NEW ORLEANS — Mike Kelleher has a lasting image of Darren Rizzi in his head.
Colgate University opened the 1993 season against Rutgers at Giants Stadium. Rutgers fumbled at midfield, then Colgate tailback Bill Sparacio ran 48 yards to set up a touchdown for a 6-0 lead.
As Sparacio sprinted down the field, Rizzi was matching him step-for-step on the sideline. The new kid, a 23-year-old graduate assistant who had been with the team for three weeks, was celebrating as if he’d scored, too.
“I looked down on the field, and there’s Darren running side by side with our tailback, past the coaching box, just running,” said Kelleher, Colgate’s defensive coordinator at the time. “He’s off the field, but he’s just running parallel with him and he greets him in the end zone. And our head coach is like, ‘MK, what is Darren doing?'”
“That’s just Rizz,” Kelleher replied.
Rizzi, or “Rizz” as he’s also known to his players, is still that enthusiastic kid at 54. He’s also a man on a mission to secure his first NFL head coaching job.
Rizzi was named the New Orleans Saints‘ interim coach after Dennis Allen was fired on Nov. 4 and started by snapping a seven-game losing streak, and he has a 3-2 record overall. Rizzi promised the team wouldn’t lack passion or fight during his tenure, and while he’d love to keep his dream job, he knows it’ll be a significant challenge to have the interim title removed.
Rizzi has been a college head coach twice at the Division II and FCS level but has had two formal head coaching interviews in his 16 NFL seasons. The Miami Dolphins hired Brian Flores over Rizzi in 2019 and the Saints promoted Allen after Sean Payton stepped down following the 2021 season.
“I went into the interviews with the intention of, I’m going to get the job,” Rizzi said. “I didn’t think it was just a courtesy interview in either situation. I got great feedback from both.”
There are currently three head coaching openings after the Saints, New York Jets and Chicago Bears fired their coaches during the season, with more likely after the season ends. But will Rizzi get one of those coveted spots?
“Darren Rizzi has brought energy, has brought fire, has brought an idea of what a head coaching job should look like and at the same time, will he be given that shot next year? … Everybody’s under evaluation,” said Saints defensive end and team captain Cameron Jordan.
Rizzi has three games left to prove why he should be considered a serious candidate, including a “Monday Night Football” clash against the Green Bay Packers (8:15 p.m. ET, ESPN/ABC). Kelleher, now defensive coordinator for St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, hopes the third time’s the charm.
“What happens in the NFL is, I think you have a small window in terms of the hiring cycle,” Kelleher said. “And I think, unfortunately, maybe his window passed him by not getting the Dolphins job. But he just continued to grind and be a great coordinator with the Saints.”
Kelleher still thinks of him as “that 20-year-old running around with the buzz cut,” while the public has seen the dual personas of Rizzi — cracking jokes about clogging toilets in postgame news conferences one week and yelling at his punter on the sideline another.
Rizzi replaced Dolphins special teams coordinator John Bonamego after he was fired midway through the 2010 season and held that position for nine seasons before taking the same job with the Saints in 2019. He was one of three coordinators who worked on installing the NFL’s new kickoff rules this offseason.
Former Rutgers fullback Brian Leonard, who played in the NFL for eight seasons, said Rizzi is one of the few coaches that could inspire him to “put on pads again and run through a wall for him.”
When Rizzi took over for Allen, he told the team that he’s been preparing for this job his entire life.
“It’s been something I’ve been working toward my whole coaching career now, 32 years,” Rizzi said. “I seem like the old guy now. But … it would mean the world to me.”
ALL RIZZI HAS ever wanted is a chance.
That’s what he told the Bergen Record in May 1993 after the Philadelphia Eagles invited him to minicamp as an undrafted rookie free agent.
He had a habit of proving his doubters wrong. He walked on at Rhode Island and became an All-American tight end. He was hoping to change some minds in the NFL, too. But at 6-foot-3 and 235 pounds, he knew it would be hard to make his mark as an undersized tight end. After the Eagles released him, he returned home to New Jersey, worked out and considered his options.
He had a few teams interested in a tryout. Tony Karcich, New Jersey Hall of Fame football coach and one of Rizzi’s mentors, offered him a job on his staff at St. Joseph Regional High School.
While Rizzi was considering his options, Kelleher, Rhode Island’s former defensive coordinator who had been hired at Colgate, called about coaching tight ends at the school.
“He said, well, ‘I’m offering you this job. It’s like a graduate assistant type of job, doesn’t really pay well, doesn’t pay anything. I think you’d be a great coach,'” Rizzi recalled.
Kelleher needed a decision by the next day. Rizzi thought about it that night, woke up at 6 a.m. and packed his car for upstate New York. His dreams had shifted, but Rizzi walked around the field that first week at Colgate with a smile and no regrets.
He told Bob Kurland of the Bergen Record he felt like “he had stepped into a gold mine.”
“I wasn’t ready to leave football,” Rizzi said at the time. “And here I am starting my career on a I-AA level. I am so fortunate.”
RIZZI ZIPPED THROUGH coaching milestones at a young age.
He was special teams coordinator and defensive line coach at New Haven at 24, the team’s defensive coordinator at 26 and had a short stint at Northeastern as special teams coordinator and linebackers coach. Then, at 28, Rizzi was named head coach at New Haven.
