‘COOL AS A CUCUMBER’
With his unflappable nature and sharp mind, Slowik might just be the man to resurrect struggling offense
It’s not easy to find information on the internet about new Texans offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik.
Search on Google, and you’ll likely have to go through three or four pages before finding anything comprehensive.
The 35-year-old former 49ers passing game coordinator has moved up the ranks fairly quickly during his time in the league. But those who know him best say he’s ready for this moment.
That’s likely why new Texans coach DeMeco Ryans hired him over the likes of former Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury, who also interviewed for the gig. That, and the fact Slowik has the philosophy Ryans was looking for in an offensive play-caller.
At his introductory news conference, Ryans said he envisioned the Texans offense playing with precision, effort and physicality.
“We want to own the line of scrimmage,” Ryans said. “We want to establish the run game first, but we want to be balanced. We want to be able to operate with play-action pass. We also want to be efficient. We want to have explosive playmakers who we can get the ball to. If it’s not down the field, we want to be able to throw a checkdown and put it in the hands of an explosive playmaker and see him create.
“Everything about our offense, we want to make sure that we’re adaptable to the players that we have, making sure we’re playing to the strengths of our players, getting the ball in our playmakers’ hands and letting them make plays.”
What Ryans described was how Kyle Shanahan’s offenses are run in San Francisco. So it made sense that Ryans would hire Slowik, who has been in the 49ers’ system learning under Shanahan and moving up the ranks since 2017.
That’s where Slowik and Ryans met. They were both defensive quality control coaches for the 49ers in 2017.
Fixing this offense won’t be easy. But everyone who knows Slowik says he was built for this. His father, Bob Slowik, is a longtime coach who was a defensive coordinator for the Bears and Packers.
His mentor is Hall of Fame coach Mike Shanahan, who gave him his first NFL job. And he’s worked with Kyle Shanahan for the past five years. Kyle is often regarded as one of the best offensive minds in football right now.
Slowik been around football his whole life. Now it’s his time to put all of that to the test.
A sixth sense
Bobby’s parents met when they were students at the University of Delaware.
His mother, Caroline, a Delaware native, was a world-class hurdler in the ’70s. Bob, who is from Pittsburgh, played football. They became high-level coaches in their respective sports and had four kids: Ryan, Andrea, Bobby and Steve.
Naturally, sports were a huge part of their family.
Caroline said Bobby was always a bright child too. She said he always had a different way of looking at and expressing things. His younger brother Steve says Bobby is the smartest of the three brothers.
“Bobby has a knack for simplifying complicated things in the way he communicates, which is going to serve him really well as an OC,” Steve, who is now a scout for the 49ers, said in a text.
He demonstrated that ability at an early age.
When Bobby was in elementary school, he’d sneak into his parents’ room every morning before his father woke up for work and leave him notes. The notes would contain football plays Bobby had drawn up on his own.
His father would take the notes with him when he was with the Bears and Packers and look at them for inspiration.
“It helped me remember that you’ve got to think a little bit out of the box every now and then,” the elder Slowik said. “It was very beneficial for me, and I’m
sure (Bobby) got great joy in doing that.”
The plays were elaborate for an elementary school kid. But Bobby had been around football his entire life.
He was one of the few kids who played both offense and defense at Green Bay Southwest High School because of how valuable he was to the team. He played wide receiver and cornerback and was a team captain. He wasn’t the biggest or fastest player, but his intelligence helped him compensate for what he lacked.
“He was always so consistent, and he was so steady,” said his high school football coach, Scott Mallien. “I remember that he was definitely one of our lockdown corners. We didn’t have to worry about anyone throwing deep on him because he was just so smart. Just had a feel, you know? A sixth sense.”
That sixth sense contributed to his success on the football field and in the classroom.
Biomedical engineer
Bob Slowik says he always tried to discourage his kids from getting into coaching. He knew the challenges that came with it. The long hours. The time away from family. The pressure. The uncertainty of whether he’d have a job from year to year. The criticism and being in the limelight.
Bob Slowik, 68, has been a coach at Florida, Rutgers and East Carolina in college, the Cowboys, Bears, Browns, Packers, Broncos and Commanders in the NFL, and the Montreal Alouettes and Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian Football League.
Bobby was born in New Jersey, when Bob and was coaching at Rutgers. He graduated from high school when they were in Green Bay.
“It wasn’t an easy path for the family,” Bob Slowik said. “I don’t know how many times I was looking for a job when I was a younger coach. I think it was six, seven times, and we had to move back into my wife’s parents’ home twice. Being out of a job with no money and no place to live.”
When Bob was the Packers’ defensive coordinator in 2004,
he recalls a teacher telling one of his kids, “I hope you do this better than your dad.”
For a while, Bob and Caroline didn’t think Bobby wanted to coach. Sure, he loved football and played it in high school and later at Michigan Tech. But he was just as successful in his studies.
At Michigan Tech, Bobby played wide receiver and studied biomedical engineering. Steve Short, who played quarterback for Michigan Tech and was roommates with Bobby for four years, said Bobby was so smart, he could sit in chemistry class without taking notes and still remmeber the information. He said he tried to do the same but quickly realized they had different learning styles.
“To get a biomedical engineering degree at Michigan Tech is really hard to achieve,” Short said, “and he kind of made it look easy. He definitely put in the work for it, for sure.”
His mother likes to joke that she doesn’t know where he got it from.
But she always figured her son would go into the biomedical engineering field until the latter part of his college career.
