How Daronte Jones, NFL ‘Renaissance Man,’ finally returned home with the Commanders

LOTHIAN, Md. — Ben Jones Lane is private and dirt, and as it tumbles further into rural Anne Arundel County, Md., it leaves the strip malls of neighboring Prince George’s County — home to the Washington Commanders — behind. Washington, D.C., just more than a half an hour by car, falls further back still.

One stifling afternoon earlier this month, Daronte Jones pulled his 2020 Porsche 911 onto the bumps and the gravel. He has been making this drive his whole life. He slowed down to look at the street sign.

“Ben Jones was my grandfather’s uncle,” Daronte Jones said, fully at a stop. “Or … great uncle? No, uncle. His uncle.”

The Jones clan is both unwieldy and tight. Daronte Jones lived with his mother Darlene — the second-oldest of Calvert and Inez Jones’s seven children — on the Jones’ tobacco farm until he was in third grade. Aunts, uncles and cousins lived in houses strewn across 100 acres.

“I hated farm life,” he said. Still, he knows it shaped him.

Jones is a football coach. The life of a football coach is, by nature, itinerant. He is 47. He has slept under his desk and in his car. He has coached in Maryland (Bowie State) and Montreal (Alouettes). He has coached in the Pac-12 (UCLA), the Big Ten (Wisconsin) and the Mountain West (Hawaii). He has coached at four stops in Louisiana alone (Nicholls State, a pair of high schools and LSU with the big boys). He has coached NFL teams by sea (Dolphins) and by land (Bengals, Vikings).

In a career that spans 26 years, he has moved 14 times. His permanent mailing address through it all: the little house of Calvert and Inez Jones on Ben Jones Lane, tucked away in rural Maryland.

“For the longest time, I would move, and I would never unpack because I was always planning for the next job,” Jones said, standing in the yard in front of his grandparents’ house. “You never really felt like you were settled. You got boxes everywhere, and then when you do unpack, now you’re packing up again.

“It just never felt like you’re home anywhere.”

Jones took a few strides. Some of Calvert Jones’ ducks wandered through the yard, past the pigeon cages, not far from where the basketball court once sat, a few waddles from where Calvert used to keep his pigs, around the corner from Inez’s manicured walkway to the front steps, lined with flowers.

Daronte Jones’ 14th move took him from Minneapolis, where he was the defensive backs coach of the Minnesota Vikings, to suburban Washington, where he is now the defensive coordinator of the Commanders. His new home field, Northwest Stadium, is around the corner from the elementary and middle schools where he first played football. He and his wife moved to McLean, Va., a short drive to the Commanders’ training facility in Ashburn.

It took more than a quarter of a century. But now, when Calvert Jones cooks for the extended family and Inez welcomes them on Sunday afternoons — when the cars are lined up and down Ben Jones Lane — Daronte Jones can join his cousins and aunts and uncles and his mom. After all the time away, he’s back home.

“Here,” he said, “we unpacked.”

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As the Commanders prepare for a training camp that opens Wednesday with first-time coordinators on both sides of the ball — David Blough takes over for Kliff Kingsbury on offense, Jones for the fired Joe Whitt Jr. on defense — head coach Dan Quinn was asked what jumped out about Jones in his first few months on the job.

“Just the attention to detail,” Quinn said.

“Details kind of separate you from being average and being really good,” said Ken Norton Jr., the Commanders’ veteran linebackers coach who is working with Jones for the first time. “And he knows his details. He understands that we need to understand what the details are of each and every position and each and every coverage.”

For Jones, that comes from a lifetime in coaching, from the countless mentors and peers who have provided lessons along the way. But it also comes from all that time spent on Ben Jones Lane, where Calvert Jones put young Daronte to work. Calvert is now 86, a carpenter by trade. That deck off his house? Daronte has sweat equity in it, working by Calvert’s side.

