Facing nearly insurmountable odds, David Blough was not fazed.
It was 2013, his senior season at Creekview High School in Carrollton, Texas, and the Mustangs were playing for a spot in the Class 4A playoffs.
Entering the fourth quarter, Creekview trailed North Forney, 26-13. Where some other teenage quarterbacks might succumb to defeat, Blough remained stoic. He walked the sideline, assuring his teammates everything was fine and they still had a whole quarter to play.
“He’s just walking around telling everybody,” said Creekview offensive coordinator Robert Paschall, a longtime high school coach in Texas. “It wasn’t fake bullshit. I’ve seen fake bullshit, like people running around being hype. … This was ‘By God, we’re gonna win.’”
Trending
At some point, Blough and Paschall noticed North Forney had difficulty covering flood routes, where multiple receivers go to one side of the field. They started spamming the playcall the rest of the way, and within a few possessions, they had erased the deficit — clinching a 33-29 win and earning Creekview’s first playoff berth in five years.
Sign up for the NOTUS Metro newsletter for essential coverage of the D.C. region.
The moxie Blough displayed that night was an early indicator of the player and coach he would become — one who knows how to remain calm, lean on what works and take the lead. He showed it then as a three-star quarterback prospect with just one college offer, from Purdue. He showed it with the Boilermakers, once throwing for over 300 yards and three touchdowns in a rout of No. 2 Ohio State. And he showed it as an NFL backup, working his way from undrafted free agent to a five-year career in which he made seven starts.
Now, he’ll need those traits as the Commanders’ offensive coordinator, a role he inherits after just two years as an assistant coach. Starting this week at training camp, he will be tasked with cooking up a new offense that takes full advantage of Jayden Daniels, Washington’s young franchise quarterback, and helps the team bounce back from a disastrous 2025 season.
The hardest part of this task? Blough is just 30 years old. And he’s never called plays before.
“He was always somebody we knew would develop into this role as a play caller,” Commanders coach Dan Quinn said of his young coordinator. “He came in as a coach ahead of the curve, so he had a bigger vision and perspective [than] maybe a coach just coming out of school or something in that space wouldn’t.”
Save for his father, the most important and impactful men in Blough’s life have been his coaches. Because of them, he’s always had a strong passion for mentoring young people and giving back to his community. Those who’ve known Blough the longest say he was born to do this job.
“I’ve always wanted to build men,” Blough said. “And I’ve learned this is the closest thing I could ever do to calling a play in a huddle again is building it, creating it.”
Leading from the front
Ask anyone from Blough’s childhood and they’ll tell you he has always been a leader.
In elementary school, Blough got the lead in the school musical despite not knowing how to really sing. A few years later his mother, LuAnn, signed him up for soccer even though Blough had never played before. “He went out and scored four goals,” she said. When Blough was in middle school, he walked up to the coach of the football team and told him, “Hi, Coach, I’m your quarterback.”
Andres Ruiz was Blough’s 7-on-7 coach in those early years. The ex-Marine said he used to push his young athletes hard, implementing some military tactics. No matter how tired Blough seemed, he never stopped trying to lift up his teammates.
“Even though he may not have been the most talented kid on the field, he was always front of the line, encouraging guys, keeping their heads up when they get tired, leading from the front,” Ruiz said.
Blough was always the one looking for extra reps, both on the field and in the weight room. By the time he got to high school, Blough — who started on varsity as a sophomore — would wake up teammates at the crack of dawn and wrangle them into throwing sessions.
“He would send me [a text message], ‘Well, our competition isn’t sleeping in.’ And then it’s like, ‘OK, you just rage-baited me into going to work out, and of course I want to work out,’” said Raul Bustillos, Creekview’s starting running back.
Blough’s known since high school that he wanted to be a coach. It might sound like an odd dream, but this was in Texas, home of Friday Night Lights. He once dressed up as legendary Cowboys coach Tom Landry, complete with the trademark fedora and blazer.
“It was like 95 degrees, so I don’t think he wore it that long,” said Dylan Kittrell, the team’s receiver.
On the bus to games, Paschall would hand his teenage quarterback the playsheet and tell him to pick what he wanted to run. When Blough was asked why he picked a particular play, he’d explain his rationale in detail, saying he knew the safety would react a certain way or his receiver could get to a certain spot.
“He was very precise and exacting,” Paschall said.
‘A designer, not a dictator’
John Shoop, Purdue’s offensive coordinator, came to Carrollton for a recruiting visit during Blough’s junior season. But there was a mix-up with the school, and no showcase on the schedule. Instead, Blough organized his own throwing session on the fly with about 10 of his teammates.
That day, Shoop said he witnessed someone who showed command of an offense and clearly garnered so much respect from his teammates that they’d drop everything to shine a brighter light on him. Shoop, who was an assistant coach with the Carolina Panthers from 1995 to 1998, said he hadn’t seen anything like that since evaluating future MVP quarterback Steve McNair out of Alcorn State in the mid 1990s.
“It was really revealing to me,” Shoop said of Blough’s showcase.
