What 16 NFL Seasons Didn’t Change About Andy Dalton

Dalton, one of only two TCU quarterbacks to throw for more than 10,000 yards, capped his collegiate career with an undefeated 2010 campaign and a Rose Bowl win over fifth-ranked Wisconsin. Photo by Sharon Ellman

Andy Dalton ’10 showed up on the TCU sideline in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Labor Day night 2025, “FROGS” stitched across his purple cap, arms folded, his kids at his side. That morning, he’d been at practice with his then-employer, the Carolina Panthers, a couple of hours southwest in Charlotte. But the Frogs were opening their season against the University of North Carolina, and the quarterback who took TCU to the Rose Bowl was not going to miss it. 

Only once the rout was well in hand (TCU won 48-14) did he round up the family and go. School in the morning. 

The following March, in Greenville, South Carolina, Mike Sinquefield, senior deputy athletics director, settled into his seat at an NCAA Tournament basketball game and found Dalton sitting behind him. “It’s like the guy shows up all the time,” Sinquefield said. The habit goes back to Dalton’s TCU days, when Sinquefield, then director of football operations, would ask him to make school visits and community appearances or lead the opening prayer at the team’s pregame meals. Dalton never told him no, Sinquefield said, unless he had class. 

Much has changed for Dalton since that undefeated 2010 season, the Rose Bowl win over Wisconsin and a No. 2 finish in the AP poll. He has played for seven NFL teams and 10 head coaches. The college game he left is almost unrecognizable. 

What hasn’t changed is Dalton.

WAITING HIS TURN

Before Pasadena, before the Pro Bowls, Dalton was a freshman on the second team at Katy High School, the Houston-area powerhouse. 

Dalton was a sophomore when Katy beat Southlake Carroll 16-15 for the 2003 state title. He’d been added to the varsity roster for the final five weeks of that run, practicing and traveling with the team. As a junior, he split time at quarterback with a senior, and the job wasn’t his alone until his senior year. 

“He matured late,” said Jeff Rhoads, then Katy’s quarterbacks coach. “But when he matured, he never looked back.” 

During practice, Rhoads rotated among position groups, so he carved out his own window with Dalton: 20 minutes at lunch for film review. Dalton would eat a peanut butter and banana sandwich as they studied. Rhoads compared him to a dry sponge. 

In Dalton’s senior year, Katy lost a state-final rematch against Southlake Carroll and eventual Alabama starter Greg McElroy. Dalton threw four interceptions. A lot of kids would have said it wasn’t their fault, longtime coach Gary Joseph said. Dalton didn’t. 

“He’s always taken responsibility for his actions and has never tried to throw anyone else under the bus,” said Greg Dalton, his father. “You could see his character in how he handled difficulties.” 

One night when Andy was about 5, Greg Dalton came home from speaking at a Christian gathering downtown, where one of the men in the room was homeless. When Greg told Andy about it at bedtime, his son got up. “Dad, I want to give him some money,” Andy said. 

He had $5. “OK, Andy,” Greg told him. “I’ll make sure he gets it.” 

It is the story Greg tells about his son. 

“We all bled purple. We loved TCU so much.”
Bart Johnson

COLLEGE BOUND

As Dalton looked past high school, his virtues never showed up on the stat sheet, and the blue bloods weren’t calling. 

The Daltons met with a recruiting consultant, Randy Rogers, who told them to start calling football operations offices, get to spring practices and put Andy in front of people. 

Greg made the calls that spring, asking if the two could come watch a practice and drop off a tape. When they got to TCU’s football office, they were told practice had been canceled. Then head coach Gary Patterson came out. He didn’t know them from anybody, Greg said, just another kid coming by with a tape. Patterson introduced himself and sat with them one-on-one for about 30 to 45 minutes. 

Patrick Dowling, Dalton’s final quarterbacks coach at Katy, recalled the University of Texas at El Paso extending an offer and telling him it might be the one to take. Dalton said he’d wait. 

“Andy’s faith is as strong as anybody I’ve ever met,” Dowling said. He believes that faith led Dalton to trust a better fit was still ahead. 

Dalton committed to TCU that October. Asked what he saw in the Katy quarterback, Patterson said, “He was a winner. Great family. Tough.”

