Shanahan, offensive genius, out for blood
Chiefs have Mahomes, but 49ers have Shanahan who’s just as dangerous
SANTA CLARA >> You’ve heard about it all season. Hell, you’ve heard about it for a few seasons now.
So what makes 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan an “offensive genius”?
Well, to start, it helps to know that even his own players hate going up against him in practice.
“He’ll throw so much BS at you,” Richard Sherman says of the 49ers defense’s training camp showdowns against Shanahan and the Niners’ offense. “And they’re not game-planning for anything.”
“Some of these plays… man, he knew there was no way we could stop this play if we run our scheme the correct way. We literally have to bastardize every bit of this coverage to stop this play.”
Again, they’re in training camp, a time to get right and work on the basics.
“And he’s not even thinking anything of it — that’s just how he is,” Sherman said with a chuckle. “It’s like ‘You’re a dick!’”
If that’s the way his own defense talks about him, imagine how opposing defenses feel when they go up against the 49ers offense.
In all seriousness, Shanahan is smart, studious, and competitive. Those might sound like prerequisites to be an NFL play-caller and head coach, but it’s the high-octane combination of those traits that separates Shanahan from the pack, that makes him the NFL’s best offensive coordinator.
He calls plays with the conviction and clairvoyance of a chess grandmaster, but, as Sherman alluded to, a Shanahan offense also carries a vindictiveness.
“He doesn’t just want to call a cool play. Anyone can do that,” says NFL Films analyst and a senior producer Greg Cossell. “He wants to break a defense.”
But in order to break a defense, you must understand defense. That’s where Shanahan’s unique upbringing and his path to the 49ers come into play.
Shanahan was the NFL’s youngest play-caller when he became the Houston Texans’ offensive coordinator in 2008 at age 28. Twelve years of experience goes a long way in the NFL; you’ve seen everything and almost everybody.
But it was Shanahan’s two years as an offensive assistant — a lackey, in many ways — under Jon Gruden in Tampa Bay that is most consistently cited by those in the know as the basis of his current success.
As former Buccaneers quarterback Chris Simms — one of Shanahan’s best friends dating back to their time together at the University of Texas — said on his NBC Sports podcast: “Kyle’s brilliance to me is always that when we were in Tampa Bay… he would sit in on the defense meetings of the Bucs staff.”
And that defensive staff was absolutely loaded. AllStar doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Monte Kiffin, Rod Marinelli, Gus Bradley, Mike Tomlin, and Joe Barry were masterminds. From that group of men came two of the most influential defensive schemes in the past 30 years of the NFL — the Tampa 2 and the Cover 3 press. For Shanahan, it was akin to sitting in on Einstein and Hawking teaching physics.
“That’s where he separated himself in a bigtime way,” Simms said. “To understand defenses and their rules and what they’re coached — it’s helped him to devise game-plans to screw people over.”
And that’s the keyword in understanding how Shanahan coordinates an offense: Rules.
On every play, a defender has a responsibility, a predetermined way he is supposed to react.
Because Shanahan understands those rules — thanks in large part to his time in Tampa — he can turn the defense’s game plan against itself.
“He uses every play like a puzzle piece,” says 49ers right tackle Mike McGlinchey. “He can see how a defense is going to react to one call, and use another call to exploit the way they reacted to the same call… He manipulates defenses responsibilities against them constantly.”
“Kyle takes it to an individual level,” says Sherman. “He understands the tendencies of the weak hook player on this playaction pass or what the 2i technique will do when you give him this action. All of that goes into how he calls the game, how he calls the plays. I don’t think many people think on that deep of a level.”
It drives defenders crazy.
“You can see the frustration with some on other teams,” says 49ers safety Jaquiski Tartt. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know that feeling… glad it ain’t me.’”
Shanahan also learned from the best on the offensive side of things, starting with his dad.
Mike Shanahan had a Hall of Fame-worthy career as an offensive coordinator and head coach, winning three Super Bowls (the first as the 49ers’ offensive coordinator in 1994, the last two as the head coach as the Broncos in 1997 and 1998) while championing the zone blocking scheme that is now the preferred system across the NFL the whole way.
And while Shanahan worked under his dad in Washington from 20102013, the formative years of his offensive education no doubt came from working under Gruden and then his dad’s former offensive coordinator in Denver, Gary Kubiak, in Houston. The differences between the two head coaches forced Kyle to create his own offensive ideas, to not be a copycat of another’s system.
“It was two extremes being with someone like Jon Gruden, who does every play known to man, and you have so much scheme, which was awesome. You learn it all,” says Shanahan. “Then you went to Gary, who believed less is more. … The two people I started out with were both two very good offensive coaches who were completely different, which I think really helped me.”
Shanahan the Younger’s offenses are predicated, as were his dad’s, on the zone-blocking scheme, but according to Shanahan, the Elder in an interview with KNBR, he’s taken it to “a new level” with his play-action passing game, motions, and jet sweeps.
“What he does really well — probably better than anyone — is the runpass fusion,” says Cossell. “The 49ers run game, and the play-action pass game look almost identical. That creates a conflict to defenders.”
Shanahan also runs more pre-snap motion than anyone in the league. Before 70 percent of 49ers plays, someone is moving. That forces the opposing defense to show its true intent on a play.
“Even if the defense doesn’t move an inch, you learned something,” says Cossell.
It also creates a moving target for the defense to hit, literally, on top of creating deception in personnel groupings.
For instance, the defense might see a fullback, a running back, and only one tight end on the field — Shanahan’s favorite 21 personnel (which he runs more than any other coordinator in the league) — but a wide receiver, running across the formation to probe the defense might be handed the ball on his journey, or the fullback might split out to become a wide receiver. Now the defense, which has the right to match the offense’s personnel, is having to think on the fly — does it change or stick with its play? — and it might not have the right people on the field to adapt.
It takes a special kind of defense to keep up with that. It’s no wonder that in his 12-year career as a play-caller, the average Shanahan offense — no matter the overall talent level or quarterback under center — has finished in the top-10 in yards gained. This year, the 49ers were second in the NFL in points.
The deception of a Shanahan offense is such that it sometimes catches the 49ers’ offensive players off guard.
“Once a game I have a moment where he puts me in a position to run a route that I’ve never run before,” 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk said with a laugh. “At least once a game. That’s a pretty consistent thing that I just prepare myself for.”
But the result is what analyst Alex Rollins, who breaks down 49ers film on his YouTube channel, calls “positionless football.”
It’s something that started to really develop when Shanahan was the offensive coordinator of the Atlanta Falcons. It’s something he has taken to a new level with the 49ers, and something we’ll be seeing more of as Shanahan’s coaching tree expands.
In the end, though, what separates Shanahan from the rest isn’t the innovation or the neverending education — it’s the competitiveness that drives all of it.
“The way he designs his offense and the way he decides to call a game is just as aggressive as all of us trying to play football,” McGlinchey says.
And so long as that fire continues to rage, defenses across the NFL — including his own — will hate facing him.