High-stakes homecoming brings Bill OBrien back to New England roots

Publish date: 2024-05-10

Most football coaches are not what you’d call famous. For every Tom Landry, for every Bill Parcells, there are all these Rod Rusts and Rich Kotites who’ve come and gone over the years, either stepping into retirement or taking one step back by serving as well-compensated lieutenants. 

Bill O’Brien is somewhere in the middle of all that. He didn’t win a Super Bowl during the six-plus seasons he coached the Houston Texans, and yet there’s always going to be a spotlight keeping track of his whereabouts. He is, after all, the man who reassembled the broken pieces of the Penn State football program post-Sandusky, a challenge he took on after five seasons working with the Patriots under Bill Belichick (speaking of famous NFL coaches). The work he did in Happy Valley catapulted him to the NFL head-coaching ranks.

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Now O’Brien is back with Belichick and the Patriots after two seasons running the offense at Alabama, and he’s going to be one of the most-watched, most-talked-about, most-scrutinized coaches-who-isn’t-a-head-coach in the NFL. As New England’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, it’s going to be O’Brien’s job to bring that-side-of-the-ball management experience that was lacking last season when Matt Patricia and Joe Judge were in charge.

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There’s an easy coming-home angle to all this given O’Brien’s previous employment with the Patriots plus his sturdy local roots: born in Boston’s Dorchester section, raised north of the city in Andover. But when St. John’s Preparatory School is factored in, it’s as though O’Brien never really left. St. John’s Prep is the last neighborhood haunt that is intrinsically connected to O’Brien. He is as much known in and around New England for his Prep roots as for his years at Brown University, where the O’Brien family has a deep and proud history.

Earlier this summer I made a pitch to speak with O’Brien about St. John’s Prep and the role it has had in his life — in particular, his coaching career. He expressed some interest, but then the realities of training camp arrived, and it soon became apparent I was just as likely to get O’Brien to reveal his game plan for the Sept. 10 opener against the Philadelphia Eagles as have him tell campfire stories about his high school days.

But something better happened: Through the Patriots’ media relations department, O’Brien opened up his phone book and supplied contact information for his old high school buddies. While it’ll come as no surprise that the boyos collectively lined up to say swell things about their beloved O.B. — it’s not like O’Brien was going to put me in touch with some grouchy freshman algebra teacher — what emerges is a chapter in O’Brien’s life that is equal parts “Stand By Me,” “Friday Night Lights” and “American Graffiti.”

Rob Reiner directed “Stand By Me,” the adaptation of a Stephen King novella that ends with this memorable line:

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?”  

Add five or six years to this line and you have a teenage O’Brien and his buddies Mike Panos, George Delaney and Todd Wright. They were tight then, and they remained tight through college. As each of them got married, the service was officiated by the same priest, Father Tony Penna, formerly of St. John’s Prep and now at Boston College.

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And even with their former high school offensive center providing phone numbers, Panos, Wright and Delaney felt duty-bound to check in with O’Brien before talking.

“We’ve been through thick and thin together,” said Panos, a team co-captain with O’Brien who later played linebacker at Boston College under Tom Coughlin. “We’ve stood in each other’s weddings, we’ve been there when family members have passed away and we’ve been there when the sh– has hit the fan, like when O.B. got canned in Houston.”

Wright, who played football with O’Brien until he was kicked off the team for disciplinary reasons — something he regrets to this very day because he feels he let the guys down  — put it this way: “In freshman football, there were a bunch of us who kind of leaned into each other, and it’s stayed that way.”

Delaney, a receiver and quarterback at St. John’s Prep and later a receiver at Colgate University, went so far as to speak in the third person: “All four of those guys oozed leadership. The way they did things, day in and day out. I didn’t know that back then. But looking back on it, it might have just been a good birthing year.”

