D.J. Durkin was 25 years old in the summer of 2003 when he accepted a graduate assistant job at Notre Dame, where Greg Mattison was coaching the defensive line. Mattison got his first Big Ten coaching coach the year Durkin was born. He knew, or at least knew of, just about everyone in the business after a quarter century on the job.
When he heard that he was getting a former Bowling Green linebacker named D.J. Durkin as a new understudy, Mattison’s initial reaction was to the point.
“Who’s that?” he remembers asking. “They said, ‘Well he was a really good player at Bowling Green.