Blough committed to Purdue in 2013. After his second season, the school hired former Louisville quarterback Jeff Brohm as its new head coach. Early on, Brohm asked his players to bring him ideas for plays if they ever had any, assuming no one would actually take him up on the offer. Blough did. The coach allowed his quarterback to script his own plays at times, and away from the field Blough designed his own playbook in his free time.
“He was not shy about that, which was outstanding, because a lot of people don’t fully get invested that much,” said Brohm, who had planned to hire his former quarterback as a graduate assistant in 2018 before Blough signed as an undrafted free agent with Lions. “And I think when he did that you knew at some point down the road, ‘OK, this guy’s gonna be a good coach, because he really, really is into this.’”
In addition to passion, Blough always had composure. While his former coaches admit to losing their cool sometimes, they say Blough has never been the type. He is never frantic. He has an empathy that doesn’t allow mistakes or a lack of discipline to turn into anger. When he does raise his voice, it’s more encouraging than demeaning.
“Some quarterbacks are kind of a-holes,” said Kittrell. “And others are able to teach it to everyone.”
“I truly believe that I am a designer, not a dictator,” Blough said, referring to a philosophy he learned from author Martin E. P. Seligman’s book “Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being.”
When Blough found out that his college teammate, running back Markell Jones, was in Purdue’s aviation school, the competitor in him came out: If Markell can do it, I can do it too. So he began studying to earn his private pilot license, work you can still find on his LinkedIn page. Jones, now a pilot for United Airlines, said the studies speak to Blough’s competitive nature, which can be infectious to those around him.
“When David was speaking to our team, everyone locked in,” Jones said. “You could look on his face and see that David’s going to go down dying. David will die to get the job done to execute the play to the best of his ability.”
No surprise
No matter how much of a whiz kid Blough may be or how good a high school and college quarterback he was, he has never been an offensive coordinator. Teams hiring first-time play callers have had uneven results over the years: In the NFC East alone, the Cowboys’ Kellen Moore led a top-10 offense in his first season as a play caller in 2019 while the Eagles’ Brian Johnson and Kevin Patullo were each fired following single seasons in 2023 and 2025, respectively.
But that’s the paradox of experience: You can only gain it from doing the job, but oftentimes you can’t get the job without it.
Blough, who will be making a rare and sizable leap from assistant quarterbacks coach to coordinator, said that imposter syndrome is almost unavoidable.
“I think everybody at some point who’s made it to this level, whether it’s our quarterback or head coach or head chef down there probably feels imposter syndrome in some way,” Blough said. “And then you prepare really hard and you believe in what you’re doing, and there’s a trust established between who you’re doing it with, and it helps ease all that.”
One of Blough’s best traits, former teammates and coaches say, is understanding both the tendencies of the defense and the characteristics of his own roster. It’s something he picked up from Paschall, whose offensive system at Creekview was simple: maximize what each individual player was good at and avoid what they were bad at.
Rumors have swirled for months about the Commanders signing another starting receiver to pair with veteran Terry McLaurin, but for someone with Blough’s mentality, it’s less about who you can add and more about making the most of the players available.
“We put Terry and Antonio [Williams] and Treylon [Burks] and Dyami [Brown] … in the best position possible to go be successful, and that gives me confidence, knowing that they’re the best in the world at what they do. I just get to help facilitate that,” Blough said.
But his transition to coordinator, like all major transitions, will not be without hiccups. Throughout last month’s team activities, there were mishaps on offense: fumbled snaps, overthrows, interceptions, false starts and bobbled handoffs. But that’s just part of the process, according to Blough. It’s better to make those mistakes now, he says, and learn from them rather than commit a false start in the playoffs when the game is on the line.
“We know that if we’re worth our salt as coaches and able to correct and teach, that you know when it’s fourth and 4 in the biggest stage, we’ll be able to make the play, because we’ve communicated and committed to excellence,” Blough said.
Blough is still cagey about what the offense will actually look like this season, other than acknowledging that Daniels will take more snaps under center, McLaurin will line up all over the formation, and he plans to change up tempo and personnel groupings more to make the offense unpredictable.
But in the small glimpses of his play-calling, Blough has shown the ability to take advantage of a defense.
During a 2024 matchup with the Eagles, Blough, still the team’s assistant quarterbacks coach, was behind what became the game-winning play: a 9-yard touchdown pass from Daniels to receiver Jamison Crowder. Blough had helped design the red-zone play — empty backfield, trips left, mirrored post routes toward the back of the end zone — years earlier for a different team. The Commanders practiced it earlier that week during two-minute drills. In the moment, with the game on the line, Blough delivered.
Quinn is betting big that Blough will help Washington return to the playoffs following last season’s catastrophic 5-12 finish. But for every bit of confidence the head coach has in his new coordinator, those that have been on this journey with Blough the longest are twice as certain he will succeed.
“In that league, people don’t care if you’re 20, people don’t care if you’re 60,” said Shoop, who has known Blough since college. “If you can help them get good, they listen to you, and Dave can help people get good. He really can. He’s clearly done it.”
“All of this, to someone looking at it from the outside in, it probably looks like a surprise,” said Kittrell, who has known Blough even longer. “But for us, people that know him and are close with him, it’s not a surprise whatsoever.”
Author
