Taking a deeper look into NFL coaching and how it’s evolving

We are, how would, a week and a half, two weeks away from the start of NFL training camps.

Less than two weeks. I believe the 21st or 22nd the Panthers report as a full squad. Rookies go in earlier. I know the Jets start as a full squad because they're playing in the Hall of Fame game. Jets start a little bit earlier. And there's a lot of things to think about in terms of the NFL. The Panthers went out. They have a new quarterback who's supposed to help modernize their offense.

And this is where I want to start. One of my, I think one of the coolest things to look at is the Bill Walsh coaching tree. And the Bill Walsh coaching tree, and Walsh is the father of the West Coast offense. And the Bill Walsh coaching tree has so many branches, actually has a forest, and there are different trees in that forest. And if you look at Mike Holmgren, who is part of the Bill Walsh coaching tree, he at one point had on his coaching staff like six future NFL head coaches, including Andy Reid, who is probably the second best head coach in the NFL right now, to historically anyway, he's probably the best coach in the NFL right now, to Bill Belichick. But it was also John Gruden, and former and future NFL head coaches Mike Sherman and Marty Morningwick.

We have, I guess in a way, a little bit of a sapling off that tree, and a real younger group of coaches right now, kind of spearheaded by Kyle Shanahan. And Jordan Rodriguez, our old friend who covered the Panthers for the Observer in Charlotte, and is now covering the Rams and the sport for the athletic, is doing just a tremendous series on the play callers on the athletic. I listened to the episode yesterday on my drive home.

It is awesome. Well done. You should be in the audio medium as well as writing. I appreciate your time and what gave you the, I mean, you cover Sean McVay, so that obviously is probably where this came from. And maybe it's just the logic that, man, what an era we're in with these brilliant young coaches. So explain to me the impetus for all of this and what you've learned already and what we can learn going forward. Yeah, first of all, thank you for making me sound smarter than I actually am. I appreciate that.

You're welcome. That's not true, but that's fine. And second, it's a great question because I wanted to sort of take a deep dive into a series of tree rings on, you know, football's historical timeline. And as you outlined just now, the timeline is so expansive, right? There's so many great coaches who have fostered these environments that have developed other great coaches, and then they all borrow ideas from each other. And the ultimate coaching tree is so messy in terms of all of its branches and how they intersect. But these young coaches specifically are very interesting because they're not only of a certain generation that is showing you their growth and their failures and how they're shaping offense in the NFL and honestly how they're shaping defense in the NFL as well.

They're showing you in real time how they're doing it. And second of all, they all started out together in the same rooms with the same lowly jobs. And most of them worked for Kyle Shanahan, who trained them with all of his knowledge that he had gotten from Mike Shanahan and then also from being in Tampa Bay with that massive playbook. And for me, watching how Sean McVeigh over the last several years, how he tries to find ideas, it's almost like a conflict-seeking space where he's trying to look for people who present him with problems or answers or foils to his own offense so that he can troubleshoot against them and find ways to then evolve his own system forward. And so a lot of times I first saw this when he hired Brandon Staley out of the Vic Fangio defense in 2020. And I started wondering, are all these guys like this, first of all, considering they all came from the same spaces?

And then you start peeling back the layers. So the reporting of the series over the last year has fast-forwarding looking forward while also keeping a firm plant foot in the past, looking at how these guys all became this way. And you can see these moments where they're all fighting over getting calls on Kyle Shanahan's play sheet or fighting with each other in these offices.

And that functional conflict that brings forth these ideas, sort of an underlying thread of the whole series is how did these people all go out and seek that functional conflict because they know, they have direct experience with it leading to evolution. And that's really what the series is about at its heart is how these guys have all done that. And now as they sort of enter these pivotal points in their careers, all of them, of course, at the same time, it's just been really interesting to sort of peel back the layers on how they think and how they see football and frankly, what their relationship to football even is. Even though we have defensive personnel here, Robert Sal is the head coach of the Jets, the play call is really talking about the four offensive guys, right? The Mike McDaniel in Miami, Matt LaFleur in Green Bay, Sean McVeigh with the Rams, although we thought he was going to leave after winning the Super Bowl. And Kyle Shanahan, explain if you can, and I know you're going to get into this and later, you know, as you get deeper into the series, the competitiveness of are they just in a constant state of trying to one up?

How does that work? It's interesting because you have to think again, you have to think about where they all started. They literally all were sharing these offices together, whether it was in Houston or Atlanta or in Ashburn, Virginia, and the entire point of their existence at that time, because football is everything to these guys, the entire point of their existence is to have an idea or think up something that makes it onto Kyle Shanahan's call sheet so that there's inherent competition in how you do that, because you're also trying to grow and you want to succeed in the space. And you're also doing it against people who you do respect and consider friends. But at a certain point, when they all start to split off into their respective buildings, now you're trying now you have to beat each other.

You can't be friends anymore. You have to be competitors. And so the dynamic shifting between all of them as they sort of sprint toward innovation is fascinating to me and certainly comes forth in the series because of how they talk about how to try to find what's next. And there's this underlying current of, OK, you all are doing it at the same time.

