The Fun Bunch: What Do the NFL's Best Coaches Have in Common?
On classifying coaches, developing quarterbacks, and why you should hire anyone who knows Mike Shanahan.
In 2012, Washington traded three first-round picks to move up in the NFL Draft and take Robert Griffin III. Griffin was an electric dual-threat quarterback fresh off of winning the Heisman, with 4.4s speed and one of the biggest arms in college football. The heavy investment of draft capital made the expectations of owner Dan Snyder clear: Griffin would be Washington’s savior, and the coaching staff needed to get that savior ready by week one.
As Griffin arrived at spring practices, however, head coach Mike Shanahan found a fatal flaw in his game: he couldn’t read an NFL defense. Griffin struggled to understand the defense's formation, where the open receivers were, and how to get them the ball on time. Only a few months from the NFL season, Shanahan and his staff needed to find a scheme for Griffin to hide those deficiencies and still highlight the gifts that made him a top pick.
Leading that charge was Mike’s son Kyle, the team's offensive coordinator and tinkerer-in-chief. The younger Shanahan was 31, a kid by NFL coaching standards, but was already one of the brightest offensive minds in the league. He had worked under innovators like Jon Gruden and Gary Kubiak and served as a play-caller for a top-five offense in Houston. When his father called him up to be his offensive coordinator, Kyle brought two more youthful assistants from Houston: Matt LaFleur, an exacting perfectionist, as the quarterbacks coach, and Mike McDaniel, a former Broncos ball boy turned undersized Yale wide receiver, as an offensive assistant.
Before this make-or-break season, Mike Shanahan searched for a final offensive assistant to add to his staff. He found him in Sean McVay. Like Kyle Shanahan, McVay was a “legacy hire” - his grandfather, John McVay, had been the general manager of the 49ers - and the younger McVay had also spent time as an assistant to Jon Gruden in Tampa Bay. In his first meeting in Tampa, McVay began drawing the Xs and Os for a play when Gruden stopped him, saying, “Your circles are the sh******t f*****g circles I’ve ever seen in my life.” McVay learned quickly under Gruden and developed a reputation as an offensive guru. He joined the Washington offensive think-tank and drew Xs and Os on every free surface in the facilities - all perfectly proportioned.
Locked in a film room months before training camp, Mike Shanahan and his collection of whiz-kids, which Washington beat reporters nicknamed “The Fun Bunch,” set aside all preconceived notions of NFL offenses and began building RG3’s system from scratch. It started with Mike Shanahan’s famous schemes for John Elway and Steve Young. Then they layered in influences from Cam Newton’s rookie season in Carolina and concepts from Tim Tebow’s time in Denver. The playbook that the Fun Bunch produced that preseason helped Griffin win the Offensive Rookie of the Year award and secure a spot in the Pro Bowl.
The success in Washington, however, was short-lived. An injury to Griffin derailed his career and cost the Shanahans and most of the staff their jobs. They scattered across the league, bringing along the ideas they pioneered in Washington.
In the time since, Washington’s Fun Bunch has developed into some of the best coaches in the NFL. In 2017, the younger Shanahan became the head coach of the 49ers and turned it into a perennial contender. That same year, Sean McVay became the youngest head coach in league history when he took over the LA Rams, and two years later, he was the youngest head coach to win the Super Bowl. Matt LaFleur became the head coach of the Packers in 2019 and had the best winning percentage in NFL history through his forty games. In 2021, Mike McDaniel got the Dolphins' head coaching job and overnight turned them into a contender with one of the league’s most electric offenses.
While they are an exceptional group, the rise of the Fun Bunch might just be the new blueprint for what makes a successful, modern NFL head coach.
You Are What You Teach
The first through-line of the Fun Bunch is that they are all innovative, offensive-minded head coaches.
From their first job in the NFL, usually as a quality control coach, coaches are assigned to either the offensive or defensive side of the ball. That designation follows them up the coaching totem pole, where they’ll often lead a position group and eventually become the offensive or defensive coordinator.
Each of those subsequent jobs raises the stakes and presents new challenges to aspiring head coaches. But it also serves another purpose: it provides the coach with valuable experience they later impart to their teams as head coaches. For example, It was no coincidence that Seattle’s “Legion of Boom,” one of the best secondaries in NFL history, was assembled by head coach Pete Carroll, a former defensive back and later a defensive backs coach. The Fun Bunch refined their coaching philosophies by working as offensive assistants under Gary Kubiak, Jon Gruden, and of course, Mike Shanahan.
Of the head coaches that started the 2023 season, 17 were from the offensive side of the ball, and 15 came from the defensive side. When we look at career winning percentages for those coaches, results are slightly in favor of the offensive-minded head coaches. They’ve won 55% of their regular season games, compared to 47% for defensive-minded coaches. That 8% difference is worth around 1.3 games per season.
But ask fans of teams like the Cowboys, Packers, and 49ers, and they’ll quickly tell you that regular season success isn’t the most important metric for a head coach. More important is how often that coach competes for and wins the Super Bowl.
