One of the hallmarks of a great coach is their tree. Six years in to Kyle Shanahan’s tenure, his coaching tree is already legion.
Shanahan’s top protégé, Mike McDaniel, brings arguably the league’s best offense — featuring a host of former 49ers — to town on Sunday in what figures to be an extremely entertaining matchup.
The tree
Of Shanahan’s original staff in 2017, two head coaches, one college head coach, two defensive coordinators and two offensive coordinators emerged. There have also been three defensive line coaches, two wide receivers coaches and two offensive line coaches (one in college, one in the NFL) hired away. Nearly all of those positions were promoted from within, then promoted elsewhere.
By this time next year, DeMeco Ryans will be a head coach, too. And he’ll take some of the 49ers’ current staff with him.
Departures were expected. When you build a successful team, opponents will naturally try to poach your talent. And for the most part, Shanahan has been able to adjust and continually replenish the team’s ranks with promising coaching talent as key contributors to the staff departed.
Mike McDaniel was different. He started his career as a Broncos ball boy under Mike Shanahan. He’d been with Kyle Shanahan (aside from a two-year hiatus in the United Football League) since 2006, with the Houston Texans.
Questions persisted in the early part of the season as the 49ers offense slogged its way through a litany of mostly underwhelming performances. Could Shanahan cope without his right-hand man?
Then San Francisco acquired Christian McCaffrey. Since the 44-23 beatdown dealt by Kansas City Chiefs in Week 7, the offense has looked pretty impressive, though it was came up short against an elite New Orleans front last week.
Shanahan has gotten the offense, at least, to a point where it’s been consistently productive. But while it has the potential to be, it’s not anywhere near being viewed as an elite, consistently dominant unit.
Meanwhile, McDaniel is running an offense in Miami that is downright electric. Football Outsiders’ DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) metric has the Dolphins’ passing offense as the fifth-most efficient in NFL history when Tua Tagavailoa is at the helm.
Even as the 49ers offense has progressed, there’s no question that Shanahan misses McDaniel.
You didn’t need Wednesday’s presser to tell you that, but it was apparent in the way Shanahan talked about his former longtime confidant and co-mastermind.
McDaniel was an offensive assistant for Shanahan with the Texans and again with that team in Washington, where he eventually became the wide receivers coach. That coaching staff has now produced four head coaches.
Few people possess the computational, near-photographic memory McDaniel showed early in his career as a quality control. Shanahan tends to lean on his quality controls more than position coaches and indicated that young coaches sometimes get the wrong impression of the distinction.
When you look at the 49ers’ coaching staff, the quality controls tend to be the younger, promising coaches with long-term prospects. They often spend time on either side of the ball before transitioning to position coach or coordinator roles.
“Mike, I’d always say he was our computer. Mike could always retain that stuff and was really good at it,” Shanahan said. “And then we went through so much together, how different Washington was then Houston, just schematically how many things that we had to change.
I also think anytime you have a QC, those are the guys as a coordinator you depend on the most. When you’re a coordinator and the players come in, everyone goes to their offices and teaches the players and then you go back in your room and you try to put a plan together and there’s not many people available that aren’t in rooms coaching the tight ends or the O-line.”
Bobby Slowik, the passing game coordinator, is the closest thing to McDaniel on the coaching staff.
He started on that legendary Washington staff as a defensive assistant, and after a three-year hiatus with Pro Football Focus, re-joined the 49ers as a QC on the defensive side of the ball. In 2019, he moved to the offensive side as an assistant before becoming a passing game specialist, then coordinator.
Brian Fleury, now the tight ends coach, was a defensive QC in 2019, then switched to offense in 2020 and got his current promotion this offseason.
Klay Kubiak joined the staff as a defensive QC last year before moving up to assistant quarterbacks coach this season.
DeMeco Ryans joined the 49ers as a defensive QC in 2017 before becoming inside linebackers coach.
After four years of coaching in college, Robert Saleh joined the Texans as an intern… then became a defensive QC. You see the pattern.
As Shanahan said on KNBR Friday morning, he’s had an outrageous group of quality controls in his past.
“Mike McDaniel was the first,” Shanahan said. “Matt Lafleur was the second. Sean McVay was the third. Michael LaFleur was the fourth. Those are the guys that you really work with the most and those are the guys to me always that you’re the most dependent on and you share the most information with because they’re the guys who are always around you.”
The team’s current quality controls, for those interested:
- August Mangin, special teams (and game management specialist)
- In second season, spent 2019-20 as a lead defensive analyst at LSU. Spent 2018 as special teams assistant at Alabama and 2014-17 as special teams coordinator and various position coach roles at Northwestern State. Was an LSU graduate assistant from 2012-13.
- Asauni Rufus, offense
- Was a graduate assistant at LSU. Was a three-time All-Mountain West defensive back at Nevada, a special teams analyst at Notre Dame, then a quality-control coach at Vanderbilt before briefly re-joining Brian Kelly’s staff at LSU. It’s his first year in the NFL.
- Deuce Shwartz, offense
- Was a defensive analyst at Missouri in 2021, asst. wide receivers coach at Georgia in 2020, defensive quality control with Cleveland Browns in 2019. Special teams assistant with Saints from 2017-18. Started as defensive asst. with Bills from 2015-16.