And so who is first? And then who jumps off of that innovation loop first toward the next thing, trying to outrun all the other people? Because I think a lot of these guys have figured out that it's not necessarily about like Super Bowls anymore in terms of your legacy as a coach or the coaches that they most respect. It's also about people who consider you as an innovator in the sport. And I think that's where they're all what they're all competing with each other in various ways and what a lot of coaches in the sport are now competing with each other in various ways is everyone knows how hard it is to win a Super Bowl. But can you be considered a person who has shaped the trajectory in the arc of the league? And I think that's inherently what a lot of them are sort of seeking.

Jordan Rodriguez from The Athletic, the series is called The Playmakers. It is incredibly well done. I am fascinated by it.

And I'm not even one of those deep dive. I know you said at the beginning that you are obsessed with and you are. So let me let me ask you about the way the me take two of the guys and just compare them. My my impression is that Sean McVeigh is more about a passing attack and Kyle Shanahan is more about a running attack.

Is that fair or is have I am I just too basic in my knowledge of this because that could be the right answer? Well, I think they've sort of deviated from each other in that way as they've competed in the NFC West. The NFC West has gotten just totally brutal in the way that all of these ideas and coaches, the successful young coaches and then Pete Carroll, who's still holding it down in Seattle, like all of these coaches have competed and clashed against one another. And certainly Kyle and Sean, who were once candidates for the same jobs as well. So that also is a dynamic throughout the entire thing. And and they know each other so well, too.

It's like, OK, how do you expand your identity into a specific space and find edges and find various things that that you're able to exploit and how do you do it so the other guy is not doing it the same way? Right. And so that's sort of naturally led. I think I don't think it's been necessarily intentional, but it's sort of naturally led to this divergence of scheme where Kyle Shanahan's run game is about as multiple as it gets. I mean, he basically has made his run game his quarterback in terms of all of the things that they can do. You know, they're running they're running like concepts you see in high school football combined with, you know, throwbacks and tossed, you know, all these things. And the way that they've made their receivers extensions of the running game and the way that they even they even have, you know, left tackles going in motion, you know, all of these things that that that happened in the run game itself. And and meanwhile, you know, in Los Angeles, Sean McVay has this total finesse, a quarterback who can make any throw when he's healthy. And this total finesse in the passing game and also receivers who contribute in the run game as well.

But but still that finesse in the passing game that comes with having a veteran quarterback. And it's really interesting to me to see how, whether intentional or subconscious, how their paths have diverged as game planners, as play callers and certainly schematically. Let me kind of close on this. The series is great. How many episodes, by the way, are are in the can? Five episodes. So you guys can you can binge it. It's all out over at the athletic football show podcast feed and anywhere you get your podcast. You can totally binge it with which people have. It's been funny hearing from people even across the league who have sat down and binge watched the entire binge binge listened to the entire series.

Or you can you can space it out a little bit, too. You won't miss it. Hey, sweetie, what do you think of our new car from Carvana? Think it can handle our busy family?

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It's great. I do a fair amount of driving. So in my car, boom, pop it in real quick. This is not what I was going to ask you. But how did you get these guys to sit down with you?

There's there's cursing involved, but that's fine. How did you get these guys to all sit down with you? Yeah, well, the reporting process is a year. So persistence is part of it, right?

At a certain point, you feel bad if you say no too many times, right? So persistence is definitely a part of it. But also, I just was really transparent about what I wanted to ask them about. I wanted to talk about football and how football happens and how it's created and how people think about the game and also about each other. And I think there is inherently such a respect for each other and the level that it takes to do that job as a head coach that a lot of them were very candid about that and their personal journeys because, you know, I think part of it is people don't really see that side a lot or nobody really asks.

And so I think they were not only really gracious with their time and talking about the sport and how they see the sport and their relationship to the sport, but also, I was grateful for the coaches who did open up about their own personal journeys and what coaching at this level does mean and the toll that it takes. And to the toll that it takes, because I alluded to it before, Sean McVay considered stopping after winning a Super Bowl. Your conversations with them, are you concerned, maybe concern is not the right word, about burnout where these guys who are still really young just saying, you know what, I've done enough. I've had enough. Time to do something else.

Time to do nothing. Are you concerned about that at all? Well, I'd be more concerned if they thought they could do nothing, which I don't believe for a second any of them could ever sit still long enough to do nothing. But I think it depends on the person. I mean, you talk to Kyle Shanahan and he's very comfortable existing in a space that is truly brutal in terms of the workflow and the lack of work-life balance, but then carving out certain times on the calendar where he totally disappears. I think then you talk to a Sean McVay who never, who has always struggled with really having that type of work-life balance to the point where, you know, Rams people and officials in the building are trying to force him to carve, not force him, but like make him carve out time during the week to just sit, just be man. And so it's really interesting. It depends on the person. And I think you do see again, very publicly, some of the toll of what burnout can be, but you also see they always come back to the sport that they are so inherently passionate about.

It pulls them back in, in a way that sometimes is not healthy. And I think through the course of the series that really stands out is you're sitting there wondering, are these guys okay? Like most of the time, you're listening to this series, which is a fascinating dynamic in my opinion. It is great.

I can't wait to continue binging it because I'm going to. Jordan Rodriguez from The Athletic, thank you very much for the time. We don't get a chance to talk a lot since you're all the way over there on the left coast covering the Rams and we're here, but I appreciate it and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. You got it. Jordan Rodriguez from The Athletic, it is a great, great, I mean, I can't say it's a great series because I only listened to episode one, but it is fascinating. And here's the tease I will leave you with for that.

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