents and aunt, he asked to move closer to the TV to see. His aunt immediately called his mom and told her, “I don’t think he can see.”
The issue was quickly taken care of. And the impact was felt immediately.
“All of a sudden he started going, ‘there’s Wendy’s, oh C.B. Smith Park’ and I started crying,” Jodi said. “I couldn’t believe this kid, he always sat in the front of the classroom. I thought that was by choice to see and he never mentioned it.”
But better vision to make life easier never superseded that determination to do whatever it took to succeed — whether it was studying film to find a defensive tell coaches above him never saw or spending time in State College or New Orleans working on a special project or his own playbook in addition to his usual work.
And his handwriting? It’s the stuff of legend. He’ll throw out a piece of paper if he doesn’t like the way he wrote the first word.
“If you’ve ever seen his handwriting, that tells you a ton about his best personality. He has the most immaculate handwriting in the history of mankind,” said Tommy Galt, fellow Penn State graduate assistant and current offensive coordinator/offensive line coach at Assumption University. “I mean, unbelievable handwriting, to the point where people would walk in staff meetings, and they would look at the whiteboard and they said, ‘Who wrote that up there?’ We said, ‘Joe Brady’ and they go, ‘That’s unbelievable.’ ”
He describes himself as a “process-oriented person,” not goal-oriented. The result is not the focus, but instead he locks in on doing what needs to be done.
That process made him an honorable mention Class 6A All-State wide receiver as a senior in 2007. His high school coach, Mike Palmieri, describes him as having great hands, good ball skills and being incredibly coachable.
While his time at William & Mary, both as a player and a coach, is well-known, he spent his first year after college at the Air Force Academy.
Early on at Air Force, cadets are not able to call home. Despite only being in a commercial plane about twice prior, Jodi can remember receiving a phone call that Joe had been awarded a privilege.
“He’s not a daredevil,” Jodi said. “And then for me to hear that he flew a glider and then jumped out of an airplane, I’m like, ‘No. Are you sure you have the right number?’ ”
During his time at Air Force, Joe broke his wrist and never played in a game. And while the Air Force had provided the opportunity to play Division I football, it ultimately wasn’t the right fit.
“It was the first time that he started something, and he didn’t finish, and it did bother him,” Jodi said. “I feel like it did bother him, but it was not something that could be helped (with his wrist injury).”
The decision to transfer to William & Mary was made for his education first, with football a close second. It was the first time in Brady’s life that he made a significant decision that wasn’t about football.
But it ended up leading to his football career anyway, starting with being a walk-on receiver who made more tackles than receptions, per his own account, while former William & Mary teammate Tre McBride describes him as having the “coldest swag” on the field. All that while establishing the connections that launched his career.
Stress Relief
No matter how many people you ask about Brady, good luck identifying many interests he has outside of football, sports — he grew up a Marlins and Heat fan — faith and his family.
Family and his Christian faith are among the two items most often brought up when mentioning Brady’s interests outside of football. On his desk in State College, Pennsylvania., there was a note that read, “remember who you work for,” referring to his relationship with God.
“I like to think I’m all ball,” Brady said this month. “But, look, I have a girlfriend, Lauren, that I love very much. I have a dog named Rouge. I do have hobbies. The issue becomes, you get consumed with work and you have a job to do and I lay in bed sometimes and if I’m not watching ‘The Office,’ I’m thinking about something that we have to get going the next day.”
Brady watches ‘The Office’ as he falls asleep most nights and lists the fire drill opening in Season 5 among his favorite moments.
DJ Mangas is one of Brady’s closest friends. Originally meeting as teammates at William & Mary, Brady and Mangas were roommates for a time after they graduated in 2012, and Brady and the two have been closely connected as coaches since.
Mangas was the Tribe’s offensive coordinator in 2017-18. Brady then brought him along as an offensive analyst for a championship-winning season at LSU in 2019 and now as an offensive coaching assistant, sitting socially distanced behind Brady in the box during Panthers games.
“Post-college I lived with him at William and Mary. I lived with him in Baton Rouge for probably two, three weeks. And then I lived with him here in Charlotte for two weeks,” Mangas said. “He wasn’t as obsessed with ‘The Office,’ but (now) like literally on their TV, like rolling, like they could be making food, doing whatever, ‘The Office’ is always on in the background. So it’s like I’m over here laughing because I love the show too, but they’re almost numb to it, they’ve got it memorized. I mean, it’s kind of crazy how much I guess it’s on.”
After Hours
As a coach, Brady is dedicated and selfless. The “student of the game” phrase seems less hyperbolic when it comes to him.
When McBride joined the team as a true freshman wide receiver at William & Mary in 2011, Brady, then an upperclassmen wide receiver, quickly became his mentor. He would help him learn the offense and go over little things that he thought could help make McBride better.
“You think you know everything as a young player and so part of my development was realizing that. And those little spats that we would have … it was healthy spats between teammates who wanted the best for each other, but he definitely wasn’t the type to back down,” McBride said. “He dropped some knowledge and I took that and moved on and became a better player for it. I definitely saw the coach in Joe from day one.”
McBride finished his time at William and Mary ranked second in career receptions (196). He became a receiver in the NFL and had the best game of his career with the Bears against the Saints in 2017, when Brady was in his first of two years as an assistant in New Orleans.
There are countless stories of Brady that follow a similar path. Former teammates referring to him as “quirky,” “his own special entity,” “a unique guy.” Telling stories of, as former Tribe teammate and NFL cornerback B.W. Webb described him, the “goofy kid from Florida.”
“He’s a very calm human being. He doesn’t get rattled. He’s able to focus. When he makes a correction, I think he’s a disarming guy who doesn’t offend anybody. Yet, by the same token, I think he’s not afraid to let them know when they haven’t done things the way he wants them done,” former William & Mary offensive coordinator and current Browns assistant Kevin Rogers said. “He’s got a burning desire to be as good as he can be.”
While on staff at Penn State, Brady became close with three other graduate assistants.
Among them was former William & Mary teammate Ryan Smith. When Smith graduated from William & Mary, he had just returned from studying abroad in Austria and had three days to prepare for a coaching interview at Texas-San Antonio.
Smith, now the cornerbacks coach at Virginia Tech, needed help with the technology side of being a coach, managing things on the computer. Brady worked with him on it for two days.
“I went to the interview and I did a great job and I got the job, and I attribute that to Joe’s help,” Smith said. “And that’s how I knew, not only was he a great friend and knew a lot of football, but he’s also a really good teacher.”
Brady’s first game as an NFL offensive coordinator last Sunday vs. the Raiders ended with a loss on a fourth-and-1 call that put the ball in the hands of fullback Alex Armah instead of running back Christian McCaffrey. It was a play that worked earlier in the game, but failed when the Panthers needed it most, so naturally it received plenty of attention.
“It wasn’t good enough,” Brady said about the game.
He took the credit for three-and-out drives in the third quarter and the failed drive at the end, but acknowledged that “you can’t always confuse the quality of a decision by the outcome, doesn’t make the decisions right or wrong.”
And the way he improves for the next game? Study the details.
***
Before Sunday’s game at Tampa Bay, Brady will run the Raymond James Stadium stairs if he can. Wearing large silver headphones, he’ll walk the field and see where his offense will be run up close and personal — the same routine as every week.
Once he’s in the box, he’ll take a picture of the field and his hand signing “I love you” and send it to his mother. It’s a tradition.
Then he’ll settle in and call the offense from the sky, just as he likes. No nerves required; why would there be? He prepared for this.
This story was originally published September 20, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "The impact and influence of Panthers OC Joe Brady, the NFL’s youngest coordinator."
