Books: "The Why Is Everything" By Michael Silver

 

The Why Is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution

By Michael Silver

W.W. Norton & Company; hardcover, 448 pages; $32.50

Michael Silver is an award-winning sports journalist and television analyst who is currently a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He has been a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, a columnist for Yahoo! Sports, and an analyst for the NFL Network. He is the author of All Things Possible, Walk on the Wild Side, Golden Girl, and Rice.

Silver's new book, The Why Is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution, is one of the most comprehensive books on the gridiron you will read, and you'll be sure to appreciate the current crop of NFL head coaches after reading it.

The book centers on the Francisco 49ers Head Coach Kyle Shanahan, as well as his counterparts and rivals Sean McVay of the Los Angeles Rams, Matt La Fleur of the Green Bay Packers, Raheem Morris of the Atlanta Falcons, and the Miami Dolphins' Mike McDaniel.

While the story is centered around Shanahan, Silver crafts his story in a straightforward way, with chapters apiece on these five head coaches, as well as Shanahan's father, Mike, who led the Denver Broncos to two Super Bowls in 1998 and '99, and was also the offensive coordinator for San Francisco's 1994 championship team.

It is fascinating to read Kyle Shanahan's experiences as a coach's son, like what to expect on Monday morning in school, but the thing that stood out about him was how, while in eighth grade, he studied how Jerry Rice and the 49ers receiving corps worked the game plan to perfection.

This led Shanahan to switch from playing quarterback to being a receiver in high school, and though he did play some in college, it was clear what his future would be. When he was just 25 years old, he joined the staff of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as its offensive quality control coach in 2004.

When he got the job, his father told him the best way, as 49ers Super Bowl-winning Head Coach Bill Walsh counseled him, to mold himself into a future head coach was to learn the defensive side of the ball as well. Tampa Bay at that time had one of the best defensive coordinators in the league at the time, Monte Kiffin.

Shanahan learned the game like never before under Gruden, who would give him a set of plays to draw up in his office, a task that would take up to eight hours at the start. When Shanahan got faster, he would sit in on Kiffin's defensive meetings.

"The experience was transformative," Silver writes. "Eventually, as he'd consume Gruden's offensive playbook, Shanahan would begin to consider those plays form a defensive perspective: This would be hard on the defense if they're playing this front. What's the linebacker's responsibility here? Because if he's two-gapping, it will be hard for him to stop. but if he's spilling, man, this play sucks. He was starting to think differently about the game. It wasn't about calling cool plays and seeing them come to life. Instead, it was about knowing a defense's rules and using those rules against it: it was about understanding how defensive players were being coached and exploiting them based on that knowledge."

After two seasons in Tampa Bay, Shanahan moved on to the Houston Texans, which was coached by Gary Kubiak, who offered him a job as receivers coach, and at 26 years old, the youngest position coach in the NFL.

Since Kubiak was on Mike Shanahan's staff, it was also the first time that Kyle got to study his father's offensive system. The shocking thing was that Kyle thought it was the most boring thing he had ever seen. Houston did not have close to the number of plays that Gruden did, and the concepts were far simpler. Eventually, Shanahan found a way to expand on his father's offense, which itself was an evolved version of Walsh's West Coast offense, by tightening the splits of receivers in many formations, essentially not taking the term "wide receiver" so literally, and moving them closer to the tight ends and tackles.

Silver writes of the reception Shanahan received in Houston, "There was plenty of skepticism in the building when Kubiak brought in his former boss's son, by that dissipated quickly. 'Cynically, you look at him and you're like, '[He's] the skinny dude that got his job because his dad,' recalled Robert Saleh, then a Texans defensive quality control coach. 'But it took about a week to realize, 'Wow, this dude's pretty frickin' good.'' To Sage Rosenfels, the Texans' backup quarterback at the time, the hire felt like 'classic NFL nepotism; the guy probably doesn't know his stuff. It didn't take very long to be like, 'Damn, this guy's really good.' And that's unusual.'"

Shanahan served just one season as wide receivers coach, then one as the quarterbacks coach before becoming offensive coordinator for the 2008 and 2009 seasons. The essential rule Shanahan had when he took over was for his colleagues to provide the why, and if they couldn't prove the reasoning behind it, to get out of his office. 

Then, it was off to Washington, where his father had taken over as head coach and brought Kyle in to be his offensive coordinator. After not meshing with Donovan McNabb, who owner Daniel Snyder overruled Shanahan on whether to sign, which led them to a 6-10 record in 2010, followed by 5-11 in '11, it all came together in 2012, the last really memorable year the Washington Redskins have had.

