Blogging The Boys
The Dallas Cowboys are inching closer to a defensive coordinator hire, moving into the second round of interviews. The first one they brought in for the second round was Daronte Jones, the Vikings pass game coordinator. Per reports, Jones has impressed the team and been the surprise candidate of the search.
So what can fans expect from a potential Jones hire? Like Jim Leonhard, Jones has only ever coordinated a defense at the college level, but his tenure in the NFL has come alongside several impressive defensive coaches. Here’s a deep dive into what Jones could bring to Dallas.
Born and raised in the Maryland area, Jones spent one season playing cornerback for Temple before transferring to Morgan State in Baltimore. He suffered an injury his junior year that ended his playing career early, which helped point Jones in the direction of a coaching career.
After a couple seasons as a graduate assistant at the FCS level, Jones became a defensive coordinator at a Louisiana high school. That led to a coordinator gig at Division II Bowie State in just his fifth season as a coach. Jones held that title for five seasons, ranking in the top 10 in total defense four of those years.
Jones was then poached by UCLA to coach cornerbacks, but he was let go a year later and joined the Canadian Football League. After one season up north, Jones was brought to Hawaii by then-defensive coordinator Dave Aranda, though Aranda left a month later for a different job. After three seasons coaching defensive backs at Hawaii, Jones reunited with Aranda as the defensive backs coach at Wisconsin, two years before Leonhard started coaching there.
After one season with the Badgers, Jones was hired in Miami. There, he worked under defensive coordinator Vance Joseph, and he assisted defensive backs coach Lou Anarumo. Two years later, when Anarumo was hired to run the Bengals defense, he brought Jones with him as the cornerbacks coach.
Jones left Cincinnati in 2020 to coach defensive backs for Mike Zimmer in Minnesota for a year before taking the defensive coordinator job at LSU, returning to college. That proved to be the final year of the Ed Orgeron era, so Jones was let go by new head coach Brian Kelly despite producing a strong defense.
That brought him back to Minnesota under new head coach Kevin O’Connell and, a year later, Brian Flores was hired. That precipitated Jones’ promotion to pass game coordinator, and Jones has become an integral part of building the Vikings’ fearsome defense alongside Flores.
Jones has never coordinated a defense at the NFL level, but his previous stops as a coordinator suggest one thing Cowboys fans will love: he doesn’t have a scheme, but a philosophy. Jones wants to attack and disrupt the offense; how he does it depends on the players he has to work with.
His first stop as defensive coordinator – at Bowie State – saw Jones change up his scheme...
