The making of 'Hat': How the Vikings' Matt Daniels quickly became a coaching star

Matt and Bruce Daniels should be talking nightly about life. About family. About football. About Ryan Wright's fake punt, Kris Boyd's takeaway, Patrick Peterson's blocked field goal, Greg Joseph's NFC special teams player of the week performance, that league-leading kickoff coverage and every other shining moment that's made Matt's first month as a 33-year-old NFL coordinator everything his father had hoped for and expected to see unfold after he woke up following surgery in early August.

"My dad had a lung disease called pulmonary fibrosis," said Matt Daniels, whose fiery special teams have ignited the Vikings' 3-1 start heading into Sunday's game against the 2-2 Bears at U.S. Bank Stadium.

"He was sick, but he and my mom had come up from Atlanta to UW University Hospital in Madison [in June]. Dad was set for double-lung transplant surgery. He was being transferred over from the gurney to the operating table and suffered cardiac arrest."

Bruce Daniels was 63 years old when he died. It was Aug. 5, nine days before the Vikings opened the preseason at Las Vegas.

"I know Matthew's missing his father," said his mother, Swannette, who also has two older sons, Bruce Jr. and William. "Bruce was an outstanding father and man. He was Matthew's biggest supporter. He had a way of allowing Matthew to grow by teaching him how to think, to be a servant leader, to solve problems without just giving him the answers.

"He always had this saying. 'There's never a wrong time to do the right thing.' "

Vikings coach Kevin O'Connell said he told Daniels to take a leave because, "at that point, football doesn't matter." But, somewhere, Bruce was in Matt's ear. Matt flew home to Georgia the following Friday. The funeral was Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon, he hopped a flight to Vegas for the game.

"His strength was amazing," O'Connell said. "I think the coolest part was hearing him talk about what his dad would have wanted him to do and go about this season."

The way Daniels tells it, he needed his players in that moment more than they needed him. As safety and friend Harrison Smith, who is actually 237 days older than Daniels, put it: "There's nothing anyone can do but be there with open arms. And that's all we did."

"Hat's one of us; he's family here, too," added safety and special teams leader Josh Metellus, using Daniels' popular nickname.

Daniels has a nickname for just about everyone. Wright, the rookie punter, is "Mr. Wright." Jalen Nailor, the rookie who caught Wright's fake punt pass, is "Speedy." Joseph, the kicker who went 5-for-5 on field goals last week, is "G Money."

"He's got so many nicknames, I can't keep up," joked Metellus, who's "4-4 Bulldog," based on his number. "In camp, he kept saying, 'Hot Sauce, Hot Sauce!' For two weeks I'm like, 'Who's Hot Sauce?!' It was Dan Chisena."

Daniels has had his nickname since he was a teenage freshman at Duke. A 6-1, 210-pound safety at the time, Daniels wasn't exactly shy around the older Blue Devils.

"As soon as I came in, I came up and met our star running back, Re'quan Boyette, a senior, right in the hole," Daniels said. "I broke his facemask. After that, it was, 'Man, you really laid the hat!' My name is Matt. So, 'Matt the Hat.' "

Smith and Daniels were in the same draft class in 2012. Smith was a first-round pick. Daniels went undrafted, signing with the St. Louis Rams, where fate would unite him with John Fassel, one of the best special teams coaches in the league.

"We've definitely talked about the good old days for safeties," Smith joked. "And it didn't take him long to pull out some of his clips going back to his high school days in Georgia."

Daniels explains why he showed those clips.

"My teaching philosophy is, 'Please ask me why' because I have a 'Why' behind everything I do," he said. "If I don't have an answer for your 'Why,' then we don't need to be doing it. So, players were asking one day, 'Why they call you Hat?' I'm like, 'Here you go, check out the tape, fellas. That right there is, 'Matt the Hat!' "

James Trask was one of Daniels' defensive coaches at Fayette County High in Fayetteville, Ga. He can still hear some of the hits Daniels made, including perhaps the loudest one of all on the opening play against rival McIntosh.

"He runs for a school-record 348 yards on 18 carries as our fullback that day, but the play of the game was him coming up from his safety position on a toss sweep to open the game," Trask said. "He hit their running back so hard, the entire stadium went quiet. When the lights went on, Matt lit people up. He led by knocking the crap out of people."

Swannette couldn't watch most of the time.

"It was too frightening," she said. "I'd be in the stands reading a book or in the car waiting for it to just be OV-er."

