Dave Birkett

Detroit Free Press

Teryl Austin has done wonders with the Detroit Lions defense this season, and the first-year coordinator should be a top candidate to land a head-coaching job this winter.

Austin, 49, is one of the top three minority candidates the Fritz Pollard Alliance Foundation will submit to NFL teams with coaching vacancies this off-season, chairman John Wooten said Tuesday.

"We'd be very disappointed if he doesn't (get an interview)," Wooten told the Free Press. "That's something that we look very hard at, who's getting the interviews."

The Lions lead the NFL in points against (17 ppg) and have the best run defense by any team since the 2010 Pittsburgh Steelers (63.8 ypg), and players have credited Austin's inclusive coaching style and creative blitz packages for part of their success.

Austin is in his first year as an NFL coordinator, so some teams may take a prove-it-again approach with him.

But he coached in Super Bowls as a defensive backs coach with the Seattle Seahawks, Arizona Cardinals and Baltimore Ravens, where he won a championship, and he spent one year on Urban Meyer's staff as defensive coordinator at Florida.

"I think he's (a) huge (part of our success)," safety Glover Quin said in October. "He calls great games. Very smart guy. We go into the games knowing exactly what they want from us, exactly what they expect from us, but they also do a great job in my opinion of letting the players play, and I think they do a great job of, as we call it, loading up our toolbox. Giving us a bunch of options for different things (that happen on the field)."

Wooten said he will be in New York on Wednesday to meet with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and discuss the Fritz Pollard Alliance's list of top minority coaching candidates, among other matters, with the league.

Nine candidates are on the list in all including Austin, defensive coordinators Todd Bowles (Arizona Cardinals), Perry Fewell (New York Giants), Leslie Frazier (Tampa Bay Buccaneers) and Ray Horton (Tennessee Titans); offensive coordinators Pep Hamilton (Indianapolis Colts) and Hue Jackson (Cincinnati Bengals), assistant head coach Winston Moss (Green Bay Packers) and former San Francisco 49ers coach Mike Singletary.

Wooten would not say who else besides Austin is in the top three.

"We as an organization will sit down with the commissioner and his group and ... submit our list to them and they give us their input as to what they see and what they hear and so forth," Wooten said. "And from there, each and every team that has openings, this list is given to them so that they can never say what Matt Millen said a few years ago that he couldn't find anybody."

Millen was fined $200,000 by the NFL in 2003 for failing to interview a minority candidate when he hired Steve Mariucci as Lions coach.

The Lions said at the time five candidates turned down interviews because it was apparent Mariucci was getting the job.

Austin has declined to talk about his future as a head coach this fall, saying his focus is on the Lions defense.

"We do what we always do and we look at the body of work for the whole year as to how the team is performing under him, under his direction and what they're doing overall as a team because that is one of the things that we know that the owners look at when they're doing the hiring," Wooten said. "As you follow this thing through the years, I'm sure you've seen as I have that the top coordinators is the pipeline for getting to be a head coach."

Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.