MIAMI GARDENS — Jerry Sullivan grew up in the foster care system in Miami, born 23 years before the Miami Dolphins were established as an NFL franchise.
Even as he went on to have a lengthy career spanning more than 50 years coaching wide receivers in college and professional football, he could never imagine his son would one day become general manager of the Dolphins, who are on their bye this weekend.
But that’s the full-circle story of how Jon-Eric Sullivan’s hiring as Dolphins GM last January, in a roundabout way, brought the Sullivan family back to its South Florida roots.
Jon-Eric Sullivan has two major lines of influences — probably with several others sprinkled in — on his journey rising to a GM position. For one, it’s the two-plus decades he spent climbing the scouting and personnel ranks with the Green Bay Packers, providing the foundation for his core beliefs of how to build a consistent winner in the NFL.
But before any of that, he developed a love for football at an early age and an eye for certain intricacies of the game that come from being a coach’s son.
The early influence
Jon-Eric Sullivan’s parents split up when he was going into the second grade. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1976 when his father was wide receivers coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks. Jerry Sullivan later spent a year at Indiana in 1983 and the next several seasons coaching receivers at LSU.
For many years in his youth, when school was out, Jon-Eric Sullivan was spending the day with his dad and with the game of football.
“I would go in to work with him at 6 a.m., and my babysitter for the day was the football facility and everything that came with it,” he told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in a sit-down interview this past week.
“So I’d be sitting in coaches’ meetings or I’d be running around the stadium stealing the maintenance guy’s golf cart, getting in trouble, and then I’d go to practice. As I got older, I’d go lift with the players.”
On the drive home on those days, he was drilling his father with football questions.
Jerry Sullivan recalls his son being fascinated with getting to know players’ backgrounds, where they came from, the skills they possessed that made them good at what they did.
As a youngster, he could ride the LSU bus on a Saturday as the Tigers went from the team hotel to the stadium and get a feel for whether players were locked in and ready to play.
“He watched the game from a little bit of a different perspective from a young kid,” Jerry Sullivan said, in a phone interview with the Sun Sentinel.
Dolphins GM Jon-Eric Sullivan before a game vs. the Kansas City Chiefs on Sept. 27 in Miami Gardens. (AP Photo/David Santiago)
“I couldn’t tell you that, as an 8 year old, I was starting to take in locker room dynamics, but you start to see the common denominator for good teams,” Jon-Eric Sullivan said. “The work ethic, the brotherhood, a lot of what we’re going through right now in fighting through the hard times, adversity and sticking together and not pointing fingers and blaming.”
Jon-Eric Sullivan was soaking in the football knowledge, but in his early high school years at Catholic High in Baton Rouge, his grades were suffering. Jerry Sullivan enrolled his son at Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia before his junior year.
“It was one of the greatest moves I ever made in my life,” Jerry Sullivan said. “He wasn’t all for it, either. He had his bumps along the way. To me, that was the solution to help him. Be away from home, you grow up, having more responsibilities.”
Jon-Eric Sullivan adjusted to the new environment, and coach and athletic director Micky Sullivan — no relation — took an interest in him and became an inspiration to get him straightened out before college.
Aside from military school, bouncing around from state to state presented its own challenge in the Dolphins GM’s youth.
“I didn’t love it at the time, but I will say, there’s a lot that comes with it later in life as an adult,” he said. “You learn how to adjust, you learn how to adapt, you learn how to meet new people and communicate, definitely breeds resiliency.”
As the son of a receivers coach, naturally that was the position he played, but at Fork Union, he played both sides of the ball and ended up leading the state with nine interceptions at cornerback on a state championship-winning team, as well as finding success as a returner.
Jon-Eric Sullivan played at South Carolina first, where it all started for him in Columbia, bounced back and forth between wide receiver and cornerback with the Gamecocks, and then transferred to Division II Gardner-Webb. There, he found more playing time and was an all-conference selection.
College was the end of Jon-Eric Sullivan’s football playing days. His own evaluation of himself as a 5-foot-9 receiver: “Reject.” But he adds the caveat that he played before the Wes Welker types had a home as an option out of the slot. Maybe he was just ahead of his time.
The Miami connection
Jon-Eric Sullivan never lived in Miami through all those years growing up, but he would still often come down to see his father’s hometown and get to know his grandmother, who migrated to the United States from Sicily without speaking English.
During those summers in Baton Rouge, he and his dad might take a week or two to stop in Orlando and work their way down to Miami. Jerry Sullivan showed his son the rough neighborhood he grew up in of Allapattah, attending Miami Jackson High.
