Why Kyle Shanahan is Elite

This about geniuses. Offensive geniuses to be precise.

This comes from the latest episode of The Cohn Zohn. To hear the full episode, click here.

This about geniuses. Offensive geniuses to be precise.

Since 1980, there have been three offensive geniuses -- Bill Walsh, Joe Gibbs and Andy Reid. Kyle Shanahan hasn’t earned the genius designation yet -- he’s young. He hasn’t won a Super Bowl. But he’s terrific. Call him a genius in training. And there are certain things he does right now that are at the genius level.

Shanahan is a genius play-designer for run plays and play-action passes. No one creates bigger holes or more wide-open receivers than Shanahan. In the NFL, holes usually are small and players usually aren’t wide open, so offenses look for good matchups -- a wide receiver covered by a cornerback he can beat. Not a wide receiver covered by no one. That’s high school.

Shanahan frequently makes NFL defenses look like high-school defenses. They simply lose track of his receivers or don’t know where the ball carrier is. Any coach who can create such confusion in defenses is special. 

All offensive coaches throughout the country at all levels -- college, high school, Pee Wee -- know they have to watch Shanahan’s tape weekly. That’s required homework. If you’re an English major, you have to read Chaucer. If you’re an offensive coach, you have to watch Shanahan.

Jim Harbaugh said he watches Shanahan all the time to steal his ideas. What a compliment. Coaches are supposed to steal from each other, and who better to steal from than Shanahan? When Shanaahan doesn’t get a receiver open, I’m amazed. I expect him to work his magic every single play.

I assume Shanahan thinks about and designs plays 24/7. I bet he has been that way since middle school, the way we would doodle in our notebooks and make all-star teams. When I was a kid, I made all-star teams all the time. Shanahan probably drew up plays and gave them to his dad to use in NFL games. And I bet his dad used them sometimes. And then Shanahan graduated college and became a quality control coach for Jon Gruden on the Bucs. And Shanahan drew up lots of plays for Gruden, and Gruden used them sometimes. But not nearly often enough from Shanahan’s perspective.

Shanahan probably feels he has been ready to run an offense since he was 12-years old.

Shanahan is so far beyond Gruden these days. It’s a case in which the pupil has blown past the teacher. Gruden is a system coach -- he imbibed Bill Walsh’s West Coast Offense through Mike Holmgren and doesn’t have much to add to it.

Shanahan didn’t get the Walsh system -- he got the Mike Shanahan system. But Shanahan has tinkered with it and modernized it. Has done way more with his dad’s system than Gruden ever has done with Walsh’s system.

So Shanahan has genius qualities, but isn’t yet a full-fledged genius. Does he have it in him to become a genius at the level of Walsh, Gibbs and Reid?

Hell yes.

Shanahan is a young coach who’s extremely faithful to his dad’s style. As he gets older, he may develop more of his own style, and Shanahan has all the creativity to go his own direction. He’s only 40. When he’s 60, his offense could look drastically different.