New Jacksonville Jaguar Defensive Coordinator Anthony Campanile Hails From New Jersey High School Football Royalty

Anthony Campanile a member of the First Family of New Jersey High School Football

Apr 13, 2019; Ann Arbor, MI, USA; Michigan Wolverines linebackers coach Anthony Campanile yells out during the spring football game at Michigan Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Raj Mehta-Imagn Images / Raj Mehta-Imagn Images

Newly-named Jacksonville Jaguars defensive coordinator Anthony Campanile is New Jersey through and through, born and bred in North Jersey. More specifically, Bergen County, NJ, a 246-square mile swath of land that is home to nearly one million residents, holding the distinction of being the most populous county in the densest state in the union.

For those not overly familiar with the Garden State, New Jersey is broken down into three distinct regions – North Jersey, Central Jersey, and South Jersey. In North Jersey, especially in Bergen County, the Campanile sir name is akin to high school football royalty. What the Hurley family of basketball fame is to Hudson County just to the south, the Campaniles are to Bergen County. Both counties are known for producing their share of stouthearted, competitive and strong-willed people.

Pour that on top of some chicken cutlets 😋#DUUUVAL

— Jacksonville Jaguars (@Jaguars) February 20, 2025

For the Campaniles, football is the family business. Anthony’s 80-year old father Mike is the patriarch of the family, his four sons — Vito, Nunzio, Anthony and Nicky — currently coach at three different levels of the sport.

Vito is the oldest and is the head coach at national powerhouse Bergen Catholic High School which has won four straight state titles. The quarterback of the Crusaders for the last three of those four championship seasons was Vito’s son Dominic, a strong-armed left-hander who plays high-level FCS football at Holy Cross this fall. Dominic’s arrival on the Bergen County football landscape means the Campanile legacy in North Jersey football now spans three generations.

Mike’s second-oldest son Nunzio is the former Bergen Catholic head coach who, at one time was an assistant and then briefly the interim head coach at Rutgers. He is now the quarterbacks coach at Syracuse. Anthony, entering his sixth season in the NFL is the third-oldest, followed by Nicky, another state championship-winning head coach at DePaul Catholic High located in Wayne, NJ.

In his formative years, Anthony, 43, watched his father Mike win games at Paramus Catholic High School. Since then, there has been plenty more winning for the Campaniles. The four Campanile brothers’ high school coaching careers have intertwined as in some years, with a couple of the brothers working on the same staffs together. They’ve also coached against one another a fair share of the time.

How wide does this football family’s net cast? Consider that in the last 25 years, 21 New Jersey state high school championships featured a team coached by either Mike, or one of his four sons.

Anthony Campanile is from Fair Lawn, NJ, and is a rising star in the NFL coaching world. A quarterback at both Fair Lawn High HS and Paramus Catholic HS, he expertly ran his father's run-and-shoot system, starting as a freshman and earning All-Bergen County honors. Back in 1996, Mike Campanile once said of his then 14-year-old son and quarterback: “He’s got Vito’s mouth and Nunzio’s competitiveness, so sometimes I’ve got to throw a net over him,” as told to The Record and northjersey.com.

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Anthony has held two coaching stints at his alma mater, Rutgers, where he was a walk-on linebacker from 2001-2004. His coaching pedigree also includes three seasons as defensive coordinator at perennially dominant Don Bosco Prep, whose 11-0 season in 2011 earned the Ironmen a No. 1 national ranking in several polls, including USA Today.

After Don Bosco, Anthony returned to the college ranks, with stops back at Rutgers (2012-15), Boston College (2016-18), and Michigan (2019), where he was the Wolverine’s defensive coordinator. In 2020, Anthony made the jump to the NFL, serving as linebackers coach for the Miami Dolphins (2020-23), and linebackers coach/run game coordinator with the Green Bay Packers (2024) before taking over as Jaguars’ defensive coordinator last month. He has acquired valuable experience working with veteran coaching minds such as Brian Flores and Vic Fangio with the Dolphins, Greg Schiano at Rutgers, and Jim Harbaugh at Michigan. 

Campanile is known for his enthusiastic, engaging personality and coaching style with a vocabulary and tone straight out of pick any episode of HBO’s 21-Primetime Emmy Awards winning drama series, The Sopranos, whose star actor, the late James Gandolfini, was ironically a fellow Rutgers alum.

Television viewers got an up-close taste of Campanile’s aggressive leadership methods on another Emmy award-winning HBO documentary series Hard Knocks that followed the 2023 Dolphins.

Make no mistake, Anthony Campanile, a potential future NFL head coach, is a product of first and foremost his blood ties, but also roots that lie deep in the soil beneath football fields all across Bergen County, NJ.