REDSHIRT

Though he redshirted in 2006, his first year on campus, Dalton would come to the football office alone on Mondays, the players’ day off, sandwich in hand, to watch three to five hours of film. 

Before the 2007 season, Chad Huffman was TCU’s presumed starter at quarterback, but he signed to play pro baseball. That left the job open. Sophomore Marcus Jackson ’10 had already appeared in nine games for the Frogs. Dalton had yet to take a college snap. 

Bart Johnson ’10, now managing principal at Vallis Energy, came in with Dalton in 2006 as a receiver. The two shared an apartment their second year, and Johnson would invite him to fraternity parties. Dalton passed, staying in with the playbook, NFL Network constantly running on the TV. 

As Johnson remembers it, Dalton met with offensive coordinator Mike Schultz one Sunday during preseason practice and was told the starting job was his. Then he turned up at the movie theater to catch Superbad with Johnson. “How’d it go, man?” Johnson asked. “It’s, it’s me,” Dalton said. Johnson said he’d never forget how excited Dalton was. 

That August, Patterson told the Daily Skiff that he expected Jackson to play in the opener against Baylor. “We treat both those guys as ones. … We haven’t had a 10-win season yet where the second guy didn’t play,” he said.

That debut season as the starter had its rough patches, four interceptions in an October loss to Utah among them. Johnson calls them growing pains. “There was no regression at all,” he said. “He got better every single year.” 

In 2008, a last-minute loss at No. 10 Utah cost TCU a chance to make its case on the national stage. For a Mountain West team, opportunities to break into the Bowl Championship Series conversation were scarce. 

The next year, Clemson, on the road, was the first real test. The rain didn’t let up, and the field turned sloppy. Dalton remained steady throughout, accounting for both of TCU’s touchdowns as the Frogs topped the Tigers 14-10. “That was really the first time that we knew, hey, we might have something,” Johnson said. 

Later that season, TCU was one of 10 programs Nike picked to debut its Pro Combat uniform. Then-equipment manager Matt Lewis was “burning the candle on both ends” to get them ready. Dalton caught wind of it. Lewis is certain the quarterback had a hand in him getting the game ball after the uniforms’ debut. “I know he did,” said Lewis, now TCU’s assistant athletics director for football administration. 

By his senior year in 2010, Dalton had grown into the kind of player his coaches would trust to lead on and off the field. 

Ellman Photography

That December, TCU was 12-0 and headed to the Rose Bowl. Patterson met with players to go over the holiday schedule before the coaches set out to recruit and finals began. Dalton’s hand went up. Patterson expected him to ask for more time at Christmas. “Well, if it’s OK with you, we’ve got the rest of our lives to spend Christmas with our families, but we’re only gonna get one chance to win a Rose Bowl,” Patterson remembers Dalton telling him. 

“We all bled purple,” Johnson said. “We loved TCU so much.” 

By then, Dalton had met Jordan Jones ’10. After the family met her for the first time, they piled into the old conversion van they used to drive to games, and his mother, Tina, asked what he thought of Jordan. He said she was “amazing.” Then Tina asked, “Do you think she is the one?” 

“Mom? … I do think she is the one,” Dalton said, as Greg recalls it. “I do too,” Tina said.

Andy Dalton ran the Bengals’ huddle for nine seasons. Courtesy of Cincinnati Bengals

FRANCHISE QUARTERBACK

The Cincinnati Bengals selected Dalton early in the second round of the NFL draft that spring. 

By the time Dalton walked into training camp, the Bengals already felt like his team, said Johnson, who signed with Cincinnati as an undrafted free agent that same summer. 

Dalton started all 16 games as a rookie, made the Pro Bowl and led a team that had gone 4-12 the year before back to the playoffs. The nod marked the first of three Pro Bowl seasons and 70 wins over nine years in Cincinnati. In 2015, with the Bengals 10-2 and Dalton in the thick of MVP conversations, he broke his throwing thumb, an injury that ended his season. 

Dalton spent the rest of the year coaching A.J. McCarron, the backup thrust into his place. Dalton was the first one teammates would talk to when they came off the field, said Kevin Huber, who punted for the Bengals from 2009 through 2022. “What did you see? What didn’t you see? What’d you like?” 