The list of chores was endless and all over the map. Daronte toiled in the tobacco fields, since plowed under. Calvert raised beagles — maybe 40 at a time — to help him hunt rabbits. Daronte not only had to help build the dog houses, but was tasked with dragging a pet rabbit through the woods, lacing the trail with its scent, so the beagle puppies could learn to track it down and flush it out.

All those dogs, they had metal dishes in front of their kennels. Daronte’s task: Fill them with water. Simple enough.

“I didn’t clean out the water pan,” Daronte said.

Calvert Jones had standards.

“He’s like, ‘You see this green stuff from the trees? You gotta get that out of there. They can’t drink that,’” Daronte said. “I’m like, ‘Yeah they can. They’re dogs.’”

Calvert dumped the water out of a bowl. He reached up to an overhanging tree branch, ripped off some leaves and used them as a rag to clean out the bowl. He then filled it with water, proper for his beloved beagles.

“For me, when I was young, it was like, it doesn’t really matter — you know what I mean?” Jones said. “But what he really taught me then: Everything matters.”

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Over the phone, Brian Flores, the well-respected defensive coordinator of the Vikings, ticked off the virtues and talents of Daronte Jones, his former defensive backs coach. He’s creative, not afraid to test the limits, has a great way of relating to players — all the stuff you’d expect a boss to say when extolling the virtues of an understudy who advanced.

Then he landed on a greater truth.

“We call him the Renaissance Man,” Flores said.

The Renaissance Man?

“I mean, he’s the best-dressed guy in the building,” Flores said. “He’s got the best bags and luggage. He’s the most traveled. He has been all over the world.”

As Jones drove that Porsche 911 through the back roads of Maryland, wearing a white linen shirt and black shorts, he was freshly back from his first real visit to Japan. He took in the crowds at Shibuya Crossing in the heart of Tokyo. He carefully selected his seat on the bullet train to Osaka so he’d be positioned for the best view of Mount Fuji. Alas, it was clouded over.

Another time. Because there’s always another trip. Jones tries to leave the country twice a year.

“I love seeing people at their best, in their own surroundings,” he said. “It just opens up so many different experiences. You know, sometimes when we’re here, we can be absorbed by — you can call it the rat race.”

Some football coaches almost pride themselves on having little life beyond the game. Jones revels in exploring outside of football. When he spent three years on the staff at Hawaii, Norm Chow, the well-traveled head coach of the Rainbow Warriors, encouraged him to see the world, telling him, “You want to spend money on experiences and memories.”

“I think it’s a big, big world we’re living in out there, right?” Chow said by phone this month. “And the fact that he was already halfway to Asia, and that part of the world is a little easier to get to, made sense. To his credit, he took advantage of that.”

Jones’ first international trip was to Zurich. He was so ill-prepared for the experience that he was taken aback by signs that weren’t in English.

“The survival skills kicked in,” Jones said. “And I have not stopped since.”

Geneva, Milan and Venice followed on that trip. South Africa, Australia, an emotional trip to Israel and Jordan with his mother, aunt and grandmother — on which he was re-baptized — came later. He even won over his now-wife by revealing he had been to the country of her roots, Taiwan.

“She’s like, ‘No, Taiwan, not Thailand,’” Jones said. “I was like, ‘Right. I’ve been to Taipei. I went there by myself on vacation.’ I think that about sealed the deal when she found that out.”

Early on in his tenure with the Vikings, Jones was talking with Flores about some destination. London, France, Italy, Greece — Flores can’t quite remember.

This time, it was Jones encouraging his colleague to see the world. Now, Flores takes his family abroad each offseason. There is, Flores believes, a relationship between Jones’ vagabond career, his globe-hopping avocation and his ability to connect with his players.

“He’s been in a lot of spots from a coaching standpoint,” Flores said. “So he can have, basically, a conversation with anyone about anything. He’s probably been in or around your neighborhood at some point over the course of his career. Which leaves a lot of common ground when talking and building relationships with players.”