As of late, the balance of power has swung towards the offensive-minded coaches. Over the last five seasons, nine of the ten teams to make the Super Bowl were led by offensive-minded head coaches. The last defensive-minded coach to appear in the Super Bowl was Bill Belichick in 2019, when his Patriots team took down Sean McVay’s Rams 13-3 in the lowest-scoring Super Bowl ever.
What’s led to this recent advantage for offensive minds?
Quarterback Whisperers
For one, rule changes have emphasized scoring and player safety. Freedom of motion changes have made it easier for receivers to create space, and penalties for roughing the passer and hits on defenseless players have been a boon for keeping offensive weapons on the field.
Another reason for the dominance of the offensive-minded head coach is the growing importance of the quarterback position in the modern NFL. Through a combination of breakthrough advancements from minds like Bill Walsh, Mike Leach, and Mike Shanahan, the quarterback and the passing game have moved to the center of the NFL offense.
The quarterback has by far the largest impact of any player on the outcome of a game. As a result, having a dominant quarterback is also more important than any other positional advantage on the field. We can see that idea by using PFF WAR (Pro Football Focus’s wins above replacement formula), which shows that, on average, NFL quarterbacks generate nearly six times more influence on outcomes than the next most important position.
Top quarterbacks have also dominated recent Super Bowls: Over the last ten seasons, there have been twelve different quarterbacks in the Super Bowl, and only one hasn’t made a Pro Bowl. Five of those twelve have won at least one MVP award.
Mike Shanahan had already had a reputation for being a quarterback whisperer before he took over the job in Washington. Of the five quarterbacks to play at least two seasons in his system, all five made the Pro Bowl, including NFL legends Steve Young and John Elway. Shanahan managed to pass that gift on to his assistants: Of the nine starting quarterbacks to play in offenses where a member of the Fun Bunch was the play-caller, seven have made the Pro Bowl.
The parallel between being a quarterback whisperer and a successful head coach also extends beyond Shanahan and his assistants. Andy Reid, who served as the quarterbacks coach for Brett Favre before his time as a head coach, developed all four of his starting quarterbacks - Donovan McNabb, Michael Vick, Alex Smith, and Patrick Mahomes - into Pro Bowlers. Reid saved his best for last; Mahomes has won two MVP awards and two Super Bowls in his first six seasons. The Andy Reid coaching tree, which includes Doug Pederson, Nick Sirianni, and now Shane Steichen, have all shown a similar ability to bring the best out of their quarterbacks. As a result, they’ve had five Super Bowl appearances over the last six seasons.
It’s also true that a deficiency in developing quarterbacks can hamper a head coach’s effectiveness. Mike Tomlin and Pete Carroll are two of the three longest-tenured coaches in the NFL. Both had sustained success in the 2010s under elite quarterbacks Ben Roethlisberger and Russell Wilson. After those options began to struggle, however, Carroll and Tomlin failed to develop suitable replacements and have seen their teams flounder in recent years; the last playoff win for either coach was in 2017.
Bill Belichick, who many believe is the best coach in NFL history, provides an even more striking case. After Tom Brady left for Tampa Bay, Belichick tried Cam Newton, Mac Jones, and Bailey Zappe as starters in New England. The result has been losing seasons in three of the last four years, with no playoff wins since 2018. Belichick is one of the best defensive minds in football, but his failure to develop a successor to Brady at quarterback has left the franchise reeling. It’s put Belichick on the hot seat - despite bringing six Super Bowls to New England in his tenure as head coach.
Future Fun?
Lions’ offensive coordinator Ben Johnson likely tops the list for teams needing a new head coach. He fits nicely into the Fun Bunch archetype; Johnson turned Detroit into a top-five offense and led the resurgence of quarterback Jared Goff. Dave Canales of the Buccaneers is also an intriguing option after revitalizing Tampa Bay’s offense and transforming Baker Mayfield from an NFL journeyman to a top-10 quarterback in adjusted efficiency, according to Kevin Cole at Unexpected Points.
But for a prospect with the most similar characteristics to the Fun Bunch, look no further than Bobby Slowik, the offensive coordinator for the Houston Texans. Slowik walked into a Texans offense this season with rookie quarterback CJ Stroud, whose alarmingly low S2 cognition score prompted questions about whether he was ready to lead an offense. The Texans responded by beating all expectations and making the playoffs, with Stroud playing like a star all season long.
Slowik came to Houston from Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers, where he served as the passing game coordinator, but his first NFL gig? An assistant with Mike Shanahan’s Washington team alongside the younger Shanahan, McVay, McDaniel, and LaFleur. And the apple rarely falls far from Mike Shanahan’s coaching tree.
Edited Excellently by Greta Gruber
This piece relied heavily on some excellent reporting, those pieces are linked below:
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/34363420/welcome-sean-mcvay-moment-pressures-brought-pinnacle-why-satisfaction-hard-come-by
Great piece, and a great reminder how Bruce Allen and Dan Snyder squandered the coaching dream team they once had.
What a great article! As a Jets fan a constant question we ask ourselves is did we make a mistake hiring a defensive minded coach in Saleh and should we have gone the offensive route with the success of McVay, LaFleur McDaniels etc...
That stat about the super bowls is staggering and definitely something i will be thinking about these next couple of weeks throughout the playoffs.