“I remember taking him in the car and showing him where I went to school,” Jerry Sullivan said. “He said, ‘Boy, this is a tough area.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ He had a great sense of compassion for a young kid about his dad.
“It was a blue-collar, tough area, but a lot of good football players came out of there. And I was blessed to be around some good coaches.”
One of those coaches was Joe Brodsky, who later was a two-time national champion as running backs coach with the Miami Hurricanes and then won three Super Bowls in the same role with the Dallas Cowboys. Jerry Sullivan was also high school teammates and, for a time, lived with the family of Joe Avezzano, who was special teams coach for those three Cowboys Super Bowls in the 1990s. He and Avezzano went on to Florida State together. At FSU, Jerry also played with Hall of Fame wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff.
“It was a way out,” Jerry Sullivan said of what football provided in Allapattah. “The area I grew up in, some guys went to school and went in the Army, some guys went to school and went to jail, some guys went on to play football, go to college.”
An eye for talent
During those years that Jon-Eric Sullivan tagged along at LSU, he could spot the traits in players his dad coached, like Wendell Davis, who went on to be a first-round pick of the Chicago Bears. His father always emphasized footwork to his wide receivers, so he could pick up on the receivers that had it.
“Football is a footwork game,” Jerry Sullivan said.
He has a long list of successful receivers he took under his wings at the pro level: Tony Martin in the mid 1990s with the San Diego Chargers; Herman Moore and Johnnie Morton in the late ’90s with the Detroit Lions; David Boston and Anquan Boldin in the early 2000s with the Arizona Cardinals. Later on, he helped teach Brandon Lloyd and Michael Crabtree with the San Francisco 49ers, and Allen Robinson and Allen Hurns with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Dolphins GM Jon-Eric Sullivan (right) and his father, longtime college football and NFL assistant coach Jerry Sullivan, during a Miami practice on Oct. 9 in Miami Gardens. (Tomas Diniz Santos/Courtesy of Miami Dolphins)
Within the last decade, he was back at LSU as an assistant, and he played a big role in finding and developing two of the best receivers in the NFL today, in Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson. Chase was always considered an elite recruit, but Jerry Sullivan vouched for the lightly recruited Jefferson, as he was able to identify the way he could cut in and out of breaks with — what it all comes back to — his footwork.
Jerry Sullivan was also wide receivers coach of the Dolphins in 2004, which was an infamous season for the franchise, sparked by Ricky Williams’ first retirement that July, as he faced suspension for a failed drug test for marijuana. Coach Dave Wannstedt, who is also close with current coach Jeff Hafley, was fired in the middle of that season.
Getting his foot in the door
But another thing happened for the Sullivans that year far from Miami. Jon-Eric Sullivan started working full-time with the Packers.
After college at Gardner-Webb, he tried to get into corporate America for a couple of years, but it wasn’t for him. He had to get back to football. And he also realized, from coaching wide receivers as a student assistant in 2000, he wasn’t patient enough to be a coach. Talent evaluation was the way for him.
Jerry Sullivan made a call to a good friend in Packers vice president of football operations Mark Hatley, who died of a heart attack the following year after bringing Jon-Eric Sullivan into the building as an intern in 2003. He rose through the scouting ranks, kept following the trail of current Green Bay GM Brian Gutekunst as Sullivan made his own rise and now has his own GM job with the Dolphins.
“As a dad, I kind of pointed him in the direction, and he took the ball and ran with it. That’s the best way to describe it,” Jerry Sullivan said. “He was exposed to it as a young kid, and I always put this emphasis on it when he was a kid: ‘Don’t ever think you have to play football because I’m your dad and I coach.’
“I wanted him to be his own man. I didn’t want him to have to feel that, because I was a football coach, he had to fall in line with me, play football, but he loved it, he worked at it.”
Said Jon-Eric: “I’m not here without him. The lessons that I’ve learned, the things that he allowed me to see — it wasn’t easy.”
His father’s sacrifice comes full circle to him now when he hosts him to watch the Dolphins practice.
“He likes to come hang out — I say this with all love and respect — it’s not super convenient. I got a job to do, and you got your dad here,” Jon-Eric said. “But I’m thinking back to when I was a kid. I’m sure it wasn’t convenient for him.”
In the end, it was all worth it for Jerry Sullivan.
“I couldn’t be more proud of the man he is, as well as the (football executive),” he said. “The man, the father — he’s got three girls — he’s a great dad, great husband and just a good person. When you’ve got young kids, that’s what you hope they become.”