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Knowers of Ball

The NFL attempts to innovate The Baffler

The Why is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolutionby Michael Silver. W. W. Norton, 448 pages. 2024.

Innovation has come for the NFL, America’s most popular sports league. As the writer Chuck Klosterman once pointed out, football presents itself as conservative but is incredibly liberal in terms of the competition’s evolution: the introduction of the forward pass, nearly 120 years ago, remains one of the biggest rule changes to any modern sport. The “innovation” sweeping the league now is of the kind we hear about from Silicon Valley; indeed, San Francisco is the epicenter of the New Football, one that syncs nicely with a data-driven culture in which humans and their behaviors are reduced to spreadsheets.

The NFL has become appointment viewing for those who wish to understand the intensification of labor—both managerial and manual—that comes with the new spirit of capitalism, peaking last February with 120-odd million people watching San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan make his third appearance at the Big Game (albeit losing each time). This capped a sometimes frustrating, often dazzling decade in which the young head coach has been hailed as transforming, changing, revolutionizingthe sport with an agile, intense system requiring total immersive study from his staff and players.

Sportswriter Michael Silver’s The Why is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolutioncovers the rise of Shanahan and his cohort, most prominently including Rams coach Sean McVay, along with Green Bay Packers coach Matt Lafleur and Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel. Some members of this group—its nerdy, workaholic tendencies earned it the ironic moniker the “fun bunch” from an early player—cut their teeth a decade ago on a Washington then-Redskins team coached by Shanahan’s dad, Mike. (Kyle is arguably the NFL’s ultimate nepo baby, but he’s not the only member of the fun bunch from a family football dynasty; McVay’s grandfather, for instance, was the coach of the New York Giants in the 1970s.) Leaning into the hagiography typical of the genre, the book tries to tell the story of a genius, or many geniuses, who have changed the sport, attempting to pin down the essence of the new style, which has, despite its prowess, lacked a clear explanation.

Silver’s idea is that the fun bunch’s essence is “the why”—as in, whyset up in that formation, why use that footwork, whyare we passing on this down. Whyputs the system first; why summarizes the intense scrutiny and utter grind of these coaches. It’s a compelling idea: the new coach is not an instinct guy but a brainiac, an intellectual, or, in the lingo of the league, a “knower of ball.” The motto of this approach is “plays over players”—system above stars— which amounts to knowledge over labor. This was imparted to Shanahan’s cohort by his father, who constantly set an example in his son’s and his son’s friends’ lives with his utter commitment, day and night, to beating the shit out of the specific opponent he faced each week. As the younger generation came into their own, they increasingly resisted relying on the natural instincts of their players to dominate their opponents. Instead, they demanded that players adhere to the coaches’ scheme to allow for maximum tweakability, upsetting the old balance between coach and quarterback, which allowed the latter a great deal more agency. When you watch football today, you’re watching a massive amount of crunched data flow into split-second decisions not just by the freak athletes who make highlight reels, but by a new set of eggheads on the sidelines.

Starting on that Washington team in 2014, this young generation took the technical aspects of the offensive style they were learning and went hog wild on the details. This has led to the sense that Shanahan and the whole bunch are “genius,” impossible to scheme against, the avant-garde of the NFL. But while it’s led to a lot of jobs, it hasn’t been a recipe for winning it all. Shanahan, for all the buzz around him, has struggled his entire career to succeed almost in spite of his quarterbacks. As offensive coordinator of the Redskins (now Commanders, for obvious reasons), Kyle was forced to draft Robert Griffin III (he wanted now-Falcons QB Kirk Cousins, the ultimate game manager). The predecessor to today’s “dual threat” quarterbacks, who are as likely to run the ball themselves as to pass, Griffin preferred to rely on his own instincts, leading to mutual tempers flaring and schematic dysfunction. (Lafleur had significant friction with future hall-of-famer Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay over this exact issue, with the veteran thrower wanting the freedom to call his own audibles at the line. Rodgers has continued to impose his player’s will over the systems coaches, as Jets owner Woody Johnson fired Shanahan-tree head coach Robert Saleh a few weeks ago, only for the Jets to lose the following two games.) Anecdote after anecdote from the course of Shanahan’s career from Washington to San Francisco shows how, sometimes even when a player succeeds, the coach would bawl him out if he didn’t do it the “right” way.

