Broncos fans will recognize several former Denver players and coaches during the AFC and NFC championship games this weekend.
The Broncos did not reach the playoffs this year but the team will be well-represented by former coaches and players in the NFL’s conference championship games this weekend.
49ers center Ben Garland and Emmanuel Sanders both played in Denver before landing in San Francisco. 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan is the son of former Broncos coach Mike Shanahan. Defensive backs/passing game coordinator Joe Woods coached in Denver from 2015-2018.
Wes Welker, who was a key member of the Broncos’ record-breaking offense in 2013, now serves as San Francisco’s wide receivers coach.
In Green Bay, the Packers have three offensive linemen who spent time in Denver: Billy Turner, Jared Veldheer and John Leglue.
The Titans have four former Broncos on their roster: punter Brett Kern, wide receiver Kalif Raymond, linebacker Wesley Woodyard and cornerback Tramaine Brock. Kern earned first-team All-Pro honors and the third Pro Bowl selection of his career this season.
The Titans will take on the Chiefs in the AFC title game on Sunday, Jan. 19 at 1:05 p.m. MT on CBS. The 49ers will face the Packers in the NFC Championship Game on Sunday at 4:40 p.m. MT on Fox.
All four NFL conference championship coaches deserve credit for getting their team to this point. Kyle Shanahan turned around the Niners after finally getting his franchise quarterback in place and a defense built to carry the team. Andy Reid has …
All four NFL conference championship coaches deserve credit for getting their team to this point. Kyle Shanahan turned around the Niners after finally getting his franchise quarterback in place and a defense built to carry the team. Andy Reid has been a staple in the playoffs for most of his career. Matt LaFleur and Mike Vrabel are young, up-and-coming coaches who led their teams to heights few predicted in 2019. So let’s do the obvious thing and rank them.
Neither Kyle Shanahan nor Matt LaFleur was apparently good enough for the Redskins in 2013, but now they’re a game away from the Super Bowl.
So it’s gonna be a “Did you know the two head coaches in the NFC Championship use to coach for the Redskins?” kinda week huh? pic.twitter.com/MVZc7YqTeh
Hey did you hear the news? The two coaches that are going to be coaching in the NFC Championship Game both used to coach for the Washington Redskins.
One is Kyle Shanahan, the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. He used to be the offensive coordinator for the Redskins from 2010-2013. The other coach is Matt Lafleur, with the Green Bay Packers. He used to be the quarterback’s coach for the Redskins during the same time that Shanahan was the OC in Washington. In that time, the Redskins went 24-40 under head coach Mike Shanahan, and they were eventually fired after going 3-13 in their final year with the team.
Now, the two young offensive minds have found greener grass outside of Washington, and they’ve managed to make their way into the playoffs, through the wild card and divisional rounds, and into the conference championship.
Meanwhile, the Redskins missed the playoffs for the fourth consecutive season this year.
A number of coaches have left the Redskins to find great success elsewhere, and Kevin O’Connell is likely the newest member of that club.
Another year, another bright offensive mind choosing to leave the Washington Redskins to coach elsewhere, and likely find great success.
It was reported late on Friday night that The Los Angeles Rams are hiring former Redskins’ offensive coordinator Kevin O’Connell to be the new OC under Sean McVay, a former Redskins coach. The move feels like a great fit for O’Connell, who was given permission to interview with other teams for their job openings after Washington decided to hire Scott Turner, the former QB Coach and interim OC for the Carolina Panthers. Now, O’Connell will reunite with McVay — who he succeeded as the OC in Washington — and they will likely team up to further the Rams’ recent success of deploying a potent offense that keeps defenses on their toes.