While Mike and Kyle Shanahan felt they should have made a serious run at Peyton Manning, Snyder went all in on drafting Robert Griffin III - known as RG3 - who came highly-touted out of Baylor, after trading with the St. Louis Rams to get the No. 2 pick in the Draft. They also had Kirk Cousins, whom they drafted in the Fourth Round, essentially Shanahan's choice, as a possibility if the oft-injured RG3 got hurt.

By this point, Shanahan had the staff he wanted, with McVay, McDaniel, and LaFleur, who were given the nickname "The Fun Bunch." They determined that the best way to work Griffin III into the NFL was to take the zone read-based attacks that were used at Baylor and work them into their existing systems. The result was an NFC East title, as they edged out the defending Super Bowl champion Giants, and a memorable hard-fought battle in the playoffs against the Seattle Seahawks, which ended with RG3's leg giving out.

After one more year in Washington and one in Cleveland, Shanahan was on to the Atlanta Falcons in 2015, where, Silver writes, "he had a reputation for clashing with talented players who dared deviate from his intricately crafted blueprints. He immediately countered a formidable adversary. Matt Ryan, the Falcons' franchise quarterback since they'd made him the third-overall pick of the 2008 draft, had his way of doing things, and it didn't always conform to Shanahan's. Each also had a temper.

"Just do what I coach you to do, and it will work, Shanahan implored the quarterback known as Matty Ice for his composure in critical moments. There's a reason behind everything we do, but you have to do it the way we coach for it to work.

"Ryan pushed back - it was one thing to draw up play cards and dissect defensive alignments and stay up until the wee hours workshopping new ways of manipulating 11 men around a 100-by-53 1/3-yard patch of turf, or whatever it was Shanahan and his cadre of young, driven, and idiosyncratic assistants did. Actually executing those plays, with violence barreling in from every direction, was an entirely different endeavor. Amid the chaos of a play, those theoretical tenets only went so far."

Their first season was a challenge, but they were sent to the NFL version of "marriage counseling," as they had a frank discussion at the home of Tom House, a former Major League Baseball pitcher who became a renowned throwing coach. That led Shanahan and Ryan to understand themselves more than ever, and develop a system that each had impact on. The result was an NFC Championship, and then taking a 28-3 lead on the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl before it all came crashing down.

By that point, Shanahan already had a verbal agreement to become the Head Coach of the San Francisco 49ers, along with John Lynch taking over as their new General Manager, a partnership that still exists to this day. 

Shanahan was hired after two coaches who had just one-year tenures, Jim Tomsula (hell of a trivia question) and Chip Kelly, after Jim Harbaugh set off for Michigan after the 2014 campaign.

The coaching staff he assembled had a lot of familiar faces, as he was able to bring McDaniel and LaFleur with him from Atlanta. As his defensive coordinator, after a long search, he hired Robert Saleh, who introduced him to LaFleur when they worked together in Houston in 2006. Saleh, the recently departed coach of the Jets, got the job because Shanahan was familiar with the Seattle 3 defense, which was what Atlanta's Head Coach Dan Quinn brought over after he was the defensive coordinator for Seattle's 2013 Super Bowl championship team, of which Saleh was the defensive quality control assistant.

At that time, McVay was also set to become Head Coach of the Los Angeles Rams, who were seeking a spark after a moribund season in their return home. That set the two on a path to being friend/rivals, as McVay also preached that everyone in the Rams organization should master the "know your why" philosophy.

The success of their tenures, with McVay leading the Rams to a Super Bowl title in 2021, and Shanahan's Niners winning NFC Championships, in 2019 and '23, proves they define this era of pro football the way Bill Walsh and Mike Shanahan once did. McDaniel had a longer path to a head coaching job with the Miami Dolphins, and has to deal with the future of Tua Tagovailoa. LaFleur took over Green Bay in 2019, and had to deal with the end of the Aaron Rodgers era before molding a young quarterback in Jordan Love, who led the Packers to a playoff win in Dallas last year before losing to the 49ers. Morris went on to work for McVay in Los Angeles, where he got a Super Bowl ring as the Defensive Coordinator before taking over the Falcons this year. 

The Why Is Everything is one of the finest football books you'll read, as Silver takes their complicated systems and makes them accessible, and it's fascinating to read how their paths, along with their teams, intersected, and what the future holds for this compelling group of football minds.