As the book progresses, Silver’s whyframing thins out, threatening to become just one of the floating signifiers that make up sports jargon: “he’s different,” “he’s got that dogin him,” or my personal favorite expressive tautology: “he’s him.” These phrases have real psychological value, even if they don’t exactly have much of an actual referent. Thewhy is like that too: not quite empty verbiage, but not what it claims to describe either. You’re not allowed, so Silver tells us, to give Kyle any idea without demonstrating whyin a granular way that’s not just Xs and Os. The direction the linemen set their feet, the hip movement of a receiver—it all comes in for microanalysis. Those things really do matter, but it’s less clear that they end up making the difference at the level of the system that the culture claims they do. Always giving the whyis more a statement about the relentless crush of the mental labor of coaching—and playing for these coaches—than it is about insight into how to actually win games.

This crush is orchestrated by the “quality control” coach, an unglamorous role and the most abstract job on staff. Each NFL team has one, giving quantitative feedback on the sidelines to the regular coaches and essentially telling them what the balance sheet says about how predictable their play-calling is. Rather than focusing on what the plays are, this guy focuses on numbers. Quality control is a film job that requires the “all-twenty-two” view, seeing the whole field so you can break it down into numbers. Think of it as a “skybox” view from above, which render the players as dots—as in NextGen’s ubiquitous animations. In some ways, this is the essence of the Shanahan Revolution: “plays over players,” or system over players, promotes quality control to an unheard-of role. Coaching has become so complex, so data-based, that the head coach needs that quality-control data and then has to engage the complex process of predicting the moves his chess partner is making on the other sideline. McVay recalls learning this synoptic view and thinking, “Man, I thought I knew what was going on as a player. I didn’t know.”

Quality control in this new role has led to the Excel-ification of the game. Watch a game and you’ll see players and coaches on the sidelines looking at Microsoft Surface tablets, breaking down plays by thousands of data points in real time. McDaniel in particular came up by translating the psychotic levels of opponent-specific focus in Mike Shanahan’s work into the datafied version of the game. Silver reports that he was “self-taught” on Microsoft Visio and Excel, which he used to develop an entire database of plays to serve to Kyle. The specifics of these databases are corporate secrets, but the tools make clear what’s possible: instantly chopping up plays by any combination of categories the software offers. Here’s every play where the running back opts for the C-gap in Jumbo personnel against a zone look from the defense; here’s every five-step drop back in which the quarterback was flushed from the pocket but still completed a pass. As quality control coach, McDaniel could boil strategy replete with statistical predictions into one page, condensing massive amounts of information into a plan with a why.Thinking “outside the box” means doing everything in spreadsheet cells.

In the book and in the general NFL press, this is what is called “innovation,” but it’s also called covering your ass. In a league famous for bottom-lining everything—“just find a way to win”—the new coaches and their schemes are often more about making the “right” decision even if it doesn’t actually work. When Lafleur took the ball out of Aaron Rodgers’ hands and instead went for a field goal in the 2021 NFC Championship game (a move that was widely panned as leading to the eventual loss), he was choosing system, scheme, and strategy over his best player. Commentators now obsess about whether such a decision was “correct” even if—especially if—it didn’t work out. The whywants you to be responsible, not take a risk, and what counts as responsible comes from data and systems, not human judgment.

Shanahan’s struggle to get over the hump and win a Super Bowl come down to the technology race. The rise of analytics, first offered by the company Pro Football Focus, tracks neatly with the new coaching tendencies, with the software’s first contracts with teams in the 2011 season and its quick spread after. This data, which gets more granular all the time, made it easy for opposing coaches to break down his schemes week-to-week using categories ready-made in the program. Before this, Silver reports, it would usually take most of a season for defenses to get used to Kyle’s out-of-the-box thinking. Now it took hours. But even as the league caught up, it’s not clear that it’s notthe players who win the games, after all.