The travels around the globe inform who Jones is as a person. The travels professionally inform who he is as a coach.

“I think that’s critical,” Chow said. “I think guys that just grew up in one program hurt themselves. When you move around, you learn the good things, but you learn what not to do, too.”

Jones believes those travels breed both a curiosity and an adventurousness. And that curiosity and adventurousness extend to football. He and Flores applied it to the Vikings, who ranked third in both yards per game and yards per play last season using a system that expertly disguises blitzes and coverages. Jones will now bring that creativity to Washington, which ranked last in yards per game and 30th in yards per play in 2025.

“There’s box thinking, meaning: This is how it’s always been done,” Jones said. “… We often joke, like: We don’t think outside the box. There is no box.”

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The drive from Ben Jones Lane back through Prince George’s County to the just-off-the-highway apartments in Landover Hills goes past a landmark that didn’t exist when Daronte Jones grew up here.

“That used to be a shopping mall,” Jones said as he rode past Northwest Stadium. “Circuit City, all that stuff.”

On Sundays this fall, it will be his office. Northwest Stadium — which opened as FedEx Field in 1997 — stands all of 10 minutes from the two-bedroom, sixth-floor apartment Jones shared with his mother after they moved closer to the city from the farm. Around the corner is Matthew Henson Elementary School, where Jones served as a patrol officer — bright yellow vest, little orange flag — as a sixth-grader, not far from Kenmoor Middle School, which Jones attended before matriculating to Bishop McNamara High, another five minutes further.

On that sweltering afternoon, Jones pulled into the parking lot behind the apartment building. He remembers having to call his mother at work on Capitol Hill to tell her when he arrived home from school. He remembers sitting in the window watching kids play beneath and accidentally knocking out the screen — then getting his aunt to cover for him and fix it back up.

“This,” he said, scurrying down some stairs toward a parking lot, “this is where we played football.”

Jones said he hadn’t returned since he and his mother moved to a house in nearby Capitol Heights when he was in middle school. But he remembered: the white paint that marked the parking spaces served as yard lines. Move the ball past a certain line, it’s a first down — but only one per possession. Cross that one down there, and you’re in the end zone. The kids from Jones’ building played the kids from the neighboring Howard Hall apartments. Down the hill in a little patch of grass …

“That’s where we played ‘throwback tackle,’” Jones said. Sounds just like what it means: One kid throws the ball backward over his head. Everyone else tries to tackle him.

“I used to walk from here to the practice field,” he said. “And it’s not around the corner.”

The field is still lined, the goal posts stand tall, a blocking sled and equipment shed sit there still. Daronte Jones scored his first touchdown right here, wearing the No. 83 of his hero — Redskins receiver Ricky Sanders.

“I loved ‘The Posse,’” he said. He looked around. In his new job, he has met Sanders’ fellow Posse member Gary Clark. He will certainly meet the Hall of Famer to round out that bunch, Art Monk.

Coaching careers are usually preceded by playing careers. Jones’ began here, first as a left tackle, then as a receiver. It continued at Bishop McNamara, then at Temple for a year, and finally at Morgan State in Baltimore, where he played safety.

“He was so, so cerebral,” said Dexter Davis, a former defensive back at Clemson and in the NFL who served as Morgan State’s defensive coordinator. “He wore this neck brace that made him look like he was as tough as all get-out — but he wasn’t very fast.”

No matter. Jones’s dream in the late 1990s wasn’t to coach in the NFL. It was to play there.

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The neck brace Jones wore wasn’t to make him look tough, not to impersonate Dexter Manley or Wilber Marshall, his favorite Redskins defenders growing up. He wore it because he had to. When he made tackles, he would frequently get “stingers,” the shock of pain that ran from his neck down his arm.

Each time, the condition seemed temporary. Instead, it indicated cervical nerve damage. Headed into his junior year, Jones was told he could no longer play football. He stopped going to class. He rarely left his room.

