PART OF THE FAMILY BUSINESS

By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
         With their two older sons already in the family business – namely, football – Bill and Eileen Polian held out hope that their youngest would take a different path and become a lawyer.
         "My parents weren't necessarily pushing it away, but they did a great job of not pushing anything on us," Dennis Polian said. "Their thing was: do what you love, but you're not quitting. If you commit to something, you're going to see it through."
         A political science major at Villanova who planned to become a prosecutor and "get into public service and eventually maybe politics," Dennis actually went through a semester of law school, but decided that it "just wasn't what I thought it was going to be."
         Taking a job in the Boston College athletics department, he found his passion.
         "I'm sure it was a red flag to my dad when I said I was going to law school at night," Dennis said. "I made sure I got accepted into grad school (at Boston College) before I told my parents. My mom was like, 'Oh!' And my dad said, 'We can't tell our friends that our son's an attorney. We lost another one.'''
         The youngest son of Pro Football Hall of Famer Bill Polian, who built the Buffalo Bills and Indianapolis Colts into Super Bowl teams as a general manager, Dennis has found his own path. After previous stops at Arizona and Texas A&M and NFL stints with the Tennessee Titans, Colts and Minnesota Vikings, he joined Baylor coach Dave Aranda last month as Football Chief of Staff and Senior Associate Athletics Director.
         "Because I've got experience in really all of the areas that touch the program, I think I can take away some of the day-to-day pieces . . . and make sure he has less off the field to worry about," said the 44-year-old Polian. "That's probably a long-winded way of saying whatever he doesn't want to do, put it on me."
         Since it was really all he knew, Polian didn't think too much of being able to "hang out with football teams all day" and getting the chance to be a ball boy for NFL games. That was just his life.
         "Looking back on it in a very introspective way, I'm like, 'Wow, what a surreal way to grow up,''' said Dennis, a third-grader when his dad became the Bills' GM in 1986. "You don't realize how fortunate you are until you get a little older and understand it all. Yeah, there were sacrifices in our family life and the amount of times we moved . . . but it pales in comparison to the blessings that it created for us as a family and really the path that it led me to."
         Before Buffalo, he remembers going to a small Catholic pre-K in Cornwall, N.Y., when Bill was an area scout for the Kansas City Chiefs; trick-or-treating in a snow suit and having an early Thanksgiving (Oct. 11) in Winnipeg.
         Maybe it was all the moves, particularly the one before his senior year in high school, that made Dennis push all of it away at first.

Polian

His oldest brother, Chris, followed his dad's path and served in the front office with the Colts and Jacksonville Jaguars, while Brian went the coaching route. Now the special teams coordinator at Notre Dame, Brian spent two years as a GA at Baylor (1999-2000) and went to two bowl games in four seasons as the head coach at Nevada (2013-16).
         "Without knowing it, I think I felt a pressure (with the Polian name), and that guided me a little bit to do my own thing," Dennis said. "There were times where I felt like it was actually working against me, where I needed to work harder to prove that I earned where I am. But, I never felt self-conscious or insecurity about being compared to him or my brothers, because my brothers and I all do different things. And if I'm half as successful as my dad, I'll be happy, because he's in the top 1% of what he did professionally."
         While he's been involved in athletics since his undergrad days at Villanova, and mostly with football, Dennis said it's not his identity, "it's not who I am, and it never has been."
         "It's been my passion professionally, but I've never lost sleep over not being good enough or making mistakes, because we all make mistakes," he said. "I lose sleep over not learning from a mistake or letting someone down that I work for, who's given me an opportunity. That's where my pressure and self-motivation come from"
         Part of the rowing team at Villanova, Dennis also worked in the football and ticket offices, wherever he was needed. That's where he got to know Gene DeFillippo, who left Villanova to take the athletic director position at Boston College during Polian's senior year.
         "My senior year at Villanova, I would drive up to Boston from Philly just to work the games and be around it," he said.
Polian

         Working a receptionist's job at BC during the day and going to law school at night, Dennis found that his passion was the one thing he pushed away from all those years.
         "My parents were disappointed, obviously, but very supportive," Dennis said of his decision to leave law school after one semester. He got his master's in administrative studies, which he calls a "cheater's MBA," from Boston College in 2001.
         "I didn't have to take finance or advanced-level statistics, but I took labor negotiation, broader accounting principles, financing principles, organizational structure, management, communications, things like that. Everything but the real hard-core numbers."
         From BC, Polian's career path had plenty of twists and turns, including Assistant AD positions at Columbia and Tulane, where he was heavily involved in the department's Hurricane Katrina action plan.
         After a year with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the Canadian Football League, he made the move to the NFL with stops in Minnesota, Indianapolis and Tennessee. In five years with the Titans, he was a pro scout, football administrator and special assistant to head coach Mike Munchak.
         "All my different stops were very serendipitous. I never sought anything out, and things just kept happening," Dennis said. "I think it was probably toward the end of my fourth year, the first half of my fifth year with the Titans, that I realized the college impact that you can have on people. Out of nowhere, Kevin Sumlin called about a job at Texas A&M. I went there strictly as director of player personnel, but then it evolved into the role I have now."
         Following Sumlin to the University of Arizona, Polian worked with the Wildcats until Sumlin was fired at the end of the 2020 season.
         For the first time in his professional career, he was in a position "where I consciously sought out a specific type of organization and type of people I wanted to be around." That's what led him to the position at Baylor and working with Aranda and Mack Rhoades, Baylor's VP and Director of Athletics.
         "Dave is brilliant as a football coach," Dennis said. "How purposeful he is and intentional he is about everything we do – it's not unique, but it's not overly common, especially in college football," Dennis said. "It's proven that you can win at a high level the way Dave does things. I think of people like Tony Dungy, Dom Capers, Jim Caldwell and Mike Munchak, guys who have been the best at what they're doing by treating people a certain way and going about it a certain way and not worrying about the external pressures to be a certain way."
         Seeing Rhoades' vision for the overall athletics program and what he's done at Baylor in the last four years, Dennis said, "That's somebody I can learn from. That's somebody I can grow from. That's somebody who's got a connection with his head coach that's strong and they're philosophically connected."
         The other attraction was being involved with a faith-based university with "values they're not going to sacrifice."
         That was particularly important for a man who grew up in the church and now has a young family. While he was working with the Titans, Dennis met his wife, the former Jenny Pasquini, who was a nurse anesthetist at a Nashville hospital.
         "Before we got serious, she made it clear that she never wanted to move," Dennis said of Jenny, who grew up in Paducah, Ky. "And this is our third move in six years. She had lived in Nashville for almost 15 years. To never be around this business, and then all of a sudden, go from Nashville to College Station to Tucson and back to Texas, to Waco, she's pretty special."
         Dennis was 40 when his son, Finn, was born in College Station. Two years later, his daughter, Miller Rose, was born in Tucson.
         "I joke with her, 'Man, I wish I had met you 10 years ago, because I'm so tired,''' Dennis said. "In some ways, I'm glad it happened the way it did. We all know people who got married super young and things didn't work out, and they have that added stress in life. Where, I feel like they're the best things in my life. My wife, she's beyond me in terms of intelligence and just her heart and demeanor and the way she is with them, I couldn't be happier and more blessed."

PART OF THE FAMILY BUSINESS

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