TROY, N.Y. — As Matt Patricia prepared to enter the Jonsson Engineering Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for the first time in nearly a quarter-century, he suddenly veered to his right, away from the front door. He wanted to see what couldn’t be seen.

On a frigid Feb. 14 morning, the Free Press joined the Detroit Lions coach for a nearly 12-hour visit at his alma mater that concluded with him giving the keynote speech at the school’s annual ROTC military ball.

Before it all began, Patricia walked to the edge of an outdoor patio of the monolithic engineering building.

“This is it,” he said, as he pointed to an ice-covered patch of dormant grass 20 feet below. “That’s the ’86 Field. That’s where we played.”

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The field that put Patricia on the path to the highest levels of NFL coaching isn’t much of a football field anymore. It’s mere greenspace now, nestled among the impressive and ancient buildings of a RPI’s classic college setting.

You couldn’t blame RPI students for being too busy pursuing degrees in bioinformatics and molecular biology to know an undersized and overachieving offensive lineman once played for the school’s Division III football team on this field.

But Patricia can still see it. The vision is as clear as it was when he graduated in 1996 with a degree in aeronautical engineering after helping the Engineers to a 31-8 record during his playing days.

The paved walkways around the field are reminders of the old track. Patricia pointed to where the bleachers used to be. On Saturdays in the fall, students stood where Patricia now stood, high above the field raucously cheering their team.

Patricia smiled. It was all coming back. He remembered one especially chippy game against the Coast Guard Academy and a teammate’s mom yelling from the stands, “Get off my baby!”

Patricia loves this memory. He laughed as he recalled it. He laughs often and more than people might think.

Inventing a football career

Patricia, who returned to visit the athletic facilities about a decade ago, got a thorough tour of the engineering center. He put on a virtual-reality headset and was invited to fly a glider. It crashed several times. He used the VR headset to test air flow and heat transfer on a jet engine. It was hard to see what he was seeing in this unfamiliar virtual world, but he started to get the hang of it.

By the time he visited the RPI’s ROTC members from the four branches of the military, Patricia developed a feel for VR. The Air Force cadets gave him a spin on an F-86 Sabre flight simulator and, while he was no Maverick or Iceman, he kept his aircraft airborne and steady.

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The cinder-block corridors the engineering center lack adornment, save for a few thumbed-through magazines such as Wired and Aerospace America. The building is a beige-carpeted, bare-bones, down-to-business kind of place too busy incubating minds to worry about its looks. This is the edifice that molded Patricia’s young mind, gave him direction and a career, taught himself to think his way out of problems. And he’s drawn to it.

“We used to have our labs down there,” Patricia called out with a nostalgic lilt as he looked down a hallway, like a person spotting his favorite elementary school classroom.

Patricia visited with students running tests in a wind-tunnel lab. He checked out the large bay that looks like a workshop on steroids, where students even build cars. Patricia could have recognized it blindfolded because of “the smell of machine oil everywhere.”

In another engineering building, RPI honors some notable alumni with poster-sized testimonials. Ray Tomlinson invented email and came up with the @ sign. Steven Sasson invented the digital camera. The Jonsson building is named after J. Erik Jonsson, founder of Texas Instruments. They were all innovators and creators.

Patricia was on his way to a promising engineering career when he turned down a $100,000 job offer, bet on himself, sold his BMW and Jeep Wrangler, cashed in all his investments and took a $5,000 job coaching the defensive line at Amherst College.

He did it because he saw what no one else did. He saw himself figuring out how to be a good football coach despite not having any significant ties in football or the coaching world.

For that reason, Patricia deserves some small measure of recognition among RPI’s esteemed alumni for being an engineer who gave up engineering to reinvent himself and create a football career out of nothing.

Stafford and the foundation of a vision

The day was a flood of experiences. He had spoken with professors, students, athletes, administrators, coaches and cadets and military personnel. At lunch, he talked shop with RPI coaches then ran into Ron Holman, 63, a Lions fan from Muskegon dressed in team gear. He quietly picked up his tab. He gave two lengthy speeches, including a 40-minute keynote. He shook hundreds, if not thousands of hands, and posed for countless pictures.

After a long day that was closing in on midnight, Patricia sat by himself in a corner of his hotel lounge nursing a Diet Coke on Valentine’s Day, far from the din of revelers.

“Football, this career, I feel like I’m on a train that’s going 1,000 miles an hour all the time,” he said quietly. “And there’s so much of it to me, and this is hard for me because mentally I think I have a really strong brain and I think I can remember a lot of things, but sometimes I’ll think about RPI and I’m like, ‘God, I don’t remember that.’

“But actually being in there today I was like, ‘OK, I remember this, I remember this.’ So having a lot of that come back was really cool.”