“It was very depressing,” Jones said. “They say you can’t play football anymore, that gets taken away from you, and you feel like it’s undone. There’s so much left, so many questions.”

Just getting Jones back out to practice was difficult — and not particularly rewarding.

“We’re competitive,” said Melvin Coleman, Jones’ roommate and fellow defensive back, the best man in his wedding and vice versa. “He’s seeing me out there doing what I’m doing and, you know, he’s wanting to be a part of it. But I guess that was the point where it was kind of like: Maybe there’s a longer plan here.”

Davis and Stump Mitchell, the former NFL running back who was Morgan State’s head coach, encouraged Jones to begin working with the coaches. Davis had seen Jones’ impact on his defense as a player — not with his skill set, but with his brain. From his spot at free safety, Jones made the calls on defense. He put players in the correct alignment. He knew not just his responsibility, but everyone’s responsibility.

“I was a young defensive coordinator, but man, he knew the defense better than me,” Davis said. “He was the epitome of a coach on the field — the epitome.”

Jones didn’t realize it, but he had already developed an interest in strategy before he walked up to the press box. He and Coleman played hours of EA Sports Madden. They were sophisticated enough that they built their own playbooks, put them on memory sticks and tucked them in their wallets lest they find themselves at a new console with an unfamiliar opponent and needed to run their own schemes.

“Playing Madden kind of helped with the X’s and O’s,” Jones said. “Which is crazy, because I still reference that stuff.”

So the struggle began. After graduating with a degree in psychology, his first job came as a graduate assistant at Lenoir-Rhyne in Hickory, N.C. His U-Haul broke down on the way there. When he arrived, Davis called. An old connection, Gene Chizik, was putting together a defensive staff at Central Florida. Davis told Jones: Get in your car and go.

“I said, ‘Coach, my family just found money for me to get a U-Haul truck to make this move,’” Jones said. “I don’t have it. I can’t do it.”

He stayed. “I was naive,” Jones said. A day after that first season, Lenoir-Rhyne’s coach and athletic director were fired.

The moves began. At Division III North Park University in Chicago, Jones slept in his car — and left before he coached in a game. At Nicholls State, he slept on the couch of fellow assistant Mickey Joseph — the older brother of Vance Joseph, then an assistant at Colorado, later the head coach (and now defensive coordinator) of the Denver Broncos. In the summer, Vance would come home to Louisiana for family events.

“Everything I know about defensive back play, I learned from Vance Joseph,” Jones said.

Each stop brought a different mentor, a new connection, another lesson. Not all were positive. For five seasons, Jones coordinated defenses at Bowie State that were three times among the best in Division II.

“What you learn is that you don’t earn respect coaching Black college football,” he said, “which is not encouraging at all.”

So he took a job at UCLA as a cornerbacks coach but on a GA’s salary — $1,000 a month. He slept on a blow-up mattress under the desk in his meeting room. Twice he thought about leaving the profession — once to study law, another to become an FBI police officer.

He always came back, wherever the job took him. And his important mail — credit card statements, tax documents — was always delivered to Ben Jones Lane.

“It’s developed who I am,” Jones said. “You know, the perseverance, the journey — it helps me connect to players, because in that journey I’ve come across all types of players from all different backgrounds.

“The psychology, the struggle, not knowing where certain things are going to come from — it all comes into play. It helps you meet players where they are.”

Where his players are now is so close to his home. The last stop that afternoon earlier this month came in Capitol Heights. Jones pulled the Porsche to a stop on Walker Mill Road, across the street from the three-bedroom rowhouse he and his mother moved to when Jones was in middle school.

A woman got out of a truck in front of the house next door.

“You know what?” Jones said. He got out of the car.

“Sissy!” he called. She turned around. “Used to be your neighbor! Darlene’s son.”

The woman waved, then went about her business.

“She probably don’t remember,” Jones said.

He remembers it all. Daronte Jones has traveled the country as a football coach and the world as a human being. He is finally home, getting familiar with it all again.