New Giants head coach Joe Judge wasted no time in getting a key hire added to his coaching staff Sunday, when he reportedly brought Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator Patrick Graham aboard for the same position with New York.
Graham, who turns 41 on Jan. 24, joins Judge just three days after the Giants introduced the former New England Patriots assistant.
The two coached together under longtime Patriots head coach Bill Belichick from 2012-15, but perhaps Graham's Giants ties make for the more intriguing aspect of Judge's move to bring him on to run the defense.
Under former head coach Ben McAdoo (2016-17), Graham was on the Giants' coaching staff as the defensive line coach. After McAdoo's firing, Graham became the Green Bay Packers' inside linebackers coach and run game coordinator in 2018.
Graham's Patriots ties led him to Miami in 2019 under Dolphins head coach Brian Flores, who spent 2004-18 as an understudy of Belichick's.
With the Patriots from 2009-15, Graham was an off-field assistant before becoming a position coach. He served as the linebackers coach twice in 2011 and from 2014-15, with defensive line coach from 2012-13 sandwiched between.
New England, where Flores was an off-field assistant before becoming the safeties coach from 2012-15, marked Graham's jump to the NFL.
Like many coaches do -- including Judge, who started as a graduate assistant with alma mater Mississippi State (2005-07) before becoming the Birmingham-Southern linebackers coach (2008) and an Alabama special teams assistant (2009-11) -- Graham's coaching journey started at the college level.
Graham joined the Patriots after serving as a graduate assistant at Notre Dame from 2007-08. He mentored both sides of the ball at Richmond from 2004-06, starting as the defensive line coach in 2004 before switching to tight ends for 2005-06.
In New York on Staten Island, Graham's first coaching job came as a graduate assistant at Wagner, where he pursued his Master of Business Administration with a finance concentration.
With the Seahawks from 2002-03, Graham guided the program's junior-varsity team to an undefeated season while additionally serving as a strength and conditioning coach and academic counselor.
Graham got into coaching immediately after graduating with his 2002 bachelor's degree in sociology from Yale, where he played for the Bulldogs as a defensive lineman, including the program's 1999 season that shared an Ivy League championship with Brown.
A Des Plaines, Illinois, native, Graham and his wife Pamela have two children, Morgan and Silas.