The call rang out on some faraway practice field back in 2011 when a scarecrow-thin defensive assistant propped himself under center, reprising his role from a former life as a college quarterback.
The Chargers were running one-on-one pass-rush drills and needed a coach to simulate a live target.
WHITE 80. WHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE 80.
Normally, this is not a method-acting role. The quieter the better for those cornered in a lucky-to-be-here, low-pay gig at the bottom of the NFL’s coaching hierarchy. A little “set-hut” will suffice. But Shane Steichen believes in energy. His life was changed through football moments, such as the time in a junior varsity game when, in the fourth quarter, his team ran an old-school I-right roll pass to the fullback to score the winning touchdown with the entire varsity team watching in the stands. Or when he finally got the keys to the stadium lights from his coach and would leave weekend parties to whip the football around with whoever he could drag with him.
So, no, he wasn’t going to just pat the football and dump it off. Philip Rivers, then the Chargers’ franchise quarterback and most important player, was on the other side of the field when the drill started. He jogged over and eyed up the new guy.
“That’s how you call a snap count!” Rivers said.
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By 2016, Steichen would be Rivers’s quarterbacks coach and later his offensive coordinator. Rivers was three years his senior (a dynamic that only complicated matters during training camp when Steichen would jump into quarterback challenges in which the Chargers would go from youngest to oldest, and Rivers would follow his coach), but there was a mutual respect and, from it, a shared shorthand language that developed from their large chunks of time spent together. Both men would find themselves waving off the other after a few syllables. The most common refrain was, “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
But it was when Steichen replicated this kind of relationship and on-field success again with Justin Herbert as the Chargers’ offensive coordinator in 2020 (including Herbert’s first career start, which allowed less than a minute of preparation time after Tyrod Taylor’s unexpected pregame injury caused by the team’s medical staff), that people around the league started to take notice. Especially now, as play-caller and coordinator for the Eagles, with QB Jalen Hurts on an MVP trajectory before potentially being sidelined by a shoulder injury, Steichen has garnered a reputation as a bit of an offensive mystic whose core philosophies can transcend the varied body types and styles of his quarterbacks. As NFL teams with head coaching vacancies prepare to make a run at potential candidates in 2023, he is at the top of a very short list.
The secret, according to those who know him, is an ability to reverse engineer. Steichen wants all of his quarterbacks—all of his players, really—to feel like he did in those moments back in high school or on the practice field where the coach, the play, the quarterback and the offense are all aligned, bound by the cosmic joy of the perfect call at the perfect moment. The same can be said for his system in general, which is a scheme based in some ways on the classic Norv Turner–style offense—full of punishing deep shots and efficient, layered routes underneath—but more of a vision driven by the quarterback’s personal comforts. In short, Steichen succeeds by taking what his team is best at, taking what makes a defense uncomfortable by virtue of their own rules, and overlaying the two into a vicious game plan.
According to charting data from Sports Info Solutions, the Eagles are incredibly hard to pin down into one specific offensive category. They are middle-of-the-road in all kinds of offensive biomarkers such as short drops and deep drops or 11-, 12- and 13-personnel (differing combinations of wide receivers, running backs and tight ends). They use backfield motion effectively until they don’t.
So far in 2022, that has resulted in an offense with the third-most total yards (394.1 per game) behind the Chiefs and Bills; the fourth-most rushing yards (158.6 per game) behind the Bears, Ravens and Falcons; the second-most yards per passing attempt (8.2) behind the Dolphins; and the second-most points per game (29.4) behind the Chiefs.
Says Eagles coach Nick Sirianni of Steichen: “He’ll be a great head coach. He can connect with guys, he can hold them accountable and he’s been around a lot of great coaches. He’s a student of the game, there’s no doubt in my mind that when he has his opportunity he’s going to run with it.”
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Here’s a story that sounds a little like an after-school special. One of Steichen’s teammates on varsity at Oak Ridge in California was Austin Collie, a wide receiver who went on to set records at Brigham Young and play five seasons in the NFL. There was a familiar turning point in their lives when social gatherings stopped revolving specifically around sports and started involving drinking and other various stereotypical rituals of rebellion.
Collie said it was easy for him to abstain. A devout Mormon, drugs of any kind were never a consideration. But he remembered being around Steichen at that time, talking to him regularly, comparing the handwritten letters they would get from college recruiters or poring over their Madden strategies. Steichen would leave parties at the same time Collie did, shortly after walking in the door. Anything that didn’t relate to football would simply ricochet out of his life, but his reasoning felt as real and as ironclad as a faith Collie was raised on.
“Football is a religion to him,” Collie says. “There was no point where I wondered, ‘Hmm, I wonder what Shane is going to do.’”
In reality, this story goes a long way toward explaining Steichen’s entire milieu. Football coaches are a lot like the way Martin Sheen describes police officers in The Departed. There are cops, people who were born to seek justice and lock away criminals, and there are people who just want to carry around a badge and a gun. Steichen was always going to be a football coach. After Steichen hurt his ankle at UNLV, derailing his playing career, Collie doesn’t even remember a discussion about what he would do next. It was just a sensible pivot toward the next version of his football life, a movement to stay in the stream. Steichen had been breaking down film since high school, when his coach’s mother-in-law, an administrator at the school, would facilitate the escape from certain classes into her son-in-law’s room so they could fire up a VHS player and dissect an upcoming opponent.
According to those who know him, this drive creates a unique, buzzing personality that eulogizes the game and creates fertile ground for both innovation and happiness. One minute he can make a deeply personal observation about someone or something in the room, while tracking a slew of developments on film scrolling idly by on the screen next to him. The next minute he can be in a heated game of H-O-R-S-E on a hoop mounted to the wall in the team meeting room (an old coach of Steichen’s says that, in high school, there would be a $75 pot for anyone who could make a half-court shot at halftime, and that Steichen used to stand in the gym for hours and practice the perfect form and trajectory, enough so that he “didn’t have to work” if he didn’t want to because he made so much money). It’s why, when you ask around about how the Eagles can come up with something we’ve never quite seen before—take Week 15’s game against the Bears, when the entire offensive line shifted down a spot like some twisted game of Frogger and Hurts walked in for a touchdown, or another short-yardage QB sneak where the Eagles scored despite a Bears’ defensive lineman lining up in the Eagles’ backfield—the answer you’ll get is that it just happens. In reality, this is what a life completely absorbed in football yields, the kind of schematic manipulations that make a viewer wonder whether what just took place was even legal.
Collie, who played for the Colts from 2009 to ’12 and the Patriots in ’13, has been around a handful of people like that in his life.
“I definitely think his approach to the game, I can tell you, it’s similar to the likes of Peyton Manning,” Collie says, referencing the quarterback who threw his first 15 NFL touchdown catches. “Only because they both have a very unique passion for football. More unique than we’ve seen from other guys. From Day 1, I knew he was going to be someone in football. He has an understanding of the game that not many people have.”
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Here’s a belief about the coach-hiring process that produces some cynicism. Owners are drawn to the coaches whose systems put up points and are often pushed that way by advisers and search firms and, perhaps, their own children who play fantasy football. This hiring strategy can yield you Zac Taylor (Bengals), Kevin O’Connell (Vikings), Mike McDaniel (Dolphins) and Kyle Shanahan (49ers), whose teams are all in playoff position through 15 weeks. It can also set your franchise back half a decade when it becomes clear that coaching a football team is more complicated than carrying a playbook from one building to the next.
In reality, the best assistant coaches have something to do with the creation of their cultures at each spot. They understand why it succeeds in a holistic way.
The Eagles appear to have more fun than any other team in football. Their offensive line made a Christmas album. Their receiving corps call each other nicknames (“Swole Batman” for A.J. Brown). But the core of their setup is entirely Bill Parcells–ian, Tom Coughlin–esque and perhaps a little twinge of Pete Carroll–ist. Practices, for example, are timed to the second. Every day. Coaches and players are held to a standard that is, like the Eagles’ offense, simply dressed up to look like something else. It is fun. It is competition. It is Pop-A-Shot in the weight room. It is checking yourself and your emotions at the door and wondering whether you are bringing the right vibe into the room.
For Sirianni, that came from his father, Fran, his high school’s longtime coach.
“You take from those relationships and how they work,” Sirianni says. “A lot of us out here got into coaching inspired by a coach we had. Whether that was college or high school, whatever, that’s how we get into this thing.”
For Steichen, it was his high school coach, Chris Jones.
In some way each of their role models were able to artfully disguise the effort and the dedication that it took to succeed in football. Or, at the very least, make the effort and the dedication seem more glamorous than it really is. (Steichen is often quoted at press conferences saying, “The separation is in the preparation.”)
“We had a young staff, young coaches; we tried to have this family-fun approach to the entire thing, and it worked,” Jones says. “We got the buy-in, and guys like Shane were great because they helped us have success and they helped reemphasize some of the stuff we were talking about.”
Back then, Jones and Steichen would sit in shotgun, spread the field with five wide receivers and chuck the ball 30 times a game when the rest of Northern California was still trying to ram the ball down everyone’s throats.
The two worked together to create an offense that took core concepts and, Jones says, “do a little bit more, and look like we were doing a little bit more than we were actually doing, dressing up [the offense] and finding different ways to do the things we did really well.”
It is a theory that looks familiar now to Jones when he watches the Eagles.
“They’ll teach a simple concept, but the brains behind the whole thing is how you get to it,” Jones says.
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Rivers’s football season ended around Halloween this year. Now the head coach of Saint Michael Catholic in Fairhope, Ala., he said “it’s not O.K.” that he doesn’t get to be on a field until November or December anymore. But it means more time to pick the brains of old coaches and friends.
Rivers and Steichen still talk regularly, as Rivers wanted to run a version of the same offense with his kids. Back when they worked together, their first and perhaps most detailed film breakdown each week would come immediately after games before either of them had a second to look at the tape. Rivers would eventually pull out his iPad, but he saw what happened to him live and appreciated that Steichen could speak as if he were right alongside him.
“I’ll call him after an Eagles win and I’ll be like, Y’all ran this and this and this, and then he comes right back with, Well yeah, but then the defense did that and that,” Rivers says. “We’re speaking the same language. It’s the offense we ran, and of course it grows with the personnel you have, but I can visualize it as he’s talking to me on the phone.”
Back when they worked together, Rivers saw a realism that transcended some of the other coaches he worked with before. Steichen would eliminate anything extraneous, such as meaningless bag drills, when it came to practice work and would mirror their workouts from a slew of cutups they would watch prior to getting on the field. He would ask himself, and his quarterback: What, exactly, are you doing here on this drop back? How can we make a drill that forces you to do exactly this, and get better at it?
This could mean Rivers being surrounded by swaths of massive, eight-foot-tall netting, or purposely simulated throws in which a small crowd of bodies backed against Rivers mimicking the congestion of an NFL pocket. Rivers jokes that he was already teased for the way he threw a football, so he didn’t mind practicing situations in which his motion was compromised or truncated.
Steichen seemed to understand the quarterback position at a more intimate level. He would willingly delete certain calls from the play sheet, understanding that perhaps, if Rivers had moved slightly to his left during a certain drop back, that it would make for an uncomfortable throw. And, to Rivers’s liking, he wouldn’t simply abandon a concept because it went against basic football rules that can sometimes dictate a coach’s thought process.
“In a meeting with Shane, it was never just [what we saw],” Rivers says. “It was a combination of the coverages and the dudes we’re watching. Like, yeah I know they’re playing Cover 3 but this corner likes to do that and we can get him if we call this.
“Some coaches are going to say, Well, these plays aren’t good against Cover 3. Well,” Rivers says, “it might be against that corner.”
A few weeks after Rivers said this, Steichen called a touchdown to Devonta Smith in which Smith used a man-coverage-beating route to win against “quarters” zone coverage, illustrating Rivers’s point.
“Shane can look out there and see it, a just-play-ball element, and when you add it to the fundamentals and the techniques, it just fit my style and my eye,” Rivers says. He notes that Steichen seemed to have that kind of relationship with everyone, even a kicker or a safety with whom he wasn’t locked in a room for hours.
Hearing Rivers talk about the plays and the offense he shares with Steichen, one can sense the old quarterback starting to talk a little bit faster, a Southern drawl on fast forward.
He says it’s fun for him to relive the whole thing. Rivers enjoys the memories and loves the plays and appreciates the direction it's all going in. Maybe a little bit like he’s still on the field. Exactly how Steichen would want it to feel.