- Andrew Hayes-Stoker, defense
- Second season, spent 2016-20 as wide receivers coach at Illinois, was wide receivers coach for Buccaneers from 2014-15.
- Stephen Adegoke, defense
- Spent last season as defensive graduate assistant at Michigan
Sufficed to say, it’s a starting point in a coaching career that tends to produce some of the league’s best and brightest coaches. It demands a studious disposition, hard work, and rewards innovation. Those who start there build connections and a shared understanding of the NFL with the people they spend the most time with.
McDaniel and Shanahan spent more than a decade together.
With all that shared knowledge, and DeMeco Ryans being on the other side of it every day for the last six years, it begs wondering how it’s all going to play out.
Where it gets interesting
In terms of how the passing offense looks, there are myriad conceptual similarities between the Dolphins and 49ers.
Both lean on a heavy dose of pre-snap motion and disguises to create space for crossers over the middle. There’s an emphasis on getting the ball into the hands of playmakers as quickly as possible in the center cut.
Both Jimmy Garoppolo (2.65 seconds per throw, 11th-quickest) and Tagavailoa (2.6 seconds per throw, 6th-quickest) are some of the league’s quickest throwers.
Now, San Francisco excels at cutting down that space. Fred Warner has a next-level ability to play center field that has often gone under-appreciated. That’s largely a product of tackling and interceptions being viewed as the main indicators of defensive performance.
When teams don’t throw the ball your way, you don’t show up as consistently on the stat sheet.
Since 2018, when Warner was drafted, per NextGenStats, the 49ers have allowed just 71 completions over the middle of the field, 15 fewer than the next-closest team.
His ability to zone match and take on a vertical routes like a safety in a split second, or crash down on a shallow crosser, or even flip his hips and play with his back to the ball while cutting down the throwing lane… it’s the best of any linebacker in the NFL, and it rivals a host of elite players in the secondary.
That will present a major challenge for McDaniel’s offense and force Tagavailoa to be incisive and judicious in going through his reads. Again, it’s a similar scheme at its core; he wants to attack the same place on the field as the 49ers do.
The differences, among quite a few, are the distance of those targets. Garoppolo averages 6.8 yards per target, seventh-lowest in the league. Tagavailoa averages 9.2 yards per attempt, fifth-most in the league.
Miami also won’t hesitate to spread things out, sometimes going to five-receiver sets. The 49ers sometimes flash those looks, but will generally send a running back out wide before returning them into the backfield.
The Dolphins will often use tight splits, creating immediate coverage problems and putting defenders in conflict at the line of scrimmage with switch releases. It also helps having two of the league’s quickest and most dynamic receivers in Jaylen Waddle and Tyreek Hill.
Hill (1,233 yards, 1st) and Waddle (963 yards, 5th) are both top-five in receiving yards, which… is laughably impressive. The last time that happened was in 2014, with Demariyus Thomas and Emmanuel Sanders.
They’re a major part of why the Dolphins have scored at least 30 points in each of their last four games, (it’s worth mentioning that former 49ers receivers Trent Sherfield and River Cracraft have also cut out small roles for themselves).
But according to just about every player or coach you’ll talk to, this is all on Tua. He’s an MVP candidate, which is a monumental departure from the woebegone and uneven performances of the previous two seasons.
The third-year quarterback admitted that he was questioning himself last year, literally asking himself in the mirror, “Do I suck?”
McDaniel reinvigorated him and brought along a more than 700-play reel of Tagavailoa’s best moments. That pair is tight and McDaniel has helped him elevate his game.
But don’t let anyone fool you. It’s not just scheme.
It is an excellent scheme, and the coaching and encouragement from McDaniel played a major role in helping Tagavailoa reclaim his swagger, but the quarterback is dealing independent of anything else.
His accuracy and rapid decision making is elite. He’s completing an outrageous 69.7 percent of his passes (second only to Geno Smith) and, like Garoppolo, putting some uniquely skilled receivers on a platform to rattle off extra yards by hitting them on the run.
Shanahan admitted that he’s enjoyed watching their offense, and that the questions about Tagavailoa have been answered:
“It’s cool to watch. Right when he got Tyreek, you knew how much that was going to help. Just Tyreek, there’s a number of fast people in this league and to me he’s different than everyone else, probably ever. Just the physicality and speed he runs with. So just some of the things that they can do with him is cool to watch.
But the question was watching Tua in the offense and I wasn’t totally sure of that and I remember turning it on in the preseason and watching his first game and I was like, ‘Wow, this guy looks totally different and looks very comfortable,’ and then turned it on Week One and I thought he was playing in Week One as good as anyone in this league and I don’t think he’s had a game not like that…
Tua, to me, is the reason that they’re leading the league in explosives because he knows how to hit people over the middle. It’s rarely deep. It’s usually running and hitting these guys on the move and there’s some really open space with all that speed and then the quarterback who can drop it over linebackers, who is not worried about safeties and is doing that part of his game as high as anyone I’ve seen right now.”
So, elite offense vs. elite defense. Potentially elite, but net average offense vs. potentially elite, but net average defense.
What does this all amount to?
Bragging rights
The real battle is between McDaniel’