“I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. It was baptism by fire,” Rizzi said. “But those three years as a head coach there are probably the three years where I learned the most because you had no choice. I learned a little bit about everything … offense, defense, special teams, and not just football.
“I learned about the training room and the equipment room and the travel and became appreciative for all those other jobs because we had like no staff. … And then I started having to learn about game management. I didn’t know anything about game management.”
Rizzi, who had a 15-14 record through three seasons, left that job at 31 to become special teams coordinator and running backs coach at Rutgers in 2002. It was there that Rizzi started to consider a move to the NFL, as he watched players he recruited and coached — like twins Jason and Devin McCourty, both of whom won a Super Bowl with the New England Patriots — go on to play in the pros. He was Rhode Island’s head coach for the 2008 season, posting a 3-9 record, before jumping to the NFL as the Dolphins’ assistant special teams coach in 2009.
Saints special teams assistant Marwan Maalouf, who was with Rizzi at Rutgers and Miami, jumped at the chance to join the staff in November.
“That’s the one guy I would drop a lot of things for,” Maalouf said. “… I’ve always believed in him, anywhere he has ever been, he’s been successful.”
Maalouf said one reason for Rizzi’s success is his incredible memory. It once got him in trouble when he was younger and preferred to memorize instead of taking notes.
That memory also comes in handy when Rizzi’s staff needs a break from the grind of the season and quizzes them on ’80s and ’90s music.
“He remembers all the songs,” Maalouf said.
His memory has impressed players like Saints long snapper Zach Wood, who has seen Rizzi rattle off an entire opposing teams depth chart by name.
“He knows a lot of situational football,” Saints linebackers coach Michael Hodges said. “He knows the rules better than any coach I’ve been around.”
WHO IS RIZZI? He’s the guy with “one thousand” jokes, the man who will bring an ax to a team meeting to demonstrate a point and a person who Saints quarterback Derek Carr said has a unique ability to connect with “this generation of players.”
Hodges said his ability to connect to players was a “superpower.” One of the ways he does it is through humor.
“I have this crazy memory for jokes,” Rizzi said. “If I hear a good joke, I just remember it and I’m like, something will trigger it and I’ll look over and I’ll see something like a pillow and I’m like, oh yeah, the pillow joke.”
Rizzi’s players are at the core of everything he does. He said the proudest moments of his career have been tied to their successes, particularly when undrafted special teams players like J.T. Gray, Deonte Harty and Rashid Shaheed earned All-Pro honors.
He is passionate, intense and holds everyone accountable. Saints safety Tyrann Mathieu, a 12-year veteran, said “If you’re in his room, he’s going to coach you.”
“Even when he was a special teams coach, I always felt engaged with him,” Mathieu said. “… I’m not even in special teams, but sometimes I want to sit in their meetings, because I think just having that type of coach that’s passionate, that’s motivating.”
Through five games of “Rizzi ball,” the Saints have blocked a field goal to win a game against the New York Giants in regulation and attempted a 2-point conversion to take the lead instead of tie it late in an 20-19 loss to the Washington Commanders.
When Rizzi described his way of thinking after the team’s final sequence — one in which rookie third-string quarterback Spencer Rattler drove the team down the field in two minutes for a chance to win — the attempt wasn’t on a whim, it was a strategy based on momentum and a plan to milk the clock.
“We left no time on the clock for Washington and [quarterback] Jayden Daniels. That was the plan,” he said later. ” … So when we scored, there was no doubt in my mind we were going to go for two and go for the win.”
Rizzi believes the success is sustainable. He pointed to his experience at the collegiate level and with the Dolphins in 2015, when Joe Philbin was fired after a 1-3 start.
The team promoted now-Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell to interim coach. Campbell walked into Rizzi’s office and promoted him to assistant head coach, telling him that he was going to lean on his experience.
Campbell reminded him of that moment when Rizzi called him after taking the promotion in November. He told Rizzi to stay true to himself. Don’t change because of a title, Campbell told him.
“Sometimes people become a head coach and they change who they are,” Rizzi said. “… Dan’s kind of that underdog. At the time when he got the Detroit job, let’s be honest, a lot of people didn’t know who Dan Campbell was.”
Campbell worked with Rizzi in New Orleans as tight ends coach/assistant head coach before the Lions hired him in 2021, despite his lack of experience as a coordinator.
That’s rare in the NFL. Of the current head coaches, Las Vegas Raiders coach Antonio Pierce was a former college coach but had never been an NFL coordinator. Andy Reid coached the offensive line and quarterbacks before the Eagles hired him in 1999, and John Harbaugh made the transition from former special teams coordinator to Baltimore Ravens head coach in 2008.
His age is another factor. Of the 2024 NFL head coaches, only the now-fired Matt Eberflus and Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles were older than 50 when they got their first NFL head coaching jobs.
“It all depends on what the organization’s looking for,” Rizzi said of teams’ thought processes during a coaching search. “… Sometimes when you go with the hot name or the hot coordinator, I don’t think that a lot of times owners or GMs take into account the things that they haven’t done. They haven’t worked with the players on the other side of the ball and they don’t have any experience with special teams.”
Rizzi said he realized how fast the season was flying after the Saints bye week. He’s trying to savor the moment.
“This is a unique situation, but at the same time I’m trying to treasure it … and make the most of it and put my best foot forward every day,” Rizzi said.