Teammate Brandon Boykin, a cornerback who became an Eagles fourth-round pick in 2012, would be back on the field with Daniels ever Saturday morning after a game working on what they could have done better.

"As coaches, we'd have to order them to go home and get rest," Trask said. "Matt was the absolute best human being as a teenager. A work ethic like none other. Humble. A 4.0 student. Winner of the Watkins Award [for the nation's top Black high school student-athlete].

"It does not surprise me at all that he's an NFL coordinator at 33."

O'Connell wasn't going to hire Daniels. In fact, he wasn't even going to interview him.

"In the back of your mind as a first-year head coach putting a staff together, you have this voice telling you that you need 'experience, experience, experience,' " O'Connell said. "But I had a lot of people I really trust rave about what Matt could be as a first-time coordinator. Then he just blew me away in the interview. To the point where it was a no-brainer hire.

"And then I realized he also has the experience. He just never had the title or got the credit. He's a big reason we've found ways to win this year."

Daniels played in only seven games over five NFL seasons with the Rams, Jaguars and Chargers. He was becoming a useful special teamer as a rookie when he blew out his knee in a 45-7 loss to the Patriots in London. He would play only three more games the rest of his career as a broken leg cut short his second season after only two games.

"But it was after that knee injury my rookie year that I started thinking about becoming a coach," Daniels said. "I'm on IR and I entrenched myself into learning the game more. Understanding it more. That's when I attached my hips to 'Bones' [Fassel, the Rams special teams coordinator]."

When his playing career ended, Daniels reached out to then-Colorado head coach Mike McIntyre, who was Daniels' defensive coordinator at Duke. McIntyre hired him as a graduate assistant in 2017.

"When I got to Colorado, I had just gotten married [to Tiffany] and was trying to figure out what I was going to do," said Daniels, whose daughter, Yara, turned 3 last Sunday. "So I sat down and wrote handwritten letters to every coach I ever came across in my life."

One of them was Fassel. As fate again would have it, Fassel's assistant got a job with the Titans the following spring. Daniels became Fassel's assistant for two years with the Los Angeles Rams and two more in Dallas. The first season with the Rams, 2018, they coached in the Super Bowl.

Daniels said Fassel taught him the importance of "edutaining" players relegated to special teams, "turning the red-headed stepchild of special teams into an education that's also an entertaining, fun place where offensive and defensive guys are mingling, working, growing together."

Daniels plays music in his meeting room. His baseball caps with "ST" on the front are becoming a must-wear item at TCO Performance Center. He's also got 32-year-old cornerback Patrick Peterson, a potential Hall of Famer, demanding to be part of the action because, he said, "Hat's special teams are a bunch of wild dogs that can change the tempo of the game at any given moment."

Daniels also has a supportive Smith sitting in on his meetings, years after the safety last served on special teams.

"I didn't realize at first that he's younger than me," Smith said. "The presence he has as a coach is very — I don't want to say beyond his years, but you can just tell he gets it. He gets what it's like out there on the field. He's very player-first and he can communicate with guys to get the best out of them."

Asked if he could envision Daniels as a head coach one day, Smith said, without hesitation, "Oh, absolutely." He's not the only person with that reaction. O'Connell and Daniels do too.

"I want to be where my feet are, obviously," Daniels said. "But I do have high hopes of being a head coach in this league."

He said he almost considered switching to defense early in his coaching career to give himself a better shot at becoming a head coach.

"But I went back to what my true purpose is, and that's to touch and teach as many individuals as I can," Daniels said. "And nobody gets to do that like a special teams coach, except the head coach."

He plans to "be so good that this league can't deny me as a head coach."

Daniels, who is Black, mentioned former Dolphins coach Brian Flores' lawsuit against the NFL, the Dolphins, Giants and Broncos alleging racist hiring practices that skirted the Rooney Rule put in place for head coach and general manager openings.

"You would think after the Brian Flores situation that things will truly change and teams won't just interview minority coaches just to check a box," Daniels said. "I think you'll start seeing more minority coaches come into the light."

Daniels pauses and mentions how he and Bruce used to discuss things like that.

"I get so caught up in football that it still hasn't really hit me that my father is gone," Daniels said. "I was his pride and joy. Now I'm getting one of my greatest accomplishments and he doesn't have the opportunity to be here and witness it.

"That's tough. Tough. But I do think he's watching somewhere. No doubt about it."