Post by Funkytown on Jul 11, 2023 22:19:16 GMT -6
Introducing ‘The Playcallers’: Competition and evolution inside NFL’s youngest coaching tree by Jourdan Rodrigue
Link:
theathletic.com/4666085/2023/07/10/nfl-coaches-mcvay-shanahan-lafleur-mcdaniel-playcallers-podcast/
Creating “The Playcallers” over the last year has often felt more like a dig at an archaeological site than a narrative podcast.
Armed with a microphone and a recorder, a fistful of plane tickets, a notebook and supportive texts from producers, I understood there would be details, patterns and complicated interpersonal dynamics to unearth deep underneath the study of sport and scheme.
They were there to be uncovered. Piece by piece, the story came to life through the eyes, voices and minds of four main characters: 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, Rams coach Sean McVay, Packers coach Matt LaFleur and Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel.
Why these coaches, specifically? It’s a fair question.
The podcast includes interviews with other head and assistant coaches across the NFL, as well as front-office staffers and some of the sport’s brightest analysts. Their own timelines have intersected schematically or philosophically with the four coaches around whom the story revolves. But Shanahan, McVay, LaFleur and McDaniel are the “faces” of the young coaching family whose offensive system permeates the NFL. They are also fated — or doomed, depending on who you ask — to be linked to each other forever.
The highly competitive, functionally dysfunctional environments they shared as 20-something assistants in Houston or in Washington (and some in Atlanta) helped evolve offensive football. Their youth set them apart in the earliest years of their careers. The NFL has shifted its hiring preferences, but back then the young assistants stuck out — sometimes in a bad way — because of a combination of what Rams defensive coordinator Raheem Morris calls “youthful arrogance” and innate curiosity.
“People, you know, criticize millennials,” says McVay. “‘Oh, they always want to know the why.’ Well, you should have a why.”
As head coaches, they all strain to establish their identities away from one another. Now, they are each facing critical moments in their respective careers.
Shanahan’s 49ers team is built to win a Super Bowl, but he must prove he can finally close the deal after getting achingly close multiple times. McVay won Super Bowl LVI, but he’s rebuilding from a personal crash while the Rams are rebuilding their roster. LaFleur must now truly show who he is in his first season without quarterback Aaron Rodgers — because unlike the other coaches, whose scheme ruled over personnel, LaFleur’s head coaching journey started with compromise. McDaniel enters his second year as Dolphins coach with one of the league’s most loaded rosters and the expectations to match.
Shanahan and McVay face each other at least twice a season, and the stakes are usually as high as the games are tense. They all openly study each others’ offenses in addition to other dominant schemes across the league. In the series, McVay tells a story about attending a Falcons playoff game during the 2016 season and getting inspired by the way Shanahan and LaFleur ran their turbo package in Atlanta … right before McVay hired LaFleur to be his offensive coordinator in Los Angeles, where they promptly installed a turbo package.
“That’s why I hate that I let Matt go to him,” Shanahan says.
During the last 10-15 years we have seen who these coaches are in how they work together, how they fight with one another, how they think about and design offense — and in their conflicts with defenses. And over time, all of those little competitions, ideas and collaborations shaped the direction of football.
So, “The Playcallers” is not so much a set of interviews as it is a deep dive into a cluster of branches of the sport’s vast coaching tree. How did these people all intersect with each other at a very specific time in football’s history, and what did they make of those meetings (and in some cases, collisions)? What were their successes? Their failures? What choices did they make after either victory or defeat, that led to something new?
In the 1990s, Mike Shanahan — a Bill Walsh disciple and the new head coach in Denver — made a decision that began a new innovation loop. He hired offensive line guru Alex Gibbs, and together with Gibbs, Gary Kubiak and famed quarterback John Elway, Shanahan married some of the meticulous philosophies of the West Coast passing game with Gibbs’ outside zone run scheme.
Along the way, his young, football-obsessed son Kyle absorbed everything Mike said and did.
Eventually, Kyle went out into the world as a young assistant, and his role in an offensive quality control job with Tampa Bay meant quite literally logging plays out of what was at that time considered to be the NFL’s most expansive playbook. He started blending that information with 20 years of lessons learned from his dad — and by lurking in the back of defensive staff meetings.
By simply trying to understand the game better, Kyle Shanahan created another loop.
Of course, even the architects of innovation have to find ways to outrun their own creations and everybody else caught in the loop with them. The dynamics between Shanahan, McVay, LaFleur and McDaniel have shifted as they became each others’ competition rather than collaborators.
“It didn’t take me long to kind of figure out that he had the acumen that I was kind of chasing,” McDaniel says in the series of his time as Shanahan’s quality control assistant in Houston. “All I cared about was being a position coach younger than he was.”
