Drew Petzing seemed destined for a career in finance, probably in a C-suite somewhere, maybe handling mergers and acquisitions for a firm on Wall Street.
Petzing’s football career had come to an end after two injury-riddled seasons at Middlebury College, a private liberal arts school in west-central Vermont. He suffered a Lisfranc fracture as a freshman and tore the ACL and meniscus in his knee as a sophomore, but when the undersized defensive back who hadn’t played a snap since high school sat in a classroom at Dartmouth taking part in a summer business program with other high achievers, he couldn’t help but let his mind wander back to the single staff room he shared with Middlebury coaches as a student assistant.
Petzing, who replaced John Morton as Detroit Lions offensive coordinator last month, the latest Dan Campbell hire tasked with getting more out of one of the NFL’s most high-powered offenses, began volunteering on Bob Ritter’s staff at Middlebury in the months after doctors removed his meniscus.
He helped with drills and analyzed statistics and offered subtle insight into gameplans, and as he sat around the fold-up tables configured in an L shape in the staff room – two for offense and two for defense – watching tape and talking ball, he fell in love with the camaraderie and challenge of coaching.
“I remember the whole time [I was at Dartmouth] just being like, ‘All these people, their interest and their desire to do these things is not mine,’” Petzing told the Free Press this week. “Like, I can do it, but I didn’t love it, I didn’t enjoy it. And I think coming back after that summer and then getting back into football for the second year, I was like, ‘All right, if I can make this happen, I need to make this happen cause this is 100 times better than whatever that was.’”
Ritter, who told Petzing on more than one occasion he was spending too much time coaching, thought enough of Petzing’s work that he scraped together enough money to pay Petzing an hourly wage as a senior.
Petzing parlayed that job into an unpaid position at Harvard; he started with the Crimson the day after he graduated from Middlebury. And he’s slowly climbed the coaching ranks since, transitioning from defense to offense with the help of Norv Turner and working with some of the game’s brightest offensive minds like Klint Kubiak, Kevin Stefanski and former Lions coordinator Ben Johnson.
Philosophically, colleagues and players say Petzing is a mix of the coaches he’s worked for and with and runs an offense that he tailors to the talent on his team.
He oversaw one of the league’s best rushing attacks for the first two of his three seasons as Arizona Cardinals offensive coordinator in 2023-25. And despite the Cardinals’ struggles last season, when they went 3-14 and tied for the worst record in the NFL while playing most of the year without their starting quarterback, top two running backs and best receiver, people who know Petzing well say his hire has a chance to be wildly successful in Detroit.
“I think he’s going to blow those players away just from a knowledge standpoint, from a connection standpoint,” Johnson said. “I fully expect that offense to be clicking at a high level next year. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit, and I think there’s a reason why Dan, from what I could gather, cast a wide net for the offensive coordinator job and Drew hit the right notes in terms of what he was looking for.
“That doesn’t surprise me. I could see this being a great fit knowing Dan and knowing Drew both. I think it’s probably a match made in heaven.”
‘We had a gem’
Petzing grew up in a football family in Wellesley, Massachusetts, about 15 miles west of Boston.
His father, Larry, played football at Middlebury, where he was teammates with Ritter – Larry also coached at the school for one season after graduation, before embarking on a career in finance – and his brother, Dean, is an offensive quality control coach with the Carolina Panthers.
Both Larry and Leslie Petzing were avid Buffalo Bills fans growing up in western New York. When Drew described the tables in the staff room at Middlebury, he compared them to ones “you see people jumping through in Buffalo every day.” And Drew said his first childhood memory is of Scott Norwood’s missed 47-yard field goal wide right in the Bills’ Super Bowl 25 loss to the New York Giants, when he still was a few months shy of his fourth birthday.
“It was the last Super Bowl party my parents ever went to,” he said. “They left me at home with a babysitter and I watched the game by myself in the living room and then literally from that Super Bowl on, we watched the Super Bowl by ourselves as a family, no matter who was in it. They never went again to another party.”
The Petzings made watching ESPN’s “NFL PrimeTime” a family affair most Sunday nights, too, and Drew recalls reading football strategy books as a kid and applying what he learned to video games such as EA Sports’ “College Football” and “Madden.”
