The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - The Playcallers Ep. 5: To resist it is useless

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

A look at the modern NFL shows that variants of this offensive system - and even the defensive systems it pulled into its innovation loop - are everywhere. What happens when it becomes too saturated? How do coaches know when to jump into what comes next? Host Jourdan Rodrigue also looks at the unintended consequences the explosion in popularity of coaches from this offense have had on the NFL's hiring practices. Meanwhile, coaches across the league are candid about how they try to evolve and adapt in a sport that endlessly moves in patterns and cycles.Voices in the episode include Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur, Mike McDaniel, Raheem Morris, Kevin O'Connell, Thomas Brown, Kevin Demoff, Les Snead, Andrew Whitworth and Robert Griffin the Third.Playcallers is presented by Miller Lite. To get Miller Lite delivered right to your door, visit millerlite.com/playcallers.Celebrate Responsibly. Miller Brewing Company, Milwaukee, WI. 96 calories and 3.2 carbs per 12 ounces. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think in football, I don't know if we ever would call it obsessive. For us, it's curious because we're trying to figure out what's next. Rahim Morris is almost having a debate with himself, out loud. We're trying to figure out what we need to do. How do you counteract? It definitely has some obsessive, some obsessive behaviors to it. But there's a happy medium. There is an underlying current that connects every successful coach in this young family, the all-consuming pursuit of the next solution.

The next advantage. What's the right word for that? I've suggested obsessive. It's an anxious curiousness. Some may describe as obsessive, which is fine, because it is up to a point when you're talking about the normal life, but it's really just become who we are. There has to be some acceptance of futility, right?

Sisyphus rolls the boulder up the hill, and when he reaches the top, It rolls back down and he starts over. Well, it's hard about winning a Super Bowl is so intoxicating. All you want is more. Now that you've tasted it, you just want to get back. It's not necessarily the freedom you imagine. No answer will really work the same way twice.

You must constantly sprint toward the next thing in an endless innovation loop. And if you're a head coach, you're getting studied as you're studying everyone else. Your successes are lessons to you and to them. so are your failures. And you know, mostly your failures will be used against you. So you would better deeply understand what they are. I think that's what builds us and it forms all our character of football, you know, our football character.

And it forms all our essence of our essence of how much we love football to be able to talk about it as much as we are possibly able to do. The Sussum sounds a little harsh. It is, you know, it's hard for us to admit. But I just enjoy so much hard for me to call that. Coaches who are a catalyst for some shift in the NFL's biology usually have created something or evolved something forward. A new direction forms in the sports timeline, spider webbing out with thousands of ripple effects. Reaction to the action. It's just physics.

The irony of it is that the architects of that direction now become trapped in it, forever sprinting to try to stay ahead of those ripple effects, toward a new catalyst. And that begins the cycle all over again. It never ends. Win the championship, right? Then last, right? It's just like, what's next? What's next?

What's next? And I'm really comfortable in that loop. And I think we all still are. And then when we're not, that's when we get off. I'm Jordan Rodriguez. This is the play callers. So, we're in the present-day NFL. The career lifespan for head coaches is shorter than ever.

The emphasis on office. offense is greater than ever, with a few outliers across the league. Well, do you think having a 37-year-old? We're on to Cincinnati. It's nothing about the past, nothing about the future. Right now, we're preparing for Cincinnati. Do you feel like the talent you have here is good? We're getting ready for Cincinnati.

The league's landscape became a perfect storm for a cluster of young offensive coaches, who all happened to incubate at the same time. ESPN's senior NFL analyst, Mina Kimes, has been studying the league's hiring cycles for years. When their assistants started getting jobs elsewhere, you did see different deviations and little evolutions along the way. Some of it personnel related as well, but a lot of it had to do with the quarterbacks that the different coaches had. You know, I mentioned Matt Lafleur in Green Bay and how he sort of kind of meet in the middle a little bit with Aaron Rogers. So, you know, still foundational outside zone running game, but Rogers in the gun more.

more RPO's. Rogers, of course, is now with Robert Sala and Nathaniel Hackett and the Jets. Nathaniel Hackett's dad is Paul Hackett, who was on the Tampa Bay staff as a quarterback's coach when Kyle Shanahan was the quality control assistant. You remember, right? This is the coach who taught Kyle Shanahan play action. I learned play action from two plays that Paul Hackett taught me that he was so good at coaching and it was such effective play for us that I love the play. Back to Mina into a league that was shifting as this coaching family grew. Zach Taylor was, you know, it was interesting because especially earlier his career,

still really uses 11 personnel at a rate that the Rams did. But once he got Joe Burrow, again, very different quarterback. You lean on the quarterback more. He's an empty more. He's in the gun more. You're spreading things out. Actually, that offense was really condensed in a way some of the Rams. Arthur Smith, more of the power running game.

