Back in January, Detroit Lions defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard interviewed for the Miami Dolphins head coach job. And according to the Lions coach, he believes he nearly got a job offer from the AFC team.
Some have criticized the Dolphins’ head coaching search process because, on the same day they announced their interviews with Sheppard and Patrick Graham—two minority coaches—they also announced they were hiring Jeff Hafley as their new head coach. The timing, some argued, suggested they were simply filling the Rooney Rule requirements before making the decision they were always going to make.
Sheppard rejected that premise outright, noting that he had been in contact for weeks with the Dolphins before they made their decision.
“Full disclosure, I was in communication with the Dolphins for about two weeks,” Sheppard said. “I don’t know how it typically goes, but I know after the interview, I was contacted by three people from that front office, and I’m not going to disclose the things that I was told, but I think that’s just about as real as it can get. And when Hafley calls somebody on my staff and says, ‘Those people were about to hire Kelvin,’ I mean, I don’t know why people would make this stuff up.”
Dolphins general manager Jon-Eric Sullivan was asked specifically about their process when it came to the two minority interviews, and he not only claimed that Sheppard and Graham were serious candidates, but both blew him away during the interview.
“Could not have been more impressed with Kelvin or Patrick. They did a phenomenal job. They were legitimate candidates,” Sullivan said. “The truth of the matter is, there’s a pace and a timing as to which you have to move to make sure that you’re going to get your guy. You can’t get left holding the bag. At that point in the process, it was clear to us that Hafley was who we wanted to go after, and he had other options on the table, so there was a timing element to where we had to get on down the road to make sure that we weren’t going to lose him to somebody else.”
Sullivan then spoke specifically about what impressed him about Sheppard.
“His energy, his command of the room. I think if you want to build a bully, Kelvin, he can lead men. There was a toughness and a command that he had, and his ability to articulate that, and it wasn’t false bravado,” Sullivan said. “I mean, he walked out of the room and we all kind of looked at each other like, ‘Wow, that was really impressive.’ I have no doubt, as he gets down the road in his career, he’ll have a lot of opportunities.
While Sheppard believes it was a real opportunity, he also recognizes that, regardless of his actual chances of landing that job, there was an innate value in the experience of going through that interview.
“Real or not, I got the opportunity to do it,” Sheppard said. “Real or fake, I went through the process and I learned a lot and I grew from it, so that’s what I’m taking from it.”
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