Bill O’Brien, Todd Wright, Mike Panos, Father Tony Penna, Barry Field and George Delaney. (Courtesy of Mike Panos)

It would be one thing if O’Brien was the one who made it big, with the other three becoming 9-to-5ers with their noses pressed up to the glass, gazing longingly at O.B. But it’s not that way at all, notes Panos, who points out that Wright happens to be vice president of player performance for the Los Angeles Clippers, and that Delaney now runs Ipswich Maritime Products, a seafood company. As for Panos, he’s a divisional president of Stryker Corp., a medical device company.

“Growing up there was this solidarity and camaraderie with one another that was basically, ‘We’re all in this together,'” Panos said. “We were teammates, we were best friends, we’d do anything for each other. And it wasn’t just, ‘Aww, man, if you have a rough day, I’m here for you.’ We pushed each other. And that exists today. George runs this shellfish empire. Todd’s at the top of his profession. You can’t get any higher than what he’s doing right now. O.B.’s obviously reached the pinnacle with what he does. I’m working my ass off every day to be my best, and part of it is knowing who my buddies are.”

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At reunions, they don’t treat O’Brien as a big deal.

“He never asks me about haddock,” Delaney said. “And I never ask him about football.”

It won’t surprise you that O’Brien was an over-the-top high school football player — so serious, so intense, that Wright believes O’Brien was driven to his profession after the Eagles had a losing record his senior year, with O’Brien, Panos and Delaney as captains no less.

“That was a weird season,” said Jim O’Leary, who coached the Eagles from 1984 to 2013. “We didn’t have a great start and everyone was disappointed by that, including myself and definitely Billy. It really bothered him.”

The Prep was 1-4 after five games, and in the season finale the Eagles traveled to Connecticut for a 28-6 loss to West Haven High, closing out at 4-6. It was the last losing season for the St. John’s Prep football program until 1999.

“We were supposed to be a pretty good team that year,” Wright said. “And when I think of how hard O.B. had worked going into that season, and then the pain on his face, and the realness to it, it was something that, looking back at it now, without a doubt, is why he became a coach. That’s what I think. It propelled him into wanting to be a coach.”

“I do know he had a lot of disappointment about our senior season not being as successful as it should have been or could have been, and the reality is that preparation and execution are half the battle,” Panos said. “The rationale is sound that that could have propelled him to saying, ‘I can be a difference-maker. I can help a team be prepared and execute and win games.'”

Whatever role that season had in directing O’Brien toward coaching, there’s no doubt he brought an intensity that went way beyond your typical rah-rah stuff. Wright remembers O’Brien kicking in a bathroom door after a tough loss. During a victory at Malden Catholic in O’Brien’s junior year that was played in cold, icy conditions — “The field was frozen mud,” Panos said. “Like a frozen parking lot.” — O’Brien came out of it with a gash on his arm that looked so bad staff members wanted him to forego the bus ride back to school and head to the hospital.

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“But we just had a big win and everyone was pumped and excited,” Delaney said. “And O.B. said, ‘Screw you, I’m going in the bus. Rev up the bus, and I’ll solder it on the exhaust pipe.’ Everybody thought it was funny, but for O.B. it was just a day in the life. He wanted to bond with his guys after winning a game under brutal conditions.”

And then there was the manner in which O’Brien snapped the ball to his quarterbacks.

“We had an old-fashioned offensive line coach, very old school, and we had a lot of young quarterbacks,” O’Leary said. “And here’s Billy, he’s very intense. So those quarterbacks came in reluctantly. He’d snap the ball, and if they didn’t have their hands in the right place it would hit the end of their fingers, and you can imagine how that would feel. Bill made sure the ball was getting up there with some authority.”

Delaney, normally a receiver, was used at quarterback a few times and remembers that O’Brien would “snap the ball as hard as he possibly could. But the faster he could snap the ball to me, the faster he could get on to his block.”

Delaney eventually returned to his old position when Matt Cushing was inserted behind center. That switch, along with what the Lynn Daily Evening Item called “a spectacular 38-yard diving catch” by Delaney in the annual Harris Agganis All-Star Football Classic, earned the receiver-turned-quarterback-turned-receiver a scholarship at Colgate, where he was a standout.