This is what makes Redskins fans, and those who cover the team, extremely frustrated. After enduring a 2019 season that was wrought with terrible losses and had injuries and incompetence sprinkled every which way, the 2020 year was starting to look up. A new head coach, a new general manager, and a new coaching staff was expected to right the ship and get things back on track. While many of the coaches in Washington needed to go, there was arguably one coach that nearly everyone wanted to stay, and that was O’Connell. His young offensive mind proved to do wonders with rookie quarterback Dwayne Haskins in 2019, as the two found several things that worked late in the season, and he was said by many respected people to be the next McVay, or Kyle Shanahan, or Matt LaFleur, all of whom came from the Redskins coaching tree. Now, like the aforementioned coaches, O’Connell will realize his success away from Washington D.C.
Of course, none of this is to say that the Redskins made a bad hire with Turner, who could very well be a solid coordinator under Ron Rivera. This is more of an airing of grievances, and something that feels like we should have seen it coming. If you were to build a Redskins coaching staff a month ago, you would bring in a host of new people, and keep the few people who were finding success. That means that KOC remains, and better coaches are brought in around him. Instead, an entirely new staff reigns in Washington, and what feels like the cool-kids club — or maybe the ‘recovering-Redskins’ — are elsewhere, reveling in the joy of realizing success.
Let’s just hope that a bit of that success can be realized in Washington somewhat soon as well.
Heading into the mid-day Saturday playoff game, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan is comparing home-field advantage to global warming ahead of San Francisco (12-3) hosting the Minnesota Vikings (11-6) Saturday.
NFL teams were good on the road during the 2019 regular season. Then, three of four road teams during Wild Card weekend won, leaving home teams watching from home heading into this weekend’s Divisional Round.
So, a reporter asked Shanahan Thursday about his perspective on that and if he still believes home-field advantage exists.
“It definitely exists and it’s just random,” Shanahan said according to NBC Sports Bay Area. “It’s global warming. There’s a home-field advantage. It’s harder to play when you can’t hear. That doesn’t mean you’re going to lose. That’s just a fact. It’s harder to play on the road.”
San Francisco suffered its first loss of the season at home, and two of the team’s three total 2019 losses took place at Levi’s Stadium. A third home loss this weekend would obviously end the Niners’ season, so Shanahan is likely hoping that the effects of home-field advantage show up at kickoff.
Heading into the mid-day Saturday playoff game, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan is comparing home-field advantage to global warming ahead of San Francisco (12-3) hosting the Minnesota Vikings (11-6) Saturday.
Heading into the mid-day Saturday playoff game, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan is comparing home-field advantage to global warming ahead of San Francisco (12-3) hosting the Minnesota Vikings (11-6) Saturday.
Heading into the mid-day Saturday playoff game, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan is comparing home-field advantage to global warming ahead of San Francisco (12-3) hosting the Minnesota Vikings (11-6) Saturday.
Heading into the mid-day Saturday playoff game, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan is comparing home-field advantage to global warming ahead of San Francisco (12-3) hosting the Minnesota Vikings (11-6) Saturday.
49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo technically won two Super Bowls with the New England Patriots. The problem is he played zero snaps in any of the Patriots’ playoff runs during his three full years in their uniform. Garoppolo will get his first …
49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo technically won two Super Bowls with the New England Patriots. The problem is he played zero snaps in any of the Patriots’ playoff runs during his three full years in their uniform.
Garoppolo will get his first taste of postseason action Saturday when the 49ers host the Minnesota Vikings.
Typically the NFL playoffs come with some additional pressure due to the amplified importance of each game, but 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan on Tuesday told reporters he isn’t concerned about Garoppolo wilting in the moment.
“I felt like last week was a playoff game. That was pretty intense,” Shanahan said of the 49ers’ Week 17 win over Seahawks in Seattle. “Or whenever we played Seattle. I think he’s shown he can handle himself in poise. He’s played some really good games. Just like everybody, hopefully he does it this Saturday, which will be his first playoff game. But, I think Jimmy has played in some pretty big games. Anyone who is around him in those games and talks to him and stuff it’s not much different in those games with him as a preseason game. He stays pretty much the same.”
Garoppolo’s unflappable nature helped him orchestrate four fourth-quarter comebacks and game-winning drives this season.
