Giants head coach Brian Daboll and Lions head coach Dan Campbell will face off on Sunday, but it won’t be their first meeting. Daboll and Campbell previously worked together on the Dolphins’ staff, and this week Daboll told an entertaining story about their first meeting.
Daboll said that when he was the Dolphins’ offensive coordinator in 2011, then-Dolphins head coach Tony Sparano asked him to interview Campbell for the job of tight ends coach. Campbell, who famously said at his first press conference in Detroit that his players would bite opponents’ kneecaps off, made an interesting impression in the interview.
“Tony said, ‘Hey, I got this guy that I think would be good. Why don’t we interview him? You take care of the interview.’ So, I interviewed Dan, and it was a great interview,” Daboll said, via the New York Post. “He’s slamming chairs on the ground and hitting walls and going through all these drills. You guys know him. He’s a fantastic person, great family. It was an entertaining interview. [He] knew a lot. Obviously, he was very passionate, tough as nails, you could tell. He was out of breath in half that interview with the stuff he was doing. Yeah, great guy.”
Daboll said that on Campbell’s first day of work, he showed up at 5:30 a.m. “power cleaning and squatting” in the Dolphins’ weight room.
Although Daboll and Campbell only worked together for one year in Miami, they’ve remained friendly and are now meeting as head coaches for the first time. As head coaches they’ve had different starts to their careers: Daboll is 7-2 in his first year with the Giants, while Campbell is 6-19-1 in his second year with the Lions.
Brian Daboll: Dan Campbell slammed chairs and hit walls when I interviewed him for a job originally appeared on Pro Football Talk