Coaching’s Generation Y2K/MMQB

Coaching’s Generation Y2K/MMQB

By Robert Klemko

In the early 2000s, a wave of new technology cracked the door open for the newest generation of NFL coaching stars

There was once a small closet inside the old One Buc Place that Buccaneers management saw fit to make into an office, complete with a foreign object nobody quite knew what to do with in the mid-90’s: the coaching staff’s only computer. The hallways were so narrow in that wing of Tampa’s 1976 relic of a facility that if the coach across the hall left his door open just so, the man in the closet was trapped. Coaches were still viewing and showing film on beta tapes and drawing playbooks by hand, so they shoved the 24-year-old quality control coach in the smallest office in the building and let him tinker with the new tech.

Then the new millennium arrived, and magical things started taking shape in the closet. Young men who would later become head coaches and coordinators in the NFL lobbied their bosses to ditch the paper and pencil and embrace a host of computer programs that would make their jobs easier. As offensive quality control coach in 2004, Kyle Shanahan, then 25, converted Jon Gruden’s playbook into XOS, an early pioneer in football’s digital movement. When Nathaniel Hackett arrived in 2006 for his first NFL job—replacing Shanahan as offensive QC coach—he converted Gruden’s 17,000-play bible into Microsoft Visio.

Here is the section on McVay:

Most of the coaches who can attribute at least part of their ascension through the NFL coaching ranks to the tech boom learned the finer points of coaching from men to whom they had become invaluable. For one season in Tampa, in 2008, Sean McVay was Gruden’s shadow and digital translator.

“Gruden would be at work at 4:30 a.m.,” says Bill Muir, Tampa’s offensive coordinator from 2002-08. “He requires a guy basically at his fingertips 24 hours a day. Sean was in essence the offensive QC, but more importantly he was John’s personal assistant. Everything that came out of Jon’s mind or mouth, Sean drew it up and put it on the computer. His office was right outside of his door.

“These guys come in and you see their expertise with computers and they become more inclusive in your planning. In previous years the quality control coaches were in another room when you made the gameplan, doing things that weren’t necessarily innovative. Now, I want these guys close to me because as things pop up in my mind, I want this information now.

“Sean, in a short period of time, got a doctorate degree in offensive football, especially as it related to the passing game, and the unique perspective Jon brought to the game.”

McVay, whose career trajectory benefitted from his father’s coaching and a personal relationship with the Gruden family, became head coach of the Rams in January, 12 days before his 31st birthday. A month later, Kyle Shanahan joined McVay as the second alumnus of Gruden’s offensive quality control gig to get a head coaching opportunity. Hackett, 37, hopes to eventually become the third.

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[mmqb.si.com]