The Why is Everything. If you don’t know it, cut it.

I recently started reading Mike Silver’s, The Why is Everything. I’m not quite halfway through it, but throughout the rest of the offseason, I’m going to sprinkle in some articles with some key takeaways I have from the book.

In case you aren’t familiar, the book is essentially how the Shanahan-McVay offense came to revolutionize offenses throughout the NFL, going all the way back to Mike Shanahan’s beginnings.

My first big takeaway came early in the book. It started with Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense, Mike Shanahan with his self-dubbed “East Coast” offense added another layer, then the next generation pioneered by Kyle really put an exclamation point on showing how an offense needs to be constructed. It goes back to the old idea of “paying your dues.” Coordinators tended to be in their 50s. They would work for a coordinator for years, master how to coach each play in the system, go coordinate one themselves, send their own assistants to be coordinators, and so on. What got lost in that cycle, as the book’s title calls out, is the why behind each play. Football in the late 20th century was primarily ran with plays that everyone knew worked - you just had to execute them. Everyone knew the play worked, so there was never a question as to why.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a time and place, particularly in high school, where I need the player to just execute the play call, but that’s probably the first level of not knowing why. The end of the road is the coach not knowing when he should call the play or why he should call it. After decades of learning a system, implement that system, other assistants leave to implement the system, you get 4, 5, 6 branches off the tree, and now the coach is just calling plays - until Bill Walsh came along.

It wasn’t just that Walsh knew the intent of every play. His plays and philosophies were fundamentally different than anything football had ever seen. He wasn’t a branch of a branch of a branch like almost every other playcaller of the time. He was the trunk of a new tree. Mike Shanahan then paired some of the West Coast philosophies with Alex Gibbs and the Outside Zone run game, along with a few Keepers and Play Passes, giving Kyle his foundation that he took with him to Tampa Bay, where he learned “every football play known to man” through Jon Gruden. As Kyle Shanahan made his way to Houston to be the Offensive Coordinator in the late 2000s, he kept his father’s foundation and filtered through Gruden’s playbook, keeping only the plays that he could tie together with the Outside Zone system.

There may not be a better way to identify the “why” behind every play than trying to filter/cut plays out of a playbook. I spent years doing that to create my high school version of the Shanahan-McVay system. You learn what you want in certain situations and where there is overlap. Some overlap is good, especially when it comes to cutting down a route tree or blocking techniques. Most overlap is bad, such as having 4 different interior run concepts that you’ll never be able to rep enough to succeed at or have difficulty deciding which interior run concept you want when you need one.

If you’re like us in Tennessee, you have some type of dead period where you can’t practice, workout, or even contact players for a set duration of time. Ours is two weeks, and we’re right in the middle of it - one week down, one week to go. This is a perfect time to evaluate your plan for the coming season’s offense. I would challenge you to go through every run scheme and pass concept you plan to run next season and ask yourself when you plan on running it (perhaps even listing out every situation it could theoretically fill on a call sheet) and why you plan on running it there. If you can’t answer it, the play should be cut immediately, no questions asked. I would even suggest that in high school specifically, if a certain scheme isn’t applicable in some form or fashion to the majority of sections on a call sheet, it needs to be cut. I don’t think I have ever thought to myself, “If only we had installed this play this week…” but I know I have thought, “If only we had just made this one block…” Now is the time to fix that mistake. Don’t bloat preseason installs and precious practice reps with plays that only get called 1-2x a game. Find a way to tag or tweak an existing concept and get back the 15-20 reps that probably got spent throughout individual, group, and team practice throughout the week on that one call in order to boost the execution of others.