Changing Of The Guard: What New Generations Of NFL Coaches Are Bringing To The Game

By Evan Smith

The Super Bowl – the culmination of a season of professional football – will be played this Sunday. Two well-run, well-coached organizations are competing for the top spot this year. A number of younger coaches have had disproportionate success with their teams this season, including several who progressed into and through the divisional playoffs, namely Kyle Shanahan – the second-youngest NFL coach among active coaches who will be leading the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl. What are these new coaches doing differently? What are they bringing to their leadership role to create this success?

The Job Description

The job description for NFL head coach includes the following elements. The coach:

• Develops and communicates strategy (overall season goals/targets) and tactics (schemes, formations, playbooks...) 
• Organizes and oversees practices, game-planning, post-game analysis/learning and what's loosely identified in sports publications as "leading" (set the tone for the team, listen, build rapport, relationships and influence) 
• May also ask for (and participate in) the identification and selection of talent – either in the draft or free-agency. 

While TV cameras on game day will feature significant footage of the coach (mostly pacing the sideline, gritting teeth and focused on what plays will be called next), in many NFL organizations the coach is one leader among several key leadership roles on a team that includes Owners, General Manager and President. Working together, these leaders divide the work in service of successful team performance.  

Historically, to be a successful coach in the NFL required deep subject matter expertise on game-day strategy, rules and positional expertise and strong "control" management tendencies. On game-day, spectators might see football coaches more closely engaged with tasks of management and control than in almost any other setting. Coaches are calling plays, setting direction as the game unfolds and making decisions – especially when the strategy and playbook requires adjustment during the game. 

Improved Performance Demands New Thinking

Changes in the competitive environment have meant changes in how coaches perform their roles and in the thinking they bring. As generations of players and the game itself has evolved (among other things, with the advent of free agency and top talent moving more fluidly from team to team), the traditional demands of a successful NFL team coach have remained relatively static while new expectations have emerged.

Today, in addition to driving the more management-like actions that dictate team direction, the best coaches also model strong leadership – recognizing the distinct opportunities confronting their teams, communicating authentically, compellingly and consistently about these opportunities and strongly influencing the engagement, connection and development of each player.  

In a league with both other-worldly performance standards and great parity in talent across teams, the best coaches are those who can most effectively read the team culture, suss out its needs, and manage/ collaborate with key stakeholders (including owners, general managers and others) to help the team bring its best performance to every game. Coaches who both manage (thoughtful administration, detailed planning, careful control of factors influencing game-day performance) and lead (helping diverse groups and individuals work together in service of higher, shared goals) seem to yield top-performing teams.

Younger Coaches Are Bringing Fresh Approaches

As change in the competitive environment and among opponents happens faster, along comes more challenges, new developments, and novel discoveries – conditions that echo the dynamism in the business world.  

So what is this new crop of coaches bringing to a faster-changing, more dynamic game today? The best new coaches bring better capability as talent-performance developers (quickly assessing, learning about and solving challenges in real-time) and more effective collaboration with others in a less hierarchical, more network-oriented landscape. For the players, these coaches are leaders and role models – people the players want to connect with and emulate. They’re relevant, contemporary and inspirational. These coaches understand more viscerally the challenges on and off the field today, and the future of work for each player. They build relationships with players, helping each to be successful while the team itself succeeds, and helping each to see himself in the future the team is building together.

Importantly, and strategically, these younger coaches are more digitally fluent, more capable with new, richer uses of data/analytics and able to develop and effectively communicate an integrative strategy of old and new tactics. They're using both more detailed observational data, including the traditional game-day video analyses, and marrying it with deeper data-driven research on trends. 

Mined from data, one “new” tactic that has emerged over the past few years as favored among selected coaches is the strategy to “go for it” on the 4th down, rather than punting the ball away. Many teams now understand that they are more likely to create longer drives and score more points by punting less frequently on 4th down, in contrast to the conventional wisdom and practice of the past. Another example of data driving change relates to the widely-asserted conventional wisdom that teams win by establishing the run on offense, controlling the clock; on defense, by stopping the run. Emerging data (now well-evidenced in behavior, team-development and play-calling choices across multiple NFL teams) shows that some coaches deeply understand that strategies focused on more passing, better per-pass performance and better net-passer rating actually correlate to better winning records.  

What can leaders in other competitive environments learn from newer entrants to NFL coaching? Success is driven by a few things:

• Setting forth – and rallying the team’s stakeholders/players around – the real, big opportunity for the team. Through networks of coalitions and relentless engagement of others, successful leaders reinforce focus around that opportunity at every turn.  
• Understanding conventional wisdom and strategy is key. This enables a leader/coach/play-caller to challenge what is conventional, create options and consider both the expected as well as the unusual approaches – a different array of preparations, alternative initiatives, new plays, unusual suspects or players.
• Investing in discerning insights that arise from new, different and deeper looks at performance.  
• Seeing the forest and the trees. Leaders are responsible for mining all the details from last week’s game film (or last quarter’s earnings, or last month’s sales) to prepare for this week. They must also see the season (or fiscal year or competitive landscape or…) in context and conceptualize moves to make to ensure success in each possibility. 

Lastly, leaders in complex environments can take a playbook page from the NFL’s newest coaching stars who are relentlessly sharpening their own learning, adaptation and growth. This, alongside the learning and growth that they expect from other team members, is the foundation on which all the rest is built.