So, you’ve got your football Jones on, you’re missing the sport, and you’re especially agitated by this interminable wait for the Falcons to play in the Super Bowl this Sunday, in Houston, against the evil empire.
Just imagine having no choice but to have head phones on during all of this, with racket coming in nearly non-stop. With the New England Patriots on tap.
Then, you’d feel something like Kyle Shanahan on game day, as Atlanta’s offensive coordinator tries to call the plays that this season made the Falcons the NFL’s top-scoring offense.
Is it any wonder that he sometimes barks over the com system, “Shut up!” to the other offensive coaches?
“Yeah, a lot,” he said about that. “I’m irritable on game days so I’m hard to deal with, and they are. We’ve got a close group of coaches and players and by the time we get to the locker room, it’s usually all good.”
Well, yeah, probably because the Falcons averaged 33.6 points per game this season. But, man, sometimes it’s maddening to be the boss.
He grinds all week to get ready for games, and goes in with serious plans, like a long script of plays to run from the start.
“Yes. I usually do about 24, but the script is always over-rated,” he said. “It’s a guideline. Never in my career have I gone one through 24.”
Often as not, it goes haywire.
The concept of scripting offensive plays to begin an NFL game is nothing new, but like play-calling itself, it’s a mixture of science and art. What if the fifth play of the game is a first-and-goal from the 3? You’re not going to call a bomb.
At some point almost every week, the idea of throwing pre-determined plays at a defense to see how it reacts becomes silly.
“You mix around. You put things in there to see what they’re going to do, and it gives your players a guideline of what you want to do,” Shanahan said. “Very quickly, you want to see what the defense is doing.
“Sometimes, you’ll be on play four and you’ll skip to play 18 through 24, and you’ll come back to plays six through 10.”
It’s common for NFL offensive coordinators to wear headsets, whether they’re on the sideline or in a box upstairs. Their primary conversation is with the quarterback, who has a radio headset in his helmet chiefly for sake of play calling.
They just about always talk to each other between possessions, too, to reconcile what they’re seeing from two levels.
There’s a lot more than that going on, as every assistant on each side of the ball – usually – is wired into the conversation with coordinators.
Head coaches frequently jump in as well.
“I’m talking to those guys all the time,” Shanahan said. “Guys have got eyes on different spots, and I always try to get feedback from everybody. Sometimes, you want everyone to get quiet so you can just think … It would probably be pretty entertaining [for outsiders].”
The conversations between coordinator and quarterback are critical, as they mingle thoughts about what the opposing defense is trying to do against various formations, personnel groupings and with individual matchups.
Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan threw high praise to Shanahan recently when he suggested that his coordinator is not just focusing on him, but rather every starting offensive player and the subs who enter and exit the game.
If a backup wide receiver is gaining a favorable matchup, or right tackle Ryan Schraeder is whipping his man, Shanahan will adjust his approach. Ryan said Shanahan thinks about 20-plus Falcons offensive players all the time.
“I think Kyle has a really good feel for having the pulse of the group of guys that are there, putting people in positions to succeed and playing to guy’s strengths,“ Ryan said. “We’ve got a lot of different moving parts and different guys that can make plays.
“I think he’s kind of orchestrated it and balanced that really, really well.”
For the most part, Shanahan talks over the head phones to only one player, Ryan. But there are occasional exceptions, chiefly late in blowout games.
“Sometimes, they’ll get on,” he said of the non-Ryans. “Usually, that’s when it’s going good and they’re just messing with me. “
Most of the direct conversation is between Shanahan and Ryan, and sometimes – but not often — they surprise each other, usually with Ryan making a suggestion for a way to change the game plan.
“It happens a lot,” Shanahan said. “It happens every day in practice, every day in meetings. We communicate a lot. We both know what we’re looking for. We both kind of see things the same. Sometimes, we try to beat each other to the same comment.”
There are occasions, too, where the game plan goes ker-plooey.
Now and then, the Falcons run something they didn’t practice during the week because the opposing defense is reacting a certain way that wasn’t anticipated.
So, Shanahan calls a play that they haven’t practiced recently.
“You do that a lot,” he said. “You don’t try to surprise the players and just randomly do it, but when you’re reviewing between series and studying fronts and coverages, if you have a system where … you can move guys and change concepts, you can change stuff that wasn’t in the game plan that the guys know.
“You’ve just got to give the quarterback a heads-up to it. We always look at those [overhead] pictures each series, and that’s pretty important every game.”
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