“As they started getting those games better and better, you started getting into, like, you could design your own playbooks,” Petzing said. “I feel like that’s where my kind of maybe the initial interest piqued.”
While it was years before Petzing would design his own playbook in the NFL, coaches he worked with along the way noticed what Stefanski, now the Atlanta Falcons coach, calls both his “cognitive horsepower” and ability to be “a very, very good thought partner.”
“He came in and worked hard at the preparation part,” Ritter said. “It wasn’t just like, ‘OK, well, I’m a smart kid and I know football and I know these guys, I know how to coach them, I can do all this.’ That wasn’t his attitude at all. Or, ‘This would be easy to learn.’ Or, ‘I’ll figure this out.’ Or, ‘I’ll just say it louder than everybody else and I’ll be right.’
“He was in here putting time in, and I just think he always had recognized that and he had a great work ethic. So I think that’s his base and I think that’s why he has been so successful and kind of risen as quickly as he had without the big name behind him coming from Middlebury College. Not a lot of pro places knocking down your door, right? So he’s had to earn everything he has.”
Petzing networked his way to Harvard, calling around before graduation searching for a job.
He got Berj Najarian, Bill Belichick’s chief of staff with the New England Patriots, briefly on the phone. And he called Ben Bloom, a fellow Wellesley High grad and current senior defensive assistant with the Tennessee Titans who was then assistant defensive line coach at Harvard.
Bloom told Petzing his timing was impeccable: Then-Harvard coach Tim Murphy was looking for an intern, Could Petzing drive down for an interview?
“I remember Coach Murphy being like, ‘Do you want the job?’” Petzing said. “He’s like, ‘I don’t need to interview you. We’re not paying you. It would be ridiculous for me to deny you a job that we’re not paying you for. Ben speaks highly of you and if you want the job, it’s yours.’ I was like, ‘All right, great. I guess I work here now.’”
Petzing lived with his parents while he worked at Harvard and for the next two years, when he was a graduate assistant working alongside Johnson at Boston College. At Harvard, he drew scout-team cards, cut up film and did grunt work for the defensive and special-teams staffs. At one point, he borrowed his parents’ camcorder so coaches could have film of a second end-zone view of practice.
“He was always ready to do something,” said Scott Larkee, a former Harvard assistant who worked closely with Petzing during his season at the school. “Very eager, ambitious about football. At the time, I knew how talented and smart he was but then the success that he’s had, how far he’s gone here so far, it’s like, ‘Holy crap, look at this guy. We had a gem right here.’ We had a gem. We kind of knew it at the time, but he really made it up the ladder in the NFL pretty quick.”
‘He’s a computer’
Johnson, who was in Petzing’s wedding and had Petzing in his, said he roots for his friend in part because of the path he took to the NFL.
“He didn’t take any shortcuts,” Johnson said. “He took some lumps along the way and yet he’s here because he works his tail off. It wasn’t like he rode someone’s coattails to get to where he is, either. He had to work his way up and he’s been successful every stop along the way.”
Petzing spent a year coaching outside linebackers at Yale before taking another pay cut to get his foot in the door in the NFL with the Cleveland Browns in a “20 for 20” job – a low-level position that generally entails working 20 hours a day for about $20,000 a year.
His first job as a Browns intern was to move then-defensive coordinator Ray Horton’s playbook to a new computer program, but he quickly found himself helping Turner, who won two Super Bowls as offensive coordinator of the Dallas Cowboys.
“He would just like yell my name for random like, I need a cut up, to show me a picture on Instagram, to get a ride to the airport,” Petzing recalled. “No call, just like a shout as loud as he could down the hall. And he did that probably for like two or three weeks and then after a month, he’s like, ‘Hey, you’re on offense now.’ I was like, ‘Oh, OK. Great.’”
Turner and the rest of the Browns staff was fired after Petzing’s first season with the team in 2013, and Petzing followed Turner to the Minnesota Vikings the next year, where he worked his way up from offensive assistant to assistant quarterbacks coach to eventually running the wide receivers room.
He worked with future head coaches Kubiak, Stefanski, Pat Shurmur and Jonathan Gannon in Minnesota, plus Campbell’s position coach when he was as a player, Tony Sparano, and he slowly made his mark on the Vikings offense.
Former Vikings tight end Kyle Rudolph said Petzing was one of the first coaches who helped him learn the nuances of Turner’s offense and how to tailor specific routes in it to certain route combinations.
Kirk Cousins, the Vikings quarterback in 2018 when Petzing was the team’s assistant quarterbacks coach, said Petzing showed him a flaw in a defensive coverage – palms, which can look like Cover 2 or quarters – that he previously had trouble seeing.
“I have a favorite line I always repeat of his that wouldn’t mean anything to your readers but I had a conversation once about a coverage that I don’t like to face that I always said was really, really tough,” Cousins said. “And I said, ‘Man, this coverage is really, really tough, Drew. I don’t like facing it. You don’t know if you’re coming or going.’ He said, ‘Kirk, it may be tough but it’s loose.’ And we always say that now, cause what he meant was that it has holes in it just as much.”
Stefanski hired Petzing as his tight ends coach when he got the Browns top job in 2020, then made him quarterbacks coach two years later as part of what he said was an “intentional development” plan to help Petzing rise up the coaching ranks.
When Gannon got the Cardinals job in 2023, he brought Petzing with him along as his offensive play-caller.
“He’s a football encyclopedia, he’s a computer,” said Sam Sewell, the Cardinals assistant special teams coach the past three seasons. “He knows something about everything. He knows about offense, he knows about defense, he knows about fourth down and it’s obvious it’s in his veins and it’s the way he sees the world. And so yeah, I have 100% confidence that Drew will do a great job [in Detroit].”
High expectations
The Lions had one of the best offenses in the NFL with Johnson calling plays in 2022-24 but weren’t as consistently efficient last season after Morton took over when Johnson left to become coach of the Chicago Bears.
Morton wasn’t alone to blame for the Lions’ disappointing 9-8 record. The offensive line struggled with injury and personnel issues, the Lions averaged their fewest rushing yards per game (120.1) since 2021 and when Campbell took over play-calling duties at midseason it led to other issues in game management.
But the expectation is Petzing will ramp up the offense again in 2026.
“Great coordinator, great offensive mind. Smart play caller. I have a lot of respect for him,” Cardinals tight end Trey McBride said. “Obviously, we had a lot of success under him, so I think he’s a great coordinator and I’m excited to see what he can do with all the weapons there in Detroit.”
ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky said Petzing’s hire should rejuvenate the Lions running game but raised concerns about some of the pass-game concepts Petzing relied on in Arizona.
“I do think that it’s important for somebody in Detroit in the building to be really good with, ‘Hey, what pass-game concepts do we like in the drop-back game and in the play-action game?’” Orlovsky said. “You want concepts that are married to that at a high level. That would be something that I would like to see advanced and developed from his time in Arizona.”
New England Patriots wide receivers coach Todd Downing, who worked with Petzing in Minnesota, said he knows Petzing as someone who is “always hunting matchups” in the pass game, and Vikings pass game specialist and game management coordinator Ryan Cordell, a colleague of Petzing’s in Cleveland, said collaboration won’t be a problem for the new Lions OC.
“He’s a very sharp guy, but he’s also got the intellectual humility to make sure he’s taking ideas from different places,” Cordell said. “When I was in there as a young coach, it was another great guy to learn from and to be around because he was going to take input, we were going to talk through things and he was going to make sure that we got to the right answer. It didn’t have to be his answer, even though often times it would be.”
Lions quarterback Jared Goff and receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown said they’re excited to see how the offense evolves under Petzing, and Goff plans to spend time with Petzing this offseason reshaping the Lions playbook.
Johnson did the same with Goff when he was hired as OC four years ago, and he forecasts Petzing’s offense to have similar success in Detroit.
“I think what Drew does is, or at least what he showed in Arizona is he’s going to put his best players in a chance to showcase what they do,” Johnson said. “I think it’s a really smart decision by Dan. It’s going to be hopefully not too big of a headache on us, but I see it being a really good match.”
Dave Birkett covers the Lions for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Bluesky, X and Instagram at @davebirkett.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: New Lions OC Drew Petzing can transform offense: ‘It’s in his veins’
Reporting by Dave Birkett, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