Even the coaches who don’t often face each other on the field understand that legacy is about more than wins and losses. It’s about pursuing the “next” ideas while everyone else is catching up on your previous one. It’s about being first to get to what is next, always. Endlessly.
While speaking to the coaches and others involved, I often found myself thinking about rubber bands, the strain of the act of stretching one and the dread of it snapping. We know what the sting feels like, but still, we like to see the limits. Sometimes it hurts. And in the endless pursuit of football’s most exciting ideas, there is a human toll.
Sometimes it’s the coaches themselves who feel it. McDaniel is candid about his struggles with sobriety as the pace of his workflow overcame him when he was a young assistant who wanted to beat every other young assistant to the best new ideas. Shanahan is open about constant battles with himself and his own instincts. McVay did whatever was necessary to win a championship after a humiliating defeat, but the cost of that victory swept something away in its wake, and McVay ultimately realized it had taken pieces of himself.
The players who bring schemes and ideas to life feel the toll of innovation, too — and their bodies and careers are on the line.
During his interview for the series, there is a moment — just a small breath that conveys so much — when former quarterback and current ESPN analyst Robert Griffin III considers his rookie season in Washington in 2012. Everything felt like it was ahead of him, but it all ended before it could really begin. And how about what happens when a coach in a “maniacal pursuit” to win a Super Bowl doesn’t believe his quarterback can match his pace, as with McVay’s public split with Jared Goff?
Loops can feel infinite, but they can also be prohibitive. How can you break into a closed system if you started outside of it?
Kyle Shanahan had access to ideas in part because he grew up as his father’s son, but also because his first NFL job required logging plays out of an unprecedentedly massive playbook that few others could ever dream of seeing in those early days of Internet information sharing. Then Shanahan started to train others, including McVay, LaFleur and McDaniel, which allowed them to access that information (and fuels the paranoia and competitiveness created for any coach once pupils start running teams of their own). Following the passing of his famed grandfather John McVay, Sean has been open about the access that sharing that last name afforded him as a young assistant.
For a league that struggles with nepotism and hiring practices, especially on the offensive side of the ball, imagine what having that type of access could do to bring more people — and their ideas — into the game? At the same time, it’s hard to argue that Shanahan and McVay didn’t push themselves to their limits to make the most of their opportunities.
So, this story is complicated, just like people, and just like football. Over the course of five episodes, I hope to help you see what I have seen: ideas and perspectives and people that collide and struggle and collaborate and create ripple effects that can be far more significant than what we watch on the field.
All episodes of “The Playcallers” dropped today in “The Athletic Football Show” feed. It is a story about how football happens — for better and for worse, and for all of the life that exists in between.
Armed with a microphone and a recorder, a fistful of plane tickets, a notebook and supportive texts from producers, I understood there would be details, patterns and complicated interpersonal dynamics to unearth deep underneath the study of sport and scheme.
They were there to be uncovered. Piece by piece, the story came to life through the eyes, voices and minds of four main characters: 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, Rams coach Sean McVay, Packers coach Matt LaFleur and Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel.
Why these coaches, specifically? It’s a fair question.
The podcast includes interviews with other head and assistant coaches across the NFL, as well as front-office staffers and some of the sport’s brightest analysts. Their own timelines have intersected schematically or philosophically with the four coaches around whom the story revolves. But Shanahan, McVay, LaFleur and McDaniel are the “faces” of the young coaching family whose offensive system permeates the NFL. They are also fated — or doomed, depending on who you ask — to be linked to each other forever.
The highly competitive, functionally dysfunctional environments they shared as 20-something assistants in Houston or in Washington (and some in Atlanta) helped evolve offensive football. Their youth set them apart in the earliest years of their careers. The NFL has shifted its hiring preferences, but back then the young assistants stuck out — sometimes in a bad way — because of a combination of what Rams defensive coordinator Raheem Morris calls “youthful arrogance” and innate curiosity.
“People, you know, criticize millennials,” says McVay. “‘Oh, they always want to know the why.’ Well, you should have a why.”
As head coaches, they all strain to establish their identities away from one another. Now, they are each facing critical moments in their respective careers.
Shanahan’s 49ers team is built to win a Super Bowl, but he must prove he can finally close the deal after getting achingly close multiple times. McVay won Super Bowl LVI, but he’s rebuilding from a personal crash while the Rams are rebuilding their roster. LaFleur must now truly show who he is in his first season without quarterback Aaron Rodgers — because unlike the other coaches, whose scheme ruled over personnel, LaFleur’s head coaching journey started with compromise. McDaniel enters his second year as Dolphins coach with one of the league’s most loaded rosters and the expectations to match.
Shanahan and McVay face each other at least twice a season, and the stakes are usually as high as the games are tense. They all openly study each others’ offenses in addition to other dominant schemes across the league. In the series, McVay tells a story about attending a Falcons playoff game during the 2016 season and getting inspired by the way Shanahan and LaFleur ran their turbo package in Atlanta … right before McVay hired LaFleur to be his offensive coordinator in Los Angeles, where they promptly installed a turbo package.