Other would-be quarterbacks went in different directions. Mike Kotarski, a promising left-handed baseball pitcher who was quarterback of the freshman team with O’Brien as his center, said, “There were times we were playing in the late fall and you’d take 15 snaps from Bill O’Brien, who’s aggressively getting you the ball, and every once in a while you have to say, ‘Bill, I can’t feel my hands.'”

Kotarski had already suffered an injury to his right wrist making a shoestring tackle at safety, and his father was hearing from baseball scouts who believed he might be putting his pitching career in jeopardy. He switched to track during the fall season as a sophomore, which turned out to be a wise move: Kotarski went on to become a star pitcher at Duke University and in 1992 was drafted in the 20th round by the Colorado Rockies. He pitched five seasons of minor-league ball. Today, he is the founder and senior managing director of Arena Strategic Advisors.

Take away the violent snaps, the exhaust pipes and the busted bathroom doors, and it sounds like O’Brien and Co. enjoyed a high school experience that was fun, rewarding, even a little goofy. Panos remembers that O’Brien enjoyed rolling up his sleeves over his elbows to show off the guns. Wright remembers O’Brien also playing basketball, and wanting so desperately to one day dunk the ball that O.B. mentioned it in his yearbook photo caption.

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There were pranks.

Wright: “A couple of times we duct-taped his car, all around the doors, the steering wheel and everything.”

Panos: “The car was this Impala, white, pretty beat up. It had holes and rust. It had a quarter panel that was a different color. So, yeah, we taped it up one day. It must have taken him 45 minutes to get the tape off.”

Delaney: “He seriously wanted to fight us. He wouldn’t talk to us for like two weeks. We also got all this trash and piled it in his car. Aww, man, the dude would get so mad. He’s one of the all-time great ballbusters, and 99 percent of the time he can take it as well.”

(Courtesy of St. John’s Preparatory School)

O’Brien also enjoyed the support of a family that showed up at all his games and provided the kind of old-timey support that makes the place rock.

“You know any Irish women coming out of Somerville (Mass.) and those places that weren’t intense?” asked O’Leary. “My first year coaching, we’re winning at halftime something like 32-0 and we’re walking back (to the locker room) and there’s this woman yelling at me, ‘You better play the young kids in the second half or I’ll kick your ass!’ It was my own mother.

“Billy’s mother was kind of like that. Yes, academics were very important to her. But so was football. You could hear her. There may have been a cowbell.”

As Panos put it, “O.B.’s mom was one of the most animated fans. The O’Briens are a colorful family … They were not your typical bowtie-wearing Ivy Leaguers. His mom would be hollering from the stands. We were oblivious to it at the time, but we’d hear about it after the game.”

The Prep days ended with O’Brien going to Brown. No surprise, that. Both his parents and his two older brothers attended the Ivy League academy, but don’t let that fool you into doubting his bona fides.

“I know that he’s a legacy with the rest of the family, but you don’t just walk into Brown,” noted Wright. “The guy is brilliant.”

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Panos recalls being in Houston on a business trip when O’Brien was coaching the Texans. He was invited to bring some co-workers into his old buddy’s office.

“He had a stack of books on his desk,” Panos said. “My workmates were asking about books he’s read and he’s going on about the All Blacks, the rugby team in New Zealand.”

Such was O’Brien’s enthusiasm for James Kerr’s “Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life,” that Panos and his associates did more than read it. They later enlisted Kerr to speak to their company, and, in a separate event, brought in the coach of the All Blacks, Steve Hansen, to be a keynote speaker.

“Because of Bill and that chance introduction to the book, my entire company has read it,” Panos said. “It just reflects who he is. He’s not someone sitting around on a couch. He’s not someone who is one-dimensional and can only talk football. It’s how he’s hard-wired. He’s a student of the business and leadership side, and history as much as he is football.”

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photos: Elsa, Fred Kfoury III / Getty Images)

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