Age, scheme don't matter much to Cowboys' Kiffin
BY SCHUYLER DIXON Associated Press
Friday, February 15, 2013
2/15/13 at 5:58 AM
IRVING, Texas - Monte Kiffin figures he could be 52 and coaching the 3-4 defense instead of 72 and running the 4-3.
Whatever.
Age and scheme don't matter much to the new defensive coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys. Talent and passion do.
"I look at coaching like this, do you like it or do you love it?" Kiffin said Thursday in his first meeting with reporters at team headquarters. "You got to love it. You got to have great passion."
Kiffin, architect of the so-called "Tampa 2" when the Buccaneers won the Super Bowl after the 2002 season, will spend the next six months converting the Cowboys to the 4-3.
It's the same alignment they used when coach Jason Garrett was a backup quarterback and Dallas was winning three Super Bowls in four seasons in the 1990s. Dallas switched to the 3-4 under Bill Parcells almost a decade ago.
When he replaced the fired Rob Ryan last month after the Cowboys' second straight 8-8 season - and third in a row without a playoff berth - Kiffin remembered seeing countless news items that all seemed to start with "72-year-old."
"I thought it was my jersey number, by the end of the day, good golly," Kiffin said.
There's no escaping that he will be 73 when the season starts, but he wasn't thinking about age and whether he related to today's players when he decided he wanted back in the NFL after four seasons running the defense for son Lane Kiffin at Tennessee and Southern California.
The new Dallas staff's ties to Tampa Bay's Super Bowl team go deeper than Kiffin. Rod Marinelli turned down a chance to stay in Chicago as defensive coordinator after Lovie Smith was fired, deciding instead to run the defensive line for the Cowboys.
Rich Bisaccia was special teams coach in Tampa from 2002-10 and left Auburn after just a few weeks when he says Garrett kept pressing him to join the Tampa reunion.
"I think we know what we believe in and what the core beliefs are and the core beliefs are running to the football and playing with passion and playing with great energy and probably the No. 1 thing we all look for are guys that love football," Bisaccia said.
Marinelli was the first of the three to leave Tampa when he became head coach in Detroit. That lasted three years, and ended with the only 0-16 season in NFL history.
He bounced back quickly, going to Chicago as defensive line coach and getting promoted to defensive coordinator a year later. The Bears forced 44 turnovers in 2012, including five interceptions of Tony Romo in a blowout win at Cowboys Stadium.
Original Print Headline: Age no issue to Dallas' Kiffin
