From London to LX: the British mastermind behind the Seahawks’ standout Super Bowl defense

Midway through the 2023 NFL season, Dallas Cowboys star edge rusher Micah Parsons was frustrated. Asked about the source – a feeling of being held by opponents all the time – Parsons credited his defensive line coach Aden Durde with keeping him in check.

“[Coach Durde] pulled me aside and said, ‘You gotta remember, you’re Micah fucking Parsons,” he recalled. “‘This shit is going to happen. You just gotta keep going. Fuck all the other stuff.’”

Durde is hardly the first NFL defensive coach to deliver a fiery pep talk, but he is the first to deliver it with an English accent. And come Sunday, Durde will be the first coach from the UK to grace the sidelines of a Super Bowl, when his Seattle Seahawks face the New England Patriots.

Seahawks cornerback Devon Witherspoon both respects and gets a kick out of Durde, now in his second season as Seattle’s defensive coordinator.

“His accent is pretty dope. I’m intrigued by it. I want to learn to talk like that,” said Witherspoon earlier this week. Witherspoon wasn’t comfortable attempting the accent outside the confines of the Seahawks locker room but excitedly offered a referral.

Seahawks safety Coby Bryant lit up at the mere mention of Durde, who hails from north London. After nailing “we’re going to win the Super Bowl” in Durde’s accent, Bryant explained his kinship with his coordinator.

“He’s the ultimate competitor,” Bryant said. “People say we’re similar. They think we’re serious and always about work. I respect how he always wants to get better.”

To call Seattle’s defense better since Durde and head coach Mike Macdonald came to town two years ago is an understatement. The duo have transformed Seattle’s defense from 30th overall in 2023 to sixth this season. The juggernaut unit allowed a league-best 17.2 points per game, rightfully drawing comparisons to the punishing Legion of Boom of the mid-2010s. Macdonald calls the plays, while Durde works on implementation and individual player development. It’s a partnership that was born the moment they met.

“Just listening to him talk about how he sees the game was very similar to how I saw it,” Macdonald said in 2024, “in terms of what you needed to do to be able to defend offenses these days, and he had some really interesting perspective. So we felt like, shoot, we gotta get this guy here in person. Brought him in, [he] did a great job and it just kind of took off from there.”

Long before Durde was preparing to coach in the Super Bowl, he was just a kid in Middlesex who liked a different kind of football than most of his neighbors. He grew up a West Ham fan, but American football became his obsession.

Well before streaming – and before four games, let alone one, were played in London each season – Durde watched whatever game was on Channel 4. He became a Chicago Bears fan, watching as a six-year-old as they won the 1985 Super Bowl. Childhood heroes such as Richard Dent and Mike Singletary were more than enough to reel him in.

“I fell in love with football,” Durde told the Guardian. “One day me and a kid down my street decided we wanted to play so we did. We loved it and found a team.”

The rest might not be history, though, had Durde not grown to have the frame for football. Even now at 46, Durde, who stands at 6ft 1in and 240lb, doesn’t appear to have missed many lifting days at the gym.

The rest might also not be history, though, without an outlet to play. Durde joined the British American Football League, which was the primary way for Brits to play American football from 1998 to 2010. There he excelled as a linebacker for the London Olympians before moving on to NFL Europe. After the 2005 season, Durde was allocated to the Carolina Panthers as part of the NFL International Development Practice Squad program – an initiative he would later transform.

It was a short-lived stint; Durde was released after testing positive for a performance-enhancing drug. He went on to play for the Hamburg Sea Devils of NFL Europe, before being invited back to the NFL as a preseason practice squad player for the 2008 Kansas City Chiefs.

Despite the opportunity, it was clear he wasn’t going to be the next Singletary, let alone land on a full-time NFL roster. He pivoted away from the world of football for a few years before he felt the itch to coach.

From 2011 to 2016, he served as the defensive coordinator for the London Warriors working under Tony Allen, who is still considered one of the most influential forces for American football development in the UK. While it was clear Durde had a knack for motivating players, he kept any dreams of coaching at a higher level in check.

“If you look ahead to something you want to get, you won’t be doing your job particularly well,” he said. “Just really enjoy what you do and let people notice you.”

People took notice. From 2014 to 2015, Durde worked as a coaching intern with the Dallas Cowboys through the NFL fellowship program. It was coaching grunt work, but the experience and exposure would prove invaluable.

After his internship, Durde returned to London, where he worked as a director of football development at the NFL UK office. Serendipitously, the desk next to his was occupied by a new co-worker: two-time Super Bowl champion and fellow Briton Osi Umenyiora.

“It was a very random thing, but we spoke about how we could elevate the game by finding international players. He wanted to do the same thing, and we found an opportunity to present it to Roger Goodell and we did,” Durde said.

What began as NFL Undiscovered quickly morphed into the International Player Pathway (IPP), a program to identify elite global talent with the aim of offering selected athletes the opportunity to earn a spot on an NFL roster. Seventy international players have signed with NFL teams, with 22 IPP athletes currently on NFL rosters. Since 2017, 11 of these players have been elevated to active rosters, including Jordan Mailata, an Australian rugby player turned starting left tackle for the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles.

It was a different program that connected Durde with Dan Quinn, another key figure in Durde’s rise. Durde arrived in Atlanta in 2016 via the Bill Walsh Coaching Fellowship and quickly impressed Quinn, then the Falcons’ head coach. Quinn hired Durde as a defensive quality control coach two years later, making Durde the first British full-time coach in NFL history. He studied under Quinn, one of the league’s top defensive minds, for four seasons, rising to outside linebackers coach in 2020.

After being ousted in Atlanta, Quinn became the defensive coordinator in Dallas. Durde joined to coach the line and thrived – in that 2023 season, he helped Parsons record a career-high 14 sacks.

Now days from coaching in the Super Bowl, Durde takes a quick break from the stoicism, calling his journey “surreal” and being here “crazy” before noting the games leading up to Sunday have also been important.

He knows what it means to be the first British coach in the Super Bowl but wants to ensure he’s not the last. “Yeah, the more opportunity for more people to get seen is real. Look at how the game is growing internationally. That’s how I can see,” he said, “Why limit it?”

Durde remains the only full-time British coach, but there is another up-and-comer in the league: His son Kane, a scouting assistant for the Cowboys.

“He’s making his own path. I do my best job to not get involved in that,” Durde said. “He is doing his own thing, and he’s building his own way of doing things. I’m so proud of him.”

Despite not being Seattle’s playcaller, Durde is a hot commodity. The Falcons and Browns interviewed him for their head coach openings. There is speculation that he’ll be asked to join Klint Kubiak’s staff in Las Vegas when the current Seahawks offensive coordinator is named Raiders head coach next week. Quinn, now head coach of the Commanders, may try to poach him too. His future is clearly bright.

“He’s just one of the best coaches I’ve played for. It’s just the way he motivates me, the way he allows me to play my style of football, makes me play comfortable,” Seahawks defensive tackle Leonard Williams told the Seattle Times last month. “After a while, he just breathes so much life into you that it just makes you feel confident as a player, makes you trust yourself, makes you trust your teammates, makes you trust your coaches.”

This week, Durde is happily in the Bay Area, analyzing Seattle’s defensive Super Bowl plan for the Patriots, keeping his players on track and letting his serious but friendly demeanor keep him grounded. And while he’s focused on coverages and matchups, he knows if the Seahawks players are nervous or tight on Super Bowl Sunday, he can break out the secret weapon.

“When I speak with more of an English accent, I think they laugh,” he said. “If you can help people do that, that’s what coaching’s about.”

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