Getting into coaching
The Slowiks were family friends with the Shanahans, having worked together with Mike Shanahan at Florida and again with the Broncos.
Caroline recalls the families having dinner at the Shanahans’ house when Bobby was in college. At one point, Mike Shanahan asked Bobby what he planned to do after he graduated.
Bobby told him he was a biomedical engineering major and planned to go into that field.
Shanahan looked at Bobby and said, “You should go into coaching.”
“So Bobby just started thinking about it and decided that’s what he was going to do,” Caroline said. “He took an interest in it, and the rest is history.”
Coaching soon became his primary focus at Michigan Tech.
Short said Bobby talked about becoming a coach often. And in their free time, they’d play the Madden NFL football game and design an entire playbook, hoping to draw up something good enough to suggest to their coaches at Michigan Tech.
Short said he knew Bobby was going to be a coach based on the way he dissected those plays and discussed audibles.
“You knew that if he wasn’t going to be playing it, he was going to be teaching it,” Short said.
Short said Bobby was the best route runner on the team as a freshman because of the time he put into getting it right. Short said Bobby always did more than what was required to gain an advantage, whether that was running extra routes after practice, drinking an extra protein shake to gain weight, or doing extra sprints.
He was a perfectionist. From the way he ran his routes to the motion of his arms, everything had to be perfect.
Sometimes that was a good thing and sometimes it was bad.
Bob and Caroline Slowik say Bobby has been a perfectionist his whole life, in everything he does. If he didn’t run a drill correctly while training, he’d get frustrated with himself and have to walk off and take a break before coming back.
His goal to be perfect was so apparent, Bob said he often had to have talks to his young son about it.
“Do you know how difficult it is for a perfectionist to live in an imperfect world?” Bob would tell Bobby. “You’re going to have to learn how to deal with that. Nothing is perfect.
“He ended up doing pretty damn good. He’s found a way to adjust to his perfectionist attitude and develop people skills as well as well as the desire to get things right.”
Bobby got his start in football in the video department on Mike Shanahan’s staff in Washington. After a year doing video, defensive coordinator Jim Haslett promoted Bobby to defensive assistant.
Bob was also on staff, coaching defensive backs and linebackers.
Bob said one of Bobby’s greatest assets is that he’s “cool as a cucumber” under pressure.
“Bobby is one of those guys that the more difficult it is, the cooler he gets,” Bob said. “He didn’t get that from me.”
Bob said he first noticed his son’s ability to handle high stress situations in Washington. When Bobby was a defensive assistant, one of the jobs he had was spotting personnel of the opposing team from the press box.
He’d relay the information to the defensive coordinator so he could call the correct play. Opposing teams are aware of this and try to trick their opponents, which can lead to frustration.
“Most of the coordinators will not use great language, and if you don’t get it in to them fast enough, (some people would) get all flustered, but (Bobby) was always so cool,” Bob said. “I was on the headset, so I hear it all going on. It didn’t matter. He never, ever got rattled no matter how many F bombs were thrown at him. ‘What are they in? what are they in?’ Bobby would say, ‘They are not on the field yet.’
“He just knew how to handle it perfectly.”
From PFF to the Texans
After the 2013 season, Mike Shanahan and his staff were fired in Washington. That meant Bobby was out of a job.
Recently married, he was struggling to find another coaching job, so his older brother Ryan suggested he check out Pro Football Focus, which was looking for an analyst.
PFF is a sports analytics company that focuses on analysis of the NFL and NCAA.
Bobby sent in his résumé and got the job.
At PFF, he’d watch game film and assign grades for every player. He’d review controversial grades of other analysts and make the final determination. He demonstrated his value to PFF’s team early on and became a go-to resource.
“I’ve learned more or as much from Bobby as pretty much anybody here in my time at PFF,” said Sam Monson, one of PFF’s lead analysts. “He was one of the guys that came in and brought clear NFL knowledge and experience to what we were doing.”
When they had group calls because of a tricky play they were grading, or the analysts needed help deciphering what coverage a team was in, or what went wrong on a play, Bobby always seemed to have the answer.
“He was immediately one of most valuable people we had,” Monson said.
Steve Palazzolo, head of football product at PFF, said Slowik was one of the company’s hardest workers and got things done.
He said Slowik made everyone around him better.
“Bobby really enhanced our process,” Palazzolo said.
Slowik’s goal was always to get back into coaching.
He spent two years at PFF before Kyle Shanahan asked him to join his staff in 2017. He spent two seasons as a defensive quality control coach.
Slowik became an offensive assistant in 2019 and 2020, then was promoted to offensive passing game specialist in 2021 and passing game coordinator in 2022.
Despite injuries to Trey Lance and Jimmy Garoppolo, the 49ers kept winning.
Their three quarterbacks — Lance, Garoppolo and rookie Brock Purdy — combined to throw for 4,049 yards, 30 touchdowns and only nine interceptions. The 49ers had one of the most efficient passing attacks in the NFL.
They made it to the NFC Championship Game before losing to the Eagles after Purdy was hurt early in the first quarter.
The Texans hope Slowik can bring similar success to Houston.
Bob Slowik believes his son can.
“He has really good people skills, gets along with anybody and has a great attitude towards his other coaches, and that’s a great asset,” Bob said. “He knows how to keep everybody working in the same direction and a positive outlook.”
And he knows his son’s nature. When the pressure gets going, Bobby doesn’t flinch.
“Cool as a cucumber,” his father says.