What Does an NFL Quality Control Coach Do?

Packers head coach Matt LaFleur got his start as a quality control coach.

Welcome to the first edition of Ask Me Anything for 2023! For this year, I’ve decided to do these quarterly so as to avoid overloading on this kind of writing; the next one will pop up in June. But if this column is any indication, we’ll never be short for diverse questions. This time we touch on quality control coaches, Jordan Love, and even some soccer and anime.

Can you give some insight into what a quality control coach does? What’s their interaction with the position coaches and how do they rank from a seniority perspective? I’m quite intrigued by it as I don’t think I’ve seen it in any other of the sports I follow.

I think this is an important thing to grasp if you’re looking for next-level football understanding, because most coaches get their start in some sort of a quality control role. Matt LaFleur did, serving as a quality control coach with the Houston Texans for 2008 and 2009.

So what do they do? There’s a short answer and a long answer.

The short answer is that quality control coaches do whatever anybody else doesn’t want to do. They are the interns of the coaching world. They are assistant coaches for assistant coaches, filling in all the little busywork that other coaches can’t or won’t do in a given week.

The longer answer is that those duties vary a lot by team. Some teams want their quality control coaches down in the weeds, sorting through the little details that other coaches don’t have the time to look at. For other teams, it’s largely a data entry job, going through information in the team’s video cataloging system and making sure it all lines up correctly. On other teams, they might be making cutups of specific down and distance situations for other coaches to look at as they gameplan.

There are two main consistent features, though: it’s all low-level grunt work and it’s all fairly low-paid work. A lot of these guys are really coaches in name only; from what I’ve read, they rarely, if ever, are working directly with players. And they’re not getting paid much; though I know the numbers have gone up, I once heard someone — maybe Brian Billick? I don’t know — refer to quality coaches as “20/20 guys.” That is, guys in their 20s willing to work for something in the ballpark of $20,000 a year. 

But it’s a start, and it’s the feeder system the NFL uses to weed out guys not willing to put in the (largely totally useless) long hours the coaching profession (unnecessarily) demands. It’s not hard to see why so many NFL coaches are just the sons of guys who have already made it in the league. Who else has the money to survive while waiting to get the big break?

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