In 2019, the Bengals benched Dalton for rookie Ryan Finley on Dalton’s birthday. He stood in front of the team anyway. “I’m in full support of Ryan,” Dalton said, according to special teams coordinator Darrin Simmons, who recounted the moment to The Athletic. The Bengals released him in April 2020, a week after they’d drafted Joe Burrow. 

Dalton left Cincinnati as the franchise’s all-time leader in touchdown passes, a record he still holds. 

THE VETERAN

After Cincinnati came Dallas. Then Chicago, where Dalton mentored Justin Fields, the Bears’ first-round pick in 2021. “Andy’s completely taken me under his wing,” Fields said in June 2021, according to NFL.com. Then New Orleans, where late in the 2022 season, Dalton and the Saints topped the eventual NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles. Then Carolina, where Dalton spent 2023, 2024 and 2025 mentoring No. 1 overall pick Bryce Young. 

“He’ll train those young first-round quarterbacks to have a chance to be successful,” Patterson said. “It’s just another way for him to pass it forward in life.” 

In March 2026, the Panthers traded Dalton to the Eagles. He opened his 16th NFL season as Jalen Hurts’ backup. In October, he signed with the Atlanta Falcons. 

Asked what comes after his playing career, Dalton said, “I don’t really know. … But I’m just excited to know that I gave the game my all and got everything I could out of it.”

PASS IT ON

Sometime in his first year in Cincinnati, Dalton said, he and Jordan realized what the job had given them. “We knew that we had the ability to make an impact in the community. We were going to be able to have a voice,” he said. 

That outlook predated the platform. In spring 2009, Dalton learned that Presley Boydstun, the granddaughter of the late Dick Winder, his first college quarterbacks coach, had been diagnosed with leukemia. Dalton started texting her. “Hey, I hope you’re doing well,” he’d write. Winder, Dalton told ESPN in 2015, would tell him: “You have no idea the impact that you’re having on her.” 

Justin Fuente, then TCU’s co-offensive coordinator, saw the same thing at home. His daughter was little when Dalton was running the Frogs’ offense, and the family still has pictures of the two of them together. “This is a 22-year-old kid,” Fuente said of Dalton, who made time “to play with a little 4-year-old.” Dalton has checked in on her every so often in the years since. She enrolled at TCU this fall. 

Married and settled in Cincinnati, Dalton and Jordan started a foundation. They set out to help sick children and kids with special needs, running what they called the Pass It On Fund to cover medical costs that insurance wouldn’t. 

One family couldn’t afford the speech therapy their son needed. The foundation paid for it. Weeks later, his parents heard him say “I love you” for the first time, Dalton said. “That’s one of the stories that’s always going to stick with us.”

Johnson’s daughter is a two-time cancer survivor. The first time the family went into the chemo room at Fort Worth-based Cook Children’s, as his daughter was getting hooked up for treatment, Johnson looked over and saw a large Bengals-themed cabinet in the corner, an image of Dalton throwing a football across it. It held video games for the kids in the room. Dalton had donated the gear, Johnson said. Around them, other children were playing while their treatment was being administered. 

Huber and his wife went to several of the foundation’s events. Plenty of founders don’t show up much, he said. Dalton and Jordan were at every event, giving speeches and talking with the people who came out to support them, Huber said. “The big thing that stood out was just how involved and present he was in the foundation itself.” 

Andy Dalton and his wife, Jordan, started their foundation in the city that cheered for him. Courtesy of Cincinnati Bengals

Jordan wasn’t in the locker room, but Huber saw her elsewhere. During training camp she was at practice, bringing the kids. In season, while the players were at practice or traveling, she hosted Bible study groups for the other wives and girlfriends, who went for the community and friendships her leadership had built, Huber said. 

The foundation isn’t active anymore, Dalton said. Cincinnati had been its center of gravity, and once his career took the family elsewhere, sustaining it from a new city became too much. 

Jake Kirkpatrick ’10, his All-American center at TCU, has been watching since they shared a suite in Moncrief Hall as first-year students. He can list the stats and the teams and the injuries Dalton played through. 

He has spent enough time around Dalton and his three kids to see how much Dalton loves being a father. “He’s an incredible dad,” Kirkpatrick said. But the rest of it he can’t measure. “We won’t ever be able to tell the impact that he’s had.”