Mike McDaniel with Tua. So you're going to lean more into the RPO's, but then you also have the fastest players in football. So you're going to put all of them in motion at once. So the quarterback has 30 options on any given play. Wait, wait, wait. Mike McDaniel actually sums it up pretty perfectly himself. We have fastest shit-wide receivers. McDaniel also just hired Vic Fangio as his defensive coordinator.

Fangio, of course, was the white whale for so many of McDaniel's former coworkers. That's one of the reason I'm so excited and went the direction I went with our defense coordinator because I think there's a ton of ability to grow within. And if you are paired with the right system and teacher, that you can really get a lot out of it. I think having an ego is pretty dumb. One that operates in a land of insecurity, that ego, whatever that is, is pretty dumb. I refuse to have that be a part of my being.

So I think it's a special situation for us where I can really take advantage of Vic, where some people either wouldn't hire them because of the threat to whatever that shit is or out of insecurity you try to show them how much they knew all the time. Both of those things that I think are dumb. And I'm not trying to be done. As Mina noted, Falcons coach Arthur Smith deployed a run-centric variation of this system in Atlanta after working under Matt LaFleur in Tennessee. Kevin Stefansky, a Gary Kubiak mentee, runs another variation in Cleveland.

Nathaniel Hackett, who also worked under LaFleur, is the O.C. New Cardinals' OC, Drew Petzing, worked under Stefansky. In Seattle, offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, started running some of the concepts he studied under Sean McVay. Thomas Brown, who also worked under McVeigh, is the new offensive coordinator in Carolina. and so on and so forth across the NFL. Everywhere, the secrets spread, and the language changes a little or a lot, as do the players and their roles.

Just getting easy touches for your best players within the confines of your offense. Here's Vikings head coach, Kevin O'Connell. Changes from building to building. It's different for Zach Taylor with Jamar Chase and T. Higgins and, you know, and Joe and how they do it, it's different for them than it is for Kyle

and that it is for Matt Lefleur and Green Bay, or it is for us in Minnesota. If we want to really feature this player, how do we feature this player in a way that enhances their ability to have success? Well, he's the ex-receiver. Justin Jefferson's the X. Cooper Cup was the F-receiver. Zach deals with Jamar, T. Higgins, and Boyd. I mean, they've got, you know, they're going to play the game mostly an 11 person on.

You know, when I got to Minnesota, it was, okay, we've got. Dalvin Cook and Alex Madison, we've got three wide outs I feel really good about, and then a quarterback that I know can throw the ball at an elite level from an accuracy standpoint. But he does prefer, you know, the keepers and the play pass in some of those situations. So you get it. This offense is everywhere, in one way or another. Even if a coach isn't technically from the tree, you'll probably still see some of its concepts pop up. Proof positive?

there's this play, Zorro, that's an outside zone concept that was an early staple of the Shanahan-McDaniel run system. In 2022, how many teams were running Zorro? Uh, 25. And how many were running it when you started running it? Two to three. But this offensive system also can be molded and changed to the players inside it. and can even take on the identity of the play caller who runs it. Or, as Rams Jam Les Sneed puts it,

The other humans put their spin on it for whatever reason is. It's like music, right when bands break up or what have you. They may be similar, but there's some nuanced differences for an intentional reason. Watching how Kyle Shanahan, then Sean McVeigh and Matt LaFleur, then Mike McDaniel, and then so many others put different fingerprints on this system, was appealing to team owners, those billionaire gatekeepers who decide who can be a head coach and when. And they weren't scared of youth anymore. Zach Taylor became a hot head coaching candidate is when you realized just how quickly the league had turned.

You remember Ram's COO Kevin Demoff. No offense to Zach, right, but he had been our assistant wide receivers coach. He gets promoted kind of to quarterback's coach. We have this run. He was not the most outspoken. person. He wasn't the person the media saw it all the time in 2018. He's got an amazing way with the media now, which I love to see. And you could tell he was cerebral sharp. But he always seemed like a person who, in normal cycles, would have been a year or two away at that point. And not only

does he get three or four interviews, but he aces all of them. Probably could have had his choice of jobs and truly believed in Cincinnati in that opportunity. That was when I first kind of said, this is here to stay. And, you know, when we hired Sean, there were no coaches under 40. I think there were nine coaches under 50. In the average age of the NFL coach, head coached time was about 51, 52. Now there are, I believe, nine coaches under 40, half the league is under 50. And the average age has gone down to like 46. There's a lot of other owners who are just like, okay, like, I want to get the next Superman play caller. Even though a lot of the guys getting hired were not play callers. Some, such as NFL Network's senior

analyst, Steve Weish, called that McVeigh-Mania, because especially Sean McVeigh's offensive coaches were getting poached like clockwork each year. You know, I want to get someone who touched Sean McVeigh. I want to get someone who touched Kyle Shanahan. Because they've won. That's another thing. They've won ball games. I mean, that's an important thing.

We can't leave that part out. For a while, it was almost a joke. Oh, you've gotten a cup of college for Sean McVeigh. You're going to be there, nice coach. Start to get absurd because you heard about Brandon Staley being more of Sean McVey than he he was with Vic Fangio. and he's a McFandio protege. So, yeah, I mean, but again, all these guys have gone and succeeded.

So you have to say, well, this is crazy. But there's a lot of other players, a lot of other coaches who are getting overlooked because they're not Sean McVeigh guys. You know, this tree in general, it's very successful. I mean, there's so many, not just head coaches we've been talking about, but play callers around the NFL right now who have had a ton of success coming out of it. The network effect, which is what you're describing, where, you know, a lot of these hiring decisions are based on relationships. It can also have a crowding out effect.

I think it's something that you can point to when we discuss the lack of diversity and head coaches and high colors in the league. And I'm not, that's obviously not the intention of anyone who's sort of high ranking in these trees are near the top. But it's an unfortunate consequence, especially I think because, you know, when, And McVeigh had his rise starting in 2017. It wasn't really just about finding friends of McVeigh, everybody, meaning owners, they all wanted the next brilliant Wunderkin play caller. D'Amico Ryans and Robert Sala are two defensive head coaches who both worked under Kyle Shanahan.

Mike McDaniel is biracial, but he is the only minority head coach on the offensive side to so far come out of this coaching family. It was a stunning, you know, that a team didn't look at someone like Jim Caldwell. He wasn't Sean McVeigh guy, but the dude, you know, and you got Matthew Stafford and Peyton Manning guys like that vouching for you, but, you know, I guess owners aren't looking for the older state man anymore. An offensive mind became in vogue. And for reasons that go way beyond this tree, there has historically been a lack of black offensive play callers in the NFL disproportionate, you know, in proportion to the number of players. that is something you can trace back to the lack of black quarterbacks and then the lack of black quarterback coaches

and then black coaches and assistance not being afforded the same opportunities or being funneled into different opportunities but what it ultimately all led to is if you look at the number of quarterback coaches and offensive coordinators it's been lacking for a long time so when you when that runs into a tidal wave a phenomena where there's this desire to find brilliant offensive minds it's going to exacerbate a problem that's been an issue and a serious one in the NFL for quite some time.

Again, no one wanted that. You know, it's something that the, I know that the, obviously the NFL has been more deliberate about trying to combat. And I think a lot of the coaches within this tree, I think about Thomas Brown, who came up under Sean McVeigh, and didn't really get a ton of attention coaching, you know, running backs and tight ends, and was just hired as offensive coordinator in Carolina.

Those are the sort of names you want to see more of as this tree continues to proliferate, other opportunities, but it does have to start at the lower levels. Look, it's one of these things where part of it's on the coaches for not pushing certain guys a certain way. A lot of it's on the ownership for not doing it. Andy Reed could not have pledged Eric B. Enemy anymore. Patrick Mahomes.

I mean, two voices. So it's one of these things, you know, we keep on saying there's some progress. We're seeing more black GMs and some guys getting put in coordinator positions. but, you know, we'll see if they get opportunities. If you look at this entire series, you'll see really just one pipeline. That of longtime relationships and relatives has been an active one. You can also see what a difference it makes for a young coach to have access to ideas, like Kyle Shanahan literally logging plays out of John Gruden's playbook,

or offensive coaches sitting in defensive meetings. Imagine if a lot of people, larger pool of candidates had that kind of access. That of course does not take away from the work these specific head coaches have clearly put into their craft. It's just additional pipelines can also be substantively nurtured in a sport where every new idea might become a new wrinkle for a scheme. Why wouldn't widening that pool of ideas and perspectives also be considered an advantage? And that's one where I'm just real interested in the positioning of of all these coaches we're talking about from the McVay tree and the Shanahan tree, the positioning of guys,

if guys are positioned to get opportunities. This topic is so important, and its scope and nuance ranges far beyond this coaching tree. In fact, the Athletic recently released a full narrative series called Between the Lines, hosted by Tashon Reed that explores race in the NFL, including the league's hiring practices. I'd urge anyone who's interested in learning more to check it out. The success of Sean McVeigh, Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur, and now Mike McDaniel, and many of their various assistants, even on the defensive side, has meant that this core offensive language, its foundation points, has exploded across the league, to the point of saturation. If more competitors than ever understand what you're doing, how do you stay ahead? If you don't evolve, there's too much money in to stopping it.

So, like, I think I're constantly, I never stop thinking about problem-solving solutions from defensive scheme. Case in point, I mean, it took a year and a half before anybody had any fucking clue how to stop the Rams. And Vic Fangio happened. Then Bill Belichick copied Big Van Geo. And then it took a while for Sean to get back there. But that was, like, a year and a half. Eventually, there's too much invested in it. Like, they're going to figure it out.

You have to evolve and trying to avoid that situation at all costs where your defense has all the answers for whatever you're trying to do. Much set Sean back years in his life. I think one of the reasons there's been staying power in this group is they all have adapted to their own world. Kyle's offense is different than Sean operants. It's different than Matt's. It's different than Zach's. It's different than Kevin O'Connell's. They probably all have.

the more roots than the people who are much more in depth of film study and all that could probably tell you the similarities and differences, but they don't all run the same stuff. And they all adapt. I think that is, if there's one thing that probably is different for this group is they all came to power by adapting and are easy to adapt on their own. They don't have something that is fixed. And in the NFL, which is always a cyclical league, I think any person who has a fixed philosophy is probably doomed at some point to flame out, no matter how successful it is, in the beginning. I asked many of the coaches interviewed for this series, what they think comes next.

Yeah, that's a hell of a question. I mean, that's like the magic question, right? I mean, that's like having the answers to the test. I really should have known better. Hilariously, very few coaches wanted to say what they think the next new idea might be when the microphone was on. And after months spent studying the dynamic between all of them, a part of me suspects it was because they all knew all the others were also doing interviews.

Thank God for Andrew Whitworth and RG3. Who have you covered here? I would say this mixture of things have gotten a little more in the direction of physicality, probably. Like, you know, I wouldn't say teams aren't running eye formations and running two tights and wings and stuff, but you see this like direction of like the giants out. some success last year, you know, just trying to run people over. Philly doing it in a different way. Like, it's shotgun, it's spread, and it's a little bit of college, but it's still that

same mentality that we're going to beat you up in the middle of the field. And then we're going to use these athletes on the edges. And so you can see there's this cycle right now to get back to, all right, there's too many cover linebackers and there's too many like tweener DBs, like because everyone's needing more secondary, you know, more linebackers that can run and cover. And it's like, all right, we're going to use that to our advantage and just run the football at you. And defensive lines are more built to rush the passer. That's kind of the cycle you see it going at right now. Andrew Whitworth is talking about the constant, never-ending action and reaction of football.

In 2022, for example, NFL teams as a whole averaged more rushing yards per carry than they had in decades. I think that you're going to see this continue until defenses adjust and start to say, all right, then we'll play with bigger players or we'll play in heavier schemes and we'll try and stop you from doing those things. I think you're going to continue to see this trend of teams trying to run the football more because I think you look at it, teams adjusted to the system and said, all right, we're not going to let you throw it over our heads. We're not going to let you manipulate us in some of the ways that you have. But doing that, that means that the four or five-yard run of just simplistically hitting people in the mouth

is a lot harder to defend with the guys that you're trying to do it with now, some of these defenses. And so I think that you're going to continue to see that trend happen. And obviously, the thing that makes it so dynamic is you're starting to see some of quarterbacks that can move. And I think what we've seen in the NFL is cycles of running back usage. But all these guys, when they're successful, they run the football. R.G3 is talking about Sean McVeigh, Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur, and Mike McDaniel specifically. The Rams were not very good last year. And I think it's because they couldn't run the football.

They just had no, they had no base. They had no counterpunch. They couldn't put it all on Matt Stafford's elbow, no pun intended, because of the injury. But at the end of the day, they just could not find a consistent running game. In its essence, it's the marriage of the run of the past. I think the main thing is the marriage of the run of the past. You hear people say the illusion of complexity. I think in its essence, it's the marriage of the run in the past.

Packers is one of the best running games. The 49ers is one of the best running games. And of course, the dolphins didn't have one of the best running games, but they had the best play action game in all of the NFL last year. So I think when you say what's next, I think it's just these guys continuing to understand that the league is going to come back to them every single time. Don't get away from the zone reads game and running the football and a commitment to that and a commitment to doing it the right way. And in looking at the primary coaches highlighted in this series, each is at a new crossroads of sorts.

The decisions they make next will inevitably come with a ripple effect. We just don't know what it is yet. Sean McVeigh is having to deal with true failure for the first time. How will he return from it? Kyle Shanahan, Mike McDaniel, and Matt LaFleur all have a different quarterback question to answer, in different ways. And at least two of their four teams are built to make a run. What will it cost? Honestly, I think this system, that Kyle and Matt and Sean and Mike McDaniel have all made their own

iterations of can survive the test of time as long as they continue to adapt with time. Both Kyle and Sean, who were the first two to kind of climb into the category of head coaches, realize that it's not always about the X's and those. Sometimes it is about the Jimmies and the Joe's. And they went and they loaded up. I mean, look at Kyle's offense right now. got Christian McCaffrey, Debo Samuel, George Kittle, Brandon Ayuk, I mean, Kyle Eusecheck. I mean, they've got guys throughout every part of their offense that are just unbelievable.

And of course, they have the best left tackle in all football in Trent Williams. And then you look at, you know, Matt LaFleard with the two running backs that he has there with A.J. Dylan and Aaron Jones and who they had before with Devante Adams at wide receiver. You know, they've gone a little bit more of a youth movement in, in Green Bay, but they all realize, like, I need bona fide dudes to go out and make plays for me. I mean, Mike McDaniel, when got Tyreek Hill, partnering him with Jalen Waddle, and all of a sudden, Tua Tuaua is leading the NFL in quarterback rating. No, so they understand that, whereas before the thought process was the scheme will went out.

I don't think that they're there anymore. I think they are extremely confident in their scheme. and that their scheme can't help them win some games that, you know, another scheme wouldn't. But they do know they have to have those bona fide guys that can run it. And I think as long as these coaches don't think that it's the scheme or it's them, they will continue to find success as they adapt. We'll return to this episode of The Play Callers after a word from our sponsors. Before you dive back into The Play Callers,

we wanted to let you know you can unlock this entire series ad-free with a subscription to the Athletic Audio Plus. Unlock that now for just 99 cents a month by clicking subscribe at the top of the Athletic Football Show's show page on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening and enjoy the rest of the episode. To be clear, even if they didn't want it shared publicly, every coach does have a belief of what comes next in the never-ending cycle of this game. But how do they know when to jump toward what that is? Evolution can be a rubber band. It can stretch and stretch and then suddenly snap. And ideally, you're on to the next stretching rubber band

before you're the victim of the previous snap. I'm a big feel guy. Yeah, you might have a vision in your mind of where, specifically where we're going as the Green Bay Packers, whether it's on offense or defense or on special teams. But I think you've got to feel it. You've got to figure out what you have. You've got to stay one step ahead of the competition in that regard.

And, you know, we've got a lot of new pieces here. In 2023, Matt LaFleur will run his offense without Aaron Rogers for the first time as a head coach. Perhaps there's something both freeing and anxious about stepping into a new era. All right. What do we have and how can we evolve? How can we stay one step ahead of everybody else? That's why we spend so much time. not only studying other teams, but you've got to study yourself too.

And you've got to know what you've put out there. So the defense or the opposition doesn't get a beat on what you're doing because if they know what you're doing, they're going to stop you. In a way, it's a little bit of a full circle moment for Matt LaFleur. Remember when he was Sean McVeigh's OC in Los Angeles? They had all of these ideas and theories coming in. But once they got in the field, they completely changed their intended identity, 12 personnel to 11 personnel and built it on the fly from there.

Everything was evolving. You know, it was going to be this and then it's like, nope, it's going to be that. That started a ripple effect of enormous consequence. Just from feeling like maybe there was a better way. And then trying it. That's how football happens. It's just a feel thing for me in terms of I like to live literally one day at a time and just try to constantly put the work in, really reflect on the work, analyze the work, and then make decisions on how we move forward.

Evolution, it can be anything. The important thing is that it exists. It's never a stagnant thing. It can be how a coach builds off a concept. I mean, shit. First put in jet motion to the side of the ball carrier in 2008. Game 2. I was like yesterday.

So we have all sorts of random shit. But I have that. It's all over the NFL and probably run it 10 times a game. But didn't run it once. The first time I ran it was the first play of the game against Detroit in 2018 game 2. Explosive Run. It was cool. And this is Matt Breed up.

They really like this young man. Fuck yeah. all derived from Richard Penny in San Diego State stuff just comes from random stuff watching Richard Penny evaluating him in 2018 they were playing Air Force and they did

outside zone with a jet sweep towards it and I saw all these Air Force players overrun the jet and I was like, oh, well, downhill. Okay, that could manifest itself into how to solve the problem with nine techniques to outside

zone tight ends. We do a ton of of jet motion with fullbacks and tight ends in the run and pass game that was used in a different form but saw it from Baltimore doing gap scheme stuff that planted the seed for it's really just part to hole some college tape some the rest of the league sometimes you see one thing and it just extrapolates into a whole different entity of random things um And then part of it is just like living and breathing it. Evolution can mean changing some of the language of an existing system. So how is it learnable?

Well, we can name all these things in the same family of words. They could be reptiles. They could be different kinds of big cats. Like we've got cheetah, jaguar, you know, we've got all these words that mean something to our players. And they know they mean something because there are certain catalog. plays with subtle differences and that's where the hooks come in. Is it called Jaguar? Well, it's got a Joe route in it instead of a stick nod.

Like, whatever it is, it's something, well, they learn it and they, you know, you don't ever want to just be, I tell her coaches this all the time. I don't just want to be making up plays and throwing it against the wall and pretty soon you won't have an offense. You'll just have playbooks of just, you know, mind erasing just lines on a sheet of paper. Evolution can mean going somewhere totally new and blending your playbook with someone else's. That's what former Rams assistant Thomas Brown is doing in Carolina with veteran head coach Frank Reich and quarterback Bryce Young, this year's number one overall pick.

When it comes down to it, when I first got to Carolina, you know, trying to come together with Frank and look at what he's done before in the past, what I've kind of done before my past, and try to find a happy marriage. Because those systems are different. The first thing that we did when I got here with the Panthers was strip both playbook down to the bare bones. Yeah, we had a thing that we hang our hat on and we believe in heavily, but who are we going to be? Evolution can be a reaction to competition. Now, what drives me the craziest is all these coaches who know what I'm coaching and where to put guys. They might not know how to tie it together or how to study defense or how to relate it to a player or whatever,

but they know where the distribution is of everyone, where the quarterbacks look. And what I hate is when they take that other places, how much their defense practices against it. I don't care if they know what we're doing. It's that back in the day, defenses, and I'm talking like five years ago, I could tell when they got ready for us, they had no idea how to stop that play action hole. Their zone drops weren't quite right. There's no way they can honor that run and learn that in three practices where only one of them is full speed. So I knew we were going to shock them all the time.

Now, I think half the league is practicing that play in OTU. and training camp, not just because they're getting ready for us, because I have somebody who has taken all these plays and bootlegs and runs places. So defenses, when they seem in practice over and over and you get beat, you have to figure out how to correct it. Evolution can be a borrowed idea with a personal spin. You know, I'm not too ashamed to say that I steal from anybody. If I think it's a good idea, I don't care. When I interviewed Matt LaFleur in Green Bay, he had two massive curved computer monitors on his desk, filled with tabs of cutups from the Miami Dolphins, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Yeah, just like I showed you earlier, I mean, I got Miami's offense on there, I got San Francisco's offense on there, and we're just trying to see what maybe some of the things that they've had success with. LaFleur toggled between cuts with what looked like a video game controller, pulling concepts up on a massive screen on his wall, and noting his thoughts. I'm trying to get inspiration from watching others and how they use maybe a specific player or to try to come up with plays or ideas that are going to help our players be their best. But that's all of them, really. One eye on everyone else.

Where I always have admired, Sean, is so many people who are his age would never admit how many plays they steal. Right from a very early point in 2017, and I vividly remember we beat the Cowboys and scored a long touchdown on a, long kind of arrow route to Todd Gurley that he had stolen from the Chiefs. And everybody was like, oh, my God, the Rams are scoring and this play for Todd Gurley. And she was like, oh, I stole that from the Chiefs we want. That was such an unusual thing for someone to say at the time. Now, what do you mean people steal plays? It was always that these people who developed plays were these mad scientists and no one

else could come up what they didn't. To have Sean openly admit that he had stolen the source code from someone else, I think was a shocker. So I think that was always, if you go into Kevin or a mass offense, they watch each other. And they steal pieces of what they like, they change it, they adapt it. Perhaps most importantly, evolution of any system can be driven by the players who truly bring it to life. You know, as I sit and reflect and talk about it, you know, it's a great collaboration of thoughts and ideas, but none of it happens without the players.

When the purpose is to try to help them and you want to see them do well. Like that's the most rewarding times have been when I've been a part of teams here that they wanted to do well because they didn't want to let somebody else down and they wanted to see that person succeed and shine more than their selfish goals and ambitions. And when I've seen that, that's when we've been the best teams. And then I can also say from my own experiences, when I'm of that mindset and mentality is when I'm being the best version of the person I want to be for that. And when I'm not, it's a very clear difference. We play an imperfect game and it's played by imperfect people. None of us are perfect. None of us have every answer. And I think that's one of the

realizations that, you know, an old saying that if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. And players and coaches, we're all in this together. I just think collaboration is key. I'm not one to think that I have all the answers. In fact, I don't want to have all the answers. And I want to be around people that have great ideas. And I want to hear those ideas. Doesn't mean we're always going to do them, but I do think there's value in that. And I'm not trying to paint myself as like, you know, I'm some holier now guy that just is, I just believe in doing what's right for us. And it doesn't matter at the end of the day. I really don't care if it's my idea. However you do it, at whatever cost, you must evolve to survive or stay the same and be erased.

That's the agreement. For some of these coaches, and certainly for some of their players, we have seen that cost at every stage of evolution. Because it is a copycat league, it is a cyclical league. No advantage lasts forever. But I think this group is not defined by any singular advantage, but rather the pursuit of advantages. Either you are someone who already accepts the ultimate futility of it all,

that you will always be trying to outrun your own innovation loop, always starting over to find new ways to be perfect in an imperfect game. or you must become someone who does accept it. That's one of the things that I have so much respect for Coach Belichick when you hear about the way that he moves and you hear about the discipline and the mental stamina and the ability to be able to just fall in love with the game every single year again and really recommit yourself to giving everything that's necessary to operate at the upper echelon when you're competing against the other guys that are great

at it. Like, that is a skill. I actually think that they wake up every day and know they can be innovated. They don't necessarily see the roadblocks. So they just go right over them or under them or around them or through them. Every now and then you just got to run duo and go through the roadblock. When the championship, right?

Then last, right? It's just like, what's next? What's next? What's next? And I'm really comfortable in that loop. And I think we all still are. And then when we're not, that's when you get off.

As long as they are head coaches, these guys aren't just linked by the office clusters some of them shared over a decade ago, or the system they evolved, or how they clashed against the competition rising to meet it, and sometimes against each other. They're also linked by a shared fate to battle for control of that innovation loop

they helped each other build, and it's unending inertia, as it battles for control over them. At the end of day, the NFL business is selling that game theory. We're either irrational enough or maybe rational enough, doubtful, probably more irrational to actually volunteer to be a part of that game theory. At the end of the day, right, probably on this planet when you look up, nothing really

matters. Like, you have a birth date and you got an expiration date. But in that, if that's actually true, nothing really matters. because you have a birth date and an expiration date, then everything in between those two dates really matter. If we're all doomed, why not go for it? Jordan Rodriguez is the creator, reporter, and host of the play callers. Kent Garrison is the supervising producer and sound designer,

editorial assistance from Ken Bradley, Matt Havia, and Mike Smelts are the executive producers.