When he was running the Atlanta Falcons’ offense, for instance, Shanahan discovered that if he ran his wide receivers on slants to occupy the defense’s cornerbacks, he could “leak” two tight ends into the secondary where they’d be wide open. Legendary Seattle defensive back Richard Sherman reportedly lost his temper, screaming at his coaches, who couldn’t seem to adjust. But while Seattle wasn’t able to defend that scheme, they ended up winning the game: the dazzle of the Shanahan plan was ultimately defeated by the defense of Sherman and company, known as the Legion of Boom for their physical, dominant play. Innovation sparkles on the spreadsheet while talented players muscle past the eggheads to the win.

Again and again, we hear this story: the new coaches are geniuses; they’ve changed the game and its culture. Winning is the obsessive focus but not the outcome. One need only to look at Shanahan’s three failed Super Bowl attempts. While no one knows if he will ever win it all, one of the guys in the fun bunch will, though, almost by process of elimination—they now are head coaches of as much as a third of the league’s teams. Their takeover has been mirrored by a larger turn toward professional-managerial class thinking in the league: an embrace of corporate liberal politics (see the placement of “end racism” and other bromides on helmets and in promos); and a push toward therapy culture that sees the league ask players to talk openly about depression and anxiety and run ads for therapy, in what often amounts to the repressed admission of the brain trauma the sport fosters.

But as the therapy talk and team-building exercises out of The Office (e.g., “Tell the Truth Monday,” a take-accountability institution Morris once instituted for his team after a bad loss) proliferate, they mask the economic fundamentals of the league, in which billionaires pay the salaries of freak athletes. McVay is the sole winner of a Super Bowl so far in the group, but he did it by getting the general manager and owner of the Rams to buy talent, leveraging many years of the franchise’s future in trading draft picks for future hall-of-fame quarterback Matthew Stafford, and spending tens of millions of dollars on short-term in-season trades for pass rusher Von Miller and start wide receiver Odell Beckham, Jr. Creating what was probably the NFL’s first super team by means of hard cash layout is literally the opposite of the why ethos, and an approach only made possible by the special breed of demented billionaire that is the NFL owner.

The owners make money hand over fist in public-private setups that often see states investing billions of dollars in franchises and stadiums that they profit from (the Buffalo Bills’ new stadium, now under construction, will cost New York state taxpayers $850 million of a projected $1.7 billion total). They control the commissioner, Roger Goodell, and largely seem to control all information about the league: football reporting is highly technical, very entertaining, and utterly without any critical voices (think of the many times we have heard that a player has “off-field issues” when, as in the case of quarterback Deshaun Watson, those issues are something like dozens of sexual assault charges). They also share revenue, which Klosterman calls “arguably the most successful form of socialism in U.S. history,” a kind of Marxism for the one percent.

From Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, whose sobriety and sanity seem questionable when he talks to the press, to Jerry Jones, who has been committing high-profile seppuku with the Dallas Cowboys since the 1990s and was forced to address his presence at counter-civil-rights protests in the 1950s, the NFL’s owner class seems like a case study in everything that’s wrong with American capitalism. The ongoing fiasco around Deshaun Watson, the accused serial sexual harasser who tore his Achilles last week after playing the worst football in the league for two seasons on a historically large, team-crippling contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is only the most egregious example of the autocracy of the owners, the rational kernel inside the mystical shell of “genius” coaches and their “innovations.” But maybe that’s the truth of the scientific sheen on capitalism in general now: tons of data and huge amounts of brainpower to distract from the collectivist class warfare of idle billionaires.

The Washington Postcolumnist George Will once called football “violence, punctuated by committee meetings.” The fun bunch has shifted the balance towards the latter, even as their innovation amounts to stagnation, all that data and analysis amounting to an explanation—a why—that can’t provide a win.