Joseph Rossi (born 1979) is an

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...

coach who is the

defensive coordinator A defensive coordinator is a coach responsible for a gridiron football (American football) team's defense. Generally, the defensive coordinator, the offensive coordinator and the special teams coordinator represent the second level of a team's c ...

and linebackers coach for the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

football team A football team is a group of players selected to play together in the various team sports known as football. Such teams could be selected to play in a match against an opposing team, to represent a football club, group, state or nation, an All-st ...

Early life

Rossi grew up in

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

where he attended Central Catholic High School. He competed on the football team as a

defensive lineman In gridiron football, a lineman is a player who specializes in play at the line of scrimmage. The linemen of the team currently in possession of the ball are the offensive line, while linemen on the opposing team are the defensive line. A numbe ...

. Rossi then accepted a scholarship to continue his playing career at

Allegheny College he, תגל ערבה ותפרח כחבצלת , mottoeng = "Add to your faith, virtue and to your faith, knowledge" (2 Peter 1:5)"The desert shall rejoice and the blossom as the rose" (Isaiah 35:1) , faculty = 193 ...

. He was a three-time All-

North Coast Athletic Conference The North Coast Athletic Conference (NCAC) is an NCAA Division III athletic conference composed of colleges located in Ohio and Indiana. When founded in 1984, the league was a pioneer in gender equality, offering competition in a then-unprecede ...

(NCAC).

Coaching career

On March 12, 2012, Rossi was named the special teams coordinator for the

Rutgers Scarlet Knights football The Rutgers Scarlet Knights football team represents Rutgers University in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) of the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA). Rutgers competes as a member of the East Division of the Big Ten Conference. ...

team. In 2013, Rossi was elevated to

for the Scarlet Knights. Rossi was named

Gophers Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They are ...

defensive line coach in January 2018 after working as a quality control assistant for Minnesota in 2017. On November 24, 2018 Joe Rossi was promoted to defensive coordinator. In 2022, he coached the Gophers defense to a pair of shutouts for the first time since 2006

References

External links

Minnesota Golden Gophers bio
1979 births Living people American football defensive linemen Allegheny Gators football players Maine Black Bears football coaches Rutgers Scarlet Knights football coaches Thiel Tomcats football coaches Minnesota Golden Gophers football coaches Players of American football from Pittsburgh {{Amfoot-coach-stub