Perhaps the most notable was the one in New Orleans when Garoppolo found tight end George Kittle on a fourth-and-2 to set up a game-winning field goal.
He also converted a pair of third-and-16s in a must-win Week 16 game over the Rams en route to conducting another game-winning field goal drive.
Even San Francisco’s first game against Seattle, Garoppolo had his club in a position to win late despite the fact he hadn’t played particularly well all game.
Shanahan’s overall point is that we’ve seen Garoppolo perform and perform well in high-leverage situations before. The 49ers’ quarterback was excellent in five games against playoff teams this season, and played perhaps his best game of the year Week 17 in Seattle.
Saturday is the biggest game Garoppolo and most of the 49ers have ever played in, but the quarterback buckling under the weight of January football doesn’t seem likely.
The Seattle Seahawks are set to return two key starters on defense, Jadeveon Clowney and Shaquill Griffin, on Sunday against the 49ers.
The Seattle Seahawks will head into Week 17 with a relatively healthy squad, which includes the return of two key defensive starters, defensive end Jadeveon Clowney and cornerback Shaquill Griffin.
“That’s huge,” coach Pete Carroll said on Friday. “It’s a huge deal. I mean, our top cover guy and a top rusher. That’s a big deal. It’s great to have those guys back out.”
Seattle is without two pieces of their offense, receiver Malik Turner and left tackle Duane Brown, and will probably be without safety Quandre Diggs – barring a miracle – but the return of Griffin and Clowney is a huge boost to a defense that has struggled the past few weeks.
Clowney missed Seattle’s last two games with a core muscle injury, an injury that also kept him out in Week 12. His return is certainly not a welcome one for San Francisco, who saw him record five solo tackles, five quarterback hits, one sack and one fumble recovery for a touchdown in the Week 10 overtime thriller between these two squads.
“He was unbelievable that game,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan told Seattle media members on Tuesday. “We know he’s going to bring that type of effort and talent this time on Sunday and we’ve got to make sure we’re at our best so we try to limit some of the plays he makes.”
Griffin is in the midst of a Pro Bowl caliber season, with 59 combined tackles and 13 passes defended. He had six of those tackles and two of those passes defended against San Francisco in Week 10.
Having both Griffin and Clowney back in the mix for Seattle gives them a much better chance of sweeping the 49ers and winning the NFC West outright, giving them a top three seed in the NFC playoffs.
In football, schematic innovation tends to trickle up. All of the new-age concepts you’ve seen infiltrate the NFL over the past few years were developed by coaches in high school and college. So, the premise of this list is a bit flawed.
The NFL has always been on a bit of an island. While lower-level coaches have never been afraid to experiment with new strategies, the pro coaches have been reluctant to adopt some of the things their peers are doing on Fridays and Saturdays.
It only takes one, though.
If one NFL coach has success with a certain concept, it’s not long before the entire league gets on board. Those guys may not have invented the strategy but they do deserve credit for bringing it to the NFL. All great coaches are receptive to new ideas.
Thanks to a handful of innovative coaches, the NFL game has changed dramatically over the past decade. Which coaches are most repsonsibile for those changes? Let’s figure that out…
1. Bill Belichick
Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
This seems like an obvious answer but I don’t know how many football fans truly appreciate the influence a young Belichick had on modern defense. While in Cleveland, he and his defensive coordinator — some dude named Nick Saban — first developed the idea of pattern matching coverage. Everyone knows what man and zone coverage is, but Belichick and Saban created a hybrid of the two.
You’re probably wondering what a concept developed in the 1990s has to do with this decade. Well, Saban brought those coverages to the college level, and a few national championships later, almost every college defense in the country was playing some form of pattern match coverage. This was like 15 years ago. But that wasn’t really the case in the pros. Of course, there were teams that started utilizing those coverages at the turn of the century, but, even when Belichick was building his dynasty in New England, traditional, spot-dropping zone coverages were still the top option for most defensive coordinators.