“That’s why I hate that I let Matt go to him,” Shanahan says.
During the last 10-15 years we have seen who these coaches are in how they work together, how they fight with one another, how they think about and design offense — and in their conflicts with defenses. And over time, all of those little competitions, ideas and collaborations shaped the direction of football.
So, “The Playcallers” is not so much a set of interviews as it is a deep dive into a cluster of branches of the sport’s vast coaching tree. How did these people all intersect with each other at a very specific time in football’s history, and what did they make of those meetings (and in some cases, collisions)? What were their successes? Their failures? What choices did they make after either victory or defeat, that led to something new?
In the 1990s, Mike Shanahan — a Bill Walsh disciple and the new head coach in Denver — made a decision that began a new innovation loop. He hired offensive line guru Alex Gibbs, and together with Gibbs, Gary Kubiak and famed quarterback John Elway, Shanahan married some of the meticulous philosophies of the West Coast passing game with Gibbs’ outside zone run scheme.
Along the way, his young, football-obsessed son Kyle absorbed everything Mike said and did.
Eventually, Kyle went out into the world as a young assistant, and his role in an offensive quality control job with Tampa Bay meant quite literally logging plays out of what was at that time considered to be the NFL’s most expansive playbook. He started blending that information with 20 years of lessons learned from his dad — and by lurking in the back of defensive staff meetings.
By simply trying to understand the game better, Kyle Shanahan created another loop.
Of course, even the architects of innovation have to find ways to outrun their own creations and everybody else caught in the loop with them. The dynamics between Shanahan, McVay, LaFleur and McDaniel have shifted as they became each others’ competition rather than collaborators.
“It didn’t take me long to kind of figure out that he had the acumen that I was kind of chasing,” McDaniel says in the series of his time as Shanahan’s quality control assistant in Houston. “All I cared about was being a position coach younger than he was.”
Even the coaches who don’t often face each other on the field understand that legacy is about more than wins and losses. It’s about pursuing the “next” ideas while everyone else is catching up on your previous one. It’s about being first to get to what is next, always. Endlessly.
While speaking to the coaches and others involved, I often found myself thinking about rubber bands, the strain of the act of stretching one and the dread of it snapping. We know what the sting feels like, but still, we like to see the limits. Sometimes it hurts. And in the endless pursuit of football’s most exciting ideas, there is a human toll.
Sometimes it’s the coaches themselves who feel it. McDaniel is candid about his struggles with sobriety as the pace of his workflow overcame him when he was a young assistant who wanted to beat every other young assistant to the best new ideas. Shanahan is open about constant battles with himself and his own instincts. McVay did whatever was necessary to win a championship after a humiliating defeat, but the cost of that victory swept something away in its wake, and McVay ultimately realized it had taken pieces of himself.
The players who bring schemes and ideas to life feel the toll of innovation, too — and their bodies and careers are on the line.
During his interview for the series, there is a moment — just a small breath that conveys so much — when former quarterback and current ESPN analyst Robert Griffin III considers his rookie season in Washington in 2012. Everything felt like it was ahead of him, but it all ended before it could really begin. And how about what happens when a coach in a “maniacal pursuit” to win a Super Bowl doesn’t believe his quarterback can match his pace, as with McVay’s public split with Jared Goff?
Loops can feel infinite, but they can also be prohibitive. How can you break into a closed system if you started outside of it?
Kyle Shanahan had access to ideas in part because he grew up as his father’s son, but also because his first NFL job required logging plays out of an unprecedentedly massive playbook that few others could ever dream of seeing in those early days of Internet information sharing. Then Shanahan started to train others, including McVay, LaFleur and McDaniel, which allowed them to access that information (and fuels the paranoia and competitiveness created for any coach once pupils start running teams of their own). Following the passing of his famed grandfather John McVay, Sean has been open about the access that sharing that last name afforded him as a young assistant.
For a league that struggles with nepotism and hiring practices, especially on the offensive side of the ball, imagine what having that type of access could do to bring more people — and their ideas — into the game? At the same time, it’s hard to argue that Shanahan and McVay didn’t push themselves to their limits to make the most of their opportunities.
So, this story is complicated, just like people, and just like football. Over the course of five episodes, I hope to help you see what I have seen: ideas and perspectives and people that collide and struggle and collaborate and create ripple effects that can be far more significant than what we watch on the field.
All episodes of “The Playcallers” dropped today in “The Athletic Football Show” feed. It is a story about how football happens — for better and for worse, and for all of the life that exists in between.
theathletic.com/4666085/2023/07/10/nfl-coaches-mcvay-shanahan-lafleur-mcdaniel-playcallers-podcast/
... and neither is this Chris guy.