A year ago, Patricia returned to central New York to visit his family in Sherrill. He pulled out one of his favorite childhood toys: Electric Football. “I have the Patriots,” he said. “I have the 49ers, I got the Bears. I’ve got all the teams. I put them on the board.”

Little did he know, the erratic movements of toy players skittering across a buzzing metal field would mimic the wild nature of the NFL. Just two days after the Lions firmly denied they were engaged in talks to trade quarterback Matthew Stafford, the NFL’s 1,000-mile-an-hour train isn’t giving Patricia much time to reflect on his first two years as the Lions’ coach.

“The first year was really hard for a lot of reasons,” he said. “I really had to find out about the team. What did we really have? And I would say that maybe the perception of what we had or what we thought the organization was, things that were in place, I had to really find out what was and what wasn’t.

“I thought we had a good opportunity going into the second year. We really had a lot of turnover. I don’t want to say that in a way that we had to, but I just think the camaraderie of that team, the ‘family-ness’ of that team is more of what I want, what I’m looking for, what I’m accustomed to and what is natural for me. I think having that in the building every day allowed me to be more of who I am every day.”

Patricia said he has remained consistent in the standards he demands of the team. But in his second season he felt it was easier for him to not be as guarded and to allow his personality to show more. He has had to battle against preconceived notions about him as a former New England Patriots coach.

“I think the hardest part of it is it’s never easy to go to an organization and change,” he said. “Everyone hates change. That’s the bottom line.”

And if you want to know what he thinks about Stafford, here it is embedded in his ideal vision of building a team.

“We’ve talked about foundation,” he said. “That’s a huge thing that I’ve got to try to figure out. The standard or the measurement for what you would call the foundation of your team is just not there. Like we don’t have that. We’re developing it, we’re growing it.

“We have our Staffords, those are your best players, those are your elite guys, those are your mainstays that you build around. But you still have to have that foundation. And I’m not just talking about the foundation of the culture. I’m talking about the foundation of just developed players because you can’t buy it, you can’t do that. So that’s tricky for us this year I think to figure out.”

Two rings, two lessons

Patricia told his origin story to about 300 people at the military ball. The theme was finding a way to succeed when it feels like the odds are against you.

His first year on RPI’s football team, Patricia struggled to bench press 135 pounds while a fellow freshman benched 405. On the first day of his freshman calculus class, one student had read the entire textbook and wanted to discuss errors she had found. It didn’t take long to understand he wasn’t the strongest or the smartest.

But he had a will to succeed and a vision for getting there that started with a goal, working his way backward to figure out the steps that would form his path. Even when his own mother, dumbstruck on the other end of the telephone line when her son said he was turning down a $100,000 job, couldn’t see the path, Patricia could.

Air Force Lt. Col. Nicholas Graham invited Patricia late last year to speak at the ball with a simple email. He didn’t realize how easy of a sell it would be. Patricia almost joined ROTC, he has close friends in the military and he treasures the stories he heard from his maternal grandfather, James Herrmann, a former marine who served during World War II and fought on Guadalcanal.

Patricia brought two props with him for his speech: His rings from Super Bowls 49 and 51 that represent the New England Patriots’ respective victories over the Seattle Seahawks and the Atlanta Falcons. He used the former to illustrate the importance of preparation that led to Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception. The latter illustrated the Patriots’ unwavering belief in the culture they had built that made Patricia confident they would rally from a 21-3 halftime deficit.

Graham said the lessons or preparation and culture resonate in the military.

“That’s one of the big things that we try to teach our cadets as leaders, that you have to build that culture in your unit and your squadron,” Graham said. “And it’s not you going around being the cheerleader, getting everyone fired up. It’s building such a positive, winning culture that your members, your airmen, your soldiers, they go do that on their own.”

Patricia didn’t show it, but he must have been exhausted while he sipped on his soft drink in the hotel lounge. You couldn’t have blamed him for giving a cliched platitude for why he thinks his team could be better this season while he grapples with ownership’s mandate to be a playoff contender. Just trying to get better every day. We’re trending in the right direction. Something like that.

Instead, Patricia was candid. Yes, he knows what it looks like. He can’t see it now, but he has seen it before. He just needs everyone on his team to start seeing it.

“It’s a weird thing to say, but there is that glass ceiling that everyone’s waiting to bump into when I’m like, ‘Look, we need to shatter through this thing so that we can just go,’ ” he said. “And that’s the part that I can’t sit here and say, ‘Look, we have those pieces or we have that.’ Part of that with teams that win, it’s something I say all the time, it’s something that catches fire during the season and it sparks the team and it sends them in that direction.

“And part of it is bringing in impact-type players or the players that you’re developing or the players that you have that just step into those roles and just become those type of guys. That unwavering mentality is what we need to have. And we’ll build upon what we did last year and we’ll hopefully add some pieces that help us get there. Offseason is a good time to work on that.”

Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.