That has started to change over the last decade, though. As passing games have grown more varied and complex, defensive coaches have had to adjust in order to keep up. Thanks to Belichick (and Saban), they have options outside of zone or man coverage.
(Obviously, Belichick’s influence extends beyond this one concept. I could have gone in a bunch of different directions with this one.)
2. Pete Carroll
Steven Bisig-USA TODAY Sports
Single-high coverages were popular well before Pete Carroll got to Seattle, but there’s no denying that the success he found with the Legion of Boom transformed the defensive landscape of the NFL for nearly the entire decade.
In retrospect, Carroll’s influence may not have been a good one for the rest of the league. Teams tried to replicate his Cover-3 and Cover-1 heavy scheme and didn’t have nearly as much success, which I wrote about my in my offseason series on the evolution of NFL defense. It turns out that running that scheme doesn’t work as well without Earl Thomas patrolling the deep middle, Richard Sherman eliminating one side of the field and Bobby Wagner, K.J. Wright and Kam Chancellor lurking underneath. Personnel matters!
Even still, Carroll laid the blueprint for how defense would be played in a post-Tampa 2 world. The NFL remains a single-high coverage league.
3. Chip Kelly
Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports
Stop laughing.
Are you done?
OK, I get that Kelly was ultimately a failure as an NFL coach, but there’s no denying that he greatly impacted the league in the short time he was a part of it. I think his schematic influence is a bit overstated, but some of the concepts he popularized during his time in Philadelphia have become NFL staples.
Kelly’s use of tempo has probably had the most profound impact on NFL strategy during the last decade. And that goes back to his time at Oregon when Belichick was picking his brain and had the Patriots running a no-huddle attack before the rest of the league caught onto the value of going fast.
Kelly’s biggest impact may have come off the field. His use of sports science was seen as revolutionary at the turn of the decade. Now it’s commonplace. And his streamlined approach to practice gave teams a model to copy after the 2011 CBA cut down on practice time, something NFL coaches are constantly complaining about.
Reid has been a brilliant offensive coach for a long time, but I don’t know if he would have made this list if I wrote it a few seasons ago. In the past few years, though, Reid has evolved what was once a classic West Coast offense into something new.
He’s made the long-time NFL staple his own by blending it with concepts we were used to seeing on Saturdays but had never been the foundation for a consistently successful pro offense. Along with college staples like option run plays and RPO’s, Reid borrowed Air Raid passing concepts to help make Patrick Mahomes’ transition to the NFL easier.
Having a quarterback like Mahomes obviously makes schematic innovation easier, but Reid was having no problem getting top production out of Alex Smith using similar concepts. And as coaches from Reid’s tree have moved on to head coaching gigs of their own, his influence has only grown. It won’t be long before most NFL offenses resemble the scheme he’s crafted in Kansas City.
5. Kyle Shanahan
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I suppose the elder Shanahan also deserves a ton of credit for influencing the league, but Kyle has taken the concepts popularized by his old man and dressed them up with mind-boggling pre-snap motions that leave defenses dazed and confused.
Shanahan has a distinct offensive philosophy — outside zone running plays meshed perfectly with a deadly play-action pass game — but he’s done a masterful job of adapting it based on his personnel. The best example being the 2012 season when he remade his offense to suit Robert Griffin III;s strength, and, in doing so, established the zone read as a concept that could work in the pros.
In his presser today, Kyle Shanahan was asked if he felt defenses had figured out the zone read. His answer was fantastic pic.twitter.com/dSa9FfGGHn
In Atlanta, he turned Matt Ryan into an MVP with an offense built around two versatile running backs and Julio Jones. Now, in San Francisco, he has the 49ers offense humming with a tight end (George Kittle) and an H-back (Kyle Jusychyck) as the focal points. Shanahan always gets the best out of his personnel.
Last year, Sean McVay was being hailed as the NFL’s newest genius, but his style was birthed by Shanahan. And Shanahan has been doing this offensive genius thing for a while now.
