Meet Texans offensive assistant coach Pat Reilly, whose dream started on Long Island

Pat Reilly’s football-playing career essentially ended when he was two days old.

Born with a heart defect called TGV, or transposition of the great vessels, along with a coarctation of the aorta, he required a complicated and, at that time 34 years ago, relatively new procedure that involved cracking his infant sternum to access the flawed organ.

It worked, and Reilly was able to grow up a happy and athletic kid on Long Island. He even became a varsity athlete at Island Trees High School in Levittown.

The surgery saved his life, but it did preclude him from participating in contact sports. No matter how much he begged his parents and his doctors to let him play football, the answer was almost always no.

They did relent one time in middle school, let him put on the pads and wear the uniform and be part of the team. He even got to be on the field a few times under strict supervision, but that was no fun for anyone, least of all the super-aggressive, ultra-competitive kid who just wanted to run around and crash into things the way he did on the basketball court or the baseball field. It lasted only one season.

By the time he was a 7-year-old insisting on wearing football jerseys to school each day, spending weekends glued to the television watching football games with his dad, Kevin, and seeing the rest of his first-grade friends sign up for local football teams, he had made up his mind. If he couldn’t play the sport he loved, he would just have to coach it.

“When they tell you you can’t do something, you want to go do it even more, and I think that’s how that transpired,” Reilly told Newsday of his calling. “I think it was my way of saying, ‘Screw you! Watch this!’ ”

On Sunday, a whole lot of people will be watching. Reilly is an assistant offensive coach for the Houston Texans, essentially the righthand man for coordinator Nick Caley, and their team is playing the Patriots in Foxborough in an AFC Divisional playoff game. If the Texans win, Reilly will be a win away from the Super Bowl.

This is his first season with Houston after four with the Jaguars. He won a national championship as a member of Nick Saban's coaching staff at Alabama for three years before that. But he also had some points when things looked bleak, when the staff he was part of was fired or he couldn’t find work.

He spent two seasons at UCLA with Jim Mora and didn’t even bother getting an apartment; he just slept at the team’s facility. His first job at Alabama wasn’t a job at all, really. It was a volunteer position and they “paid” him by letting him crash in the dorms.

“It just led me to want it more than anything, and want it badly enough to do whatever it takes to get it,” he said of those early obstacles.

Ironically, if Reilly had been able to play football, that might not have been the case.

“I think it ended up being a positive,” he said of his limitation. “If I played, I don’t know if I would have had the same determination to accomplish this. I might have. But it always set it in my mind that I can’t do that, but I can do this. I chased it down. I wanted it more than anything. It’s really the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”

When he was 16, his mother, Joni, sat him down and asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. An NFL head coach, he replied matter-of-factly.

“I said, ‘OK, that’s great, but what’s your backup plan?' ” Joni recalled. “He said, ‘No, there is no backup plan. That’s my goal.’ And it hasn’t changed since.”

So he went to college at SUNY Cortland because it was one of the few schools that would let him be an undergraduate assistant coach and not just a manager. He graduated in three years, then took on an internship with the Syracuse program. He pitched in on offense and defense wherever he went, wherever he was needed. He broke down film, set up equipment, ran position drills.

“I didn’t realize at the time how little I actually knew about football,” he said of those early experiences. “It gave me a really good stepping stone. They knew the path I wanted to take and they were able to get me on that path.”

Looking back, there were clues to this obsession that has become a career. Joni said she still  occasionally comes across Pat’s old books from school. The margins are covered in drawings of X’s-and-O’s and arrows.

“When he was supposed to be studying math and English, he was drawing up football plays,” she said.

His boyhood bedroom is still filled with books by and about football coaches along with binders on top of binders, all of them stuffed with sketches of plays as well as his thoughts about various games he watched or was part of and jottings on the mentality of the sport.

And of course his parents just happened to name their oldest son after one of the greatest coaches in history . . . sort of. It’s a different spelling and a different sport, but Reilly’s nickname is “Three-peat” after the term trademarked by Pat Riley when he was with the Lakers. Most of Reilly's friends, fellow coaches and players just call him “Three” for short.

Reilly still has the same goal he had when he was 7, the same one he told his mom about when he was 16. He’s soaking up all he can in anticipation of achieving that. Right now, that means Caley and Texans head coach DeMeco Ryans are his big influences.

“It’s a great opportunity and a great place to be,” he said of being in Houston, where he lives with his fiancee, Heather.

Becoming an NFL position coach is the next step in his plan, and there might be an opportunity for a jump to that level this offseason either with the Texans or elsewhere. He said not having played has helped because he wasn’t pigeon-holed into a position or a side of the ball. In Jacksonville, he worked with the defense and defensive backs. With the Texans, it’s offense and tight ends. During the games, he is up in the coaching box charting opposing defensive personnel and on the headset alerting Caley, who coaches from the sideline, of any tendencies he spots.

That dynamic, Joni said, is her biggest objection to his current role. In the past, when watching his college or NFL games, she often was able to spot Pat on TV regardless of whether he was upstairs or on the field. Now, being so far away from the coordinator, he’s hardly ever in the shot.

“I don’t see him at all,” she said. “I’m always yelling at the television, like, ‘Show the booth! Show the booth!’ ”

So what kind of a head coach does "Three" think he  eventually will be?

“Ultimately it will be a combination of everyone I have learned from, Coach Ryans, Coach Saban, Coach Mora, Coach Mac [Dan MacNeill from Cortland], all the others,” Reilly said. “You tend to take in everything you learn from everybody and make it your own.”

The best advice he received on the subject was from 14-year NFL veteran tight end Marcus Pollard, who now works in the Jaguars’ front office.

“He told me: ‘When you get that opportunity, the most important thing is to be yourself,’ ” Reilly said.

In other words, he’ll just do what he’s been doing since he was two days old.

He’ll follow his heart.