STARKVILLE - Manny Diaz thought he was as far inside the "circle" as he'd ever get.

He was working for ESPN, the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports broadcasting. He was a production assistant for the "NFL Countdown" show, among other duties, with an eye on an on-air job someday.

"I loved it," Diaz says now.

As it turned out, that career path led Diaz to a profession he'd considered but not known how to pursue: coaching.

After graduating from Florida State in 1995, Diaz turned his ESPN internship into a full-time job. For a guy whose playing days ended in high school, it seemed the best route to being inside the wall of access. He'd done TV work at Florida State and was sports editor of the school's student newspaper.

Coaching? He didn't even know how to go about becoming a coach. But Diaz loved talking football with ESPN's analysts, including Sterling Sharpe, who encouraged Diaz to give coaching a shot.

So in 1998 he took an unpaid graduate assistant's position on the Florida State staff, helping with the defense.

A dozen years later, the 36-year-old Diaz has established himself as one of the best young defensive minds in the country and is in his first year as Mississippi State's defensive coordinator.

"It's crazy, that fork in the road," said Bruce Feldman, a college football writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. "It was a gamble."

Fast riser

Feldman joined the ESPN family the same summer Diaz did, and the two got to know each other well. Feldman noticed a difference between Diaz and most of the other production assistants.

"He was really smart, and he was mature," Feldman said. "He was just very, very focused, I thought."

In 2000, Diaz followed Chuck Amato to North Carolina State, and he was in charge of linebackers within two years. Then he coached safeties and special teams, and he caught the eye of Rick Stockstill, Middle Tennessee State's head coach.

In 2006, Diaz was hired as the Blue Raiders' defensive coordinator. Stockstill had previously coached at Clemson and knew of Diaz, and he got a good recommendation from Reggie Herring, N.C. State's defensive coordinator in 2004.

"He was what I was looking for, with the defense that they ran at N.C. State when Reggie was there," Stockstill said. "It was an up-tempo, pressure defense. It gave you the impression or illusion that there was pressure coming on every down whether there was or there was not."

MSU played Middle Tennessee State last season, escaping Murfreesboro with a 27-6 win that was tougher than the score indicated. MSU head coach Dan Mullen took note of the job Diaz did against his offense, printed out Diaz's bio, and put it in a file.

When Carl Torbush left after one season to become DC at Kansas, Mullen flipped open his file and saw Diaz's face staring at him.

Mullen had his man.

Diaz could just as easily have been coaching offense, but that GA opening at FSU was on the defensive side. Stockstill and Mullen are thankful Diaz wound up on that side of the ball.

His defenses at MTSU reflected Herring's approach. The Blue Raiders ranked second in passing defense and third in rushing defense last season, and they were first in sacks with 38.

Dunn 2.0

Melvin Smith, MSU's cornerbacks/nickelbacks coach and a veteran assistant, has compared Diaz's defensive approach to that of Joe Lee Dunn's, who ran State's defense from 1996-2002. Smith said it's a "newer style" of Dunn's attacking schemes, noting that Diaz spreads the "stress" around, whereas the cornerbacks took on most of the pressure in Dunn's defenses.

"It's at attack defense, but you have the ability to move stress," Smith said. "You move it around, and you eliminate thinking for the guys."

The thinking is left to Diaz, who Stockstill called "an intelligent man."

Said Feldman, "I think if you'd stuck him in a bank and said, 'All right, you're going to start out as a bank teller,' 10 years later he might be the guy who's running (it), the bank president."

Diaz believes his work in the media has helped him as a coach, because he knows what makes journalists tick and what they're looking for in a story.

He also took lessons from his father, also named Manny, who came over from Cuba at age 6 and served as mayor of Miami from 2001-09.

So Diaz knows how to handle criticism.

"I always joke that if the writers want to critique me, I can critique them back."

Diaz still keeps in touch with people like Feldman, but he doesn't foresee ever returning to that profession.

Earlier this week, Diaz told a reporter that "your job is cool because you get an access to things that the standard person doesn't. But I just think that my job is cooler.

"I wanted to be as close to the inside of the circle as I possibly could."

He's about as far inside as one can get, and it looks like he'll be there a while.

Contact Brad Locke at 678-1571 or brad.locke@djournal.com.