Weekly Commentary and Review #2

The blossoming Shanahan tree, what to do (if anything) about RB devaluation, sifting through offseason news, and a first look at how fantasy drafters will value players this year

This post looks at a handful of relevant articles, analyses and podcasts from the week that provide useful insight to be absorbed, or have missing context to be added. I’ll add my takes on the material, while heavily quoting the relevant passages.

THE PLAYCALLERS

If you’re going to consume one piece of content from this week, it should be “The Playcallers” podcast series from The Athletic’s Jourdan Rodrigue. The setup for the series as explained by Rodrigue:

Piece by piece, the story came to life through the eyes, voices and minds of four main characters: 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, Rams coach Sean McVay, Packers coach Matt LaFleur and Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel.

Why these coaches, specifically? It’s a fair question.

The podcast includes interviews with other head and assistant coaches across the NFL, as well as front-office staffers and some of the sport’s brightest analysts. Their own timelines have intersected schematically or philosophically with the four coaches around whom the story revolves. But Shanahan, McVay, LaFleur and McDaniel are the “faces” of the young coaching family whose offensive system permeates the NFL. They are also fated — or doomed, depending on who you ask — to be linked to each other forever.

Going into listening, I thought the project could become hagiography, leaning so far into the narrative of the genius of Kyle Shanahan and his tree that it would fall flat as a document of what happened and who these coaches really are. That wasn’t the case. The overarching theme of the Shanahan tree’s success is there, but in the background, and Rodrigue’s storytelling feels like it could be about many sets of coaching relationships, not that there is something special and unique about these four coaches.

I don’t want to rehash what happens in the entire series point-by-point. But I do want to talk about the four main coaches profiled, in the purpose of illustrating the broader themes. We’ll start with Shanahan. Superficially, it’s easy to put him in the same bucket of young, new-wave coaches as the rest, but he really isn’t. At 43 years old, Shanahan the same age as LaFleur, a few years older than McDaniel and six years older than McVay. They’re of the same generation, whether you want to classify them as young Gen X or geriatric millennials. But Shanahan has been in a position of control (coordinator/playcaller) since becoming the offensive coordinator for the Houston Texans in 2008, only five years after starting as graduate assistant at UCLA. That’s 15 years ago. McVay has a decent tenure as playcaller of nine years (2014 Washington), but Lafleur first called plays only five years back (2018 Titans), and McDaniel never had the reins until last season.

Shanahan comes off as the grizzled old-school coach, having absorbed at lot of philosophy from his dad Mike, who first became a head coach 35 years ago. I don’t want to be overconfident in my armchair psycho-analysis here, but Shanahan definitely projected less humility and openness than the others. He probably has a higher degree of ingenuity and drive than any coach in the NFL (McVay close, if not equal), but we’ve seen many examples of when his lack of humility has hurt the process of maximizing edges and team-building.

In a window into Shanahan’s ability to reflect, he largely brushed off - as he has in past - his incorrect decision to pass at the end of the Super Bowl against the Patriots, which he frames in the paradigm of choosing aggression over conservatism.

“Do you want to go with the risky thing, or do you want to go with the conservative thing? Well, my personality is the risky thing. There’s no doubt about that. As I get older and mature more, in life, I learn that maybe you shouldn’t jump off that cliff. Maybe you shouldn’t drive that fast. Just like as we all do as we get older.”

Analytics is often conflated with “being aggressive”, but the link between the two is a function of coaches generally being too conservative versus the optimal strategy. Maximizing your edge is fundamentally agnostic to how you should aggressive you should be versus the established norms. In some ways, Shanahan might be fundamentally aggressive, but I think most coaches are affected most by regret aversion, explaining how they can sometimes be more aggressive than the optimal strategy (e.g. going for two to take a one-point lead with too much time on the clock), then most other times be too conservative. Shanahan likely would have regretted more running the ball in that situation and losing, especially after seeing his offense be so impotent the last several drives and having to turn the game over to a kicker to seal the deal. By passing, Shanahan could end the game right then, maximizing the perception of his control over the outcome. This is just the flip side of how we often see Shanhan doing the conservative thing, like the aversion to going for it in optimal fourth down situations and letting this efficient passing game take more chances on early downs. He would regret not making the fourth down more, even if it’s the right thing to do.

On way to counteract regret aversion is to be intellectually humble and open to the idea that your instincts can be wrong, and that randomness abounds. You can be more confident and check your instincts through respecting base rates and absorbing what model-based analysis can provide. That new understanding will lower regret and free you to make the right decisions. There was nothing in this series that makes me think that Shanahan has gotten closer over the years to lowering his instinct-based regret.

I’d put McVay, LaFleur and McDaniel in a different bucket of having more intellectual humility, perhaps because they haven’t be as locked into the ultimate decision-maker for as long as Shanahan. If anything, Shanahan seems to force a lot of humility onto his subordinates in Houston and Washington, poking holes in their work and having them fight for his approval.

McDaniel, for me, came off as the most intellectually humble and having the strongest understanding of probabilistic outcomes, which might be the most important distinction of process- vs results-based thinkers. Here’s how he described the playcallers true impact versus perception:

“I think that most of the playcallers think their playcalls win or lose games ….. I don’t understand how you can overweigh your contribution to the team, when you’ve had so many examples of calling a trash play and it works, or calling a perfect play and it doesn’t work.

“So if you can rectify that in your brain on the front end, there’s a tremendous amount of liberty to let go, and to recognize that this is your best educated guess. That’s all it is.

“You’re trying to put people in positions to succeed, but they’re the ones who are scoring touchdowns - the players. They’re the ones that have to execute the assignment……

“All these things, so many people involved. How shortsighted and egotistical/dumb is it to sit there and act like your playcall wins or loses the game.”

What McDaniel describes is a perfect mental framework to free yourself from regret aversion, putting the emphasis on how you approach situations on the front end, and focusing on what your true scope of control.

I think, for many, expressing this understanding of variance and lack of control comes off as shirking responsibility, or passing the buck. It’s true that throwing your hands up and putting it all on cosmic forces you can’t control could become an excuse factory, and will de-motivate some. It doesn’t appear to have that effect on McDaniel.

What’s funny about McDaniel is that I was I initially was worried about his conceptual understanding of optimal process from his interviews last offseason. But actions speak louder than words, and the Dolphins were one of the better teams at harnessing the edges in in-game decision-making, on fourth downs and early down pass frequency.

We’ll see where all these coaches end up in a few years, with McDaniel having the shortest leash, probably needing a playoff birth in a stacked AFC East to guarantee his return next season.

HAS RUNNING BACK DEVALUATION GONE TOO FAR?

ESPN’s Bill Barnwell wrote an excellent analysis on why star NFL running backs have been devalued and what’s next for the position. He meticulously goes through why running backs have been devalued, if it’s gone too far, and what could reverse the trend.

Starting with when the devaluation began, Barnwell points all the way back to Shanahan the Elder and his success with relative unknowns in the wide zone scheme.

From my perspective, the running back value conversation dates back to McVay's old boss and one of the league's best offenses. Mike Shanahan's Denver teams produced huge numbers with a series of unheralded rookies, undrafted free agents and journeymen rotating through at running back. The most famous and successful back of the bunch, Hall of Famer Terrell Davis, was a sixth-round pick in 1995.

Other backs weren't able to fully reproduce Davis' incredible numbers after he went down injured, but Olandis Gary (1999), Mike Anderson (2000) and Reuben Droughns (2004) all had big seasons with anonymous pedigrees and modest deals. Clinton Portis, a second-round pick in 2002, played well enough to inspire a swap for Hall of Fame cornerback Champ Bailey, with the Broncos even getting an extra pick in the process.

I agree that the Shanahans provided a ton of evidence that running backs could be less irreplaceable than thought, or at least that they weren’t as valuable as perceptions reflected in annual MVP voting, where the position got the second most votes to quarterbacks and won the second most awards.

I think this evidence probably had less of an impact versus the shift to multi-back systems, which almost forced teams to lower the cost of any single running back, unable to justify a large contract on a player of limited usage. Even coming off of UDFA pedigree, Arian Foster got a healthy extension as a three-down back in 2012, at the cap-adjusted equivalent of Christian McCaffrey’s deal now ($16.2 million APY). In 2011, Adrian Peterson and Chris Johnson, backs who were still perceived to matter got extensions worth the equivalent of $26.5 million and $25.2 million APY, respectively, in 2023 dollars. These deals were all signed over a decade after Shanahan was providing tons of evidence that running backs weren’t irreplaceable.

Barnwell does mention the shifting offensive workload for running backs, and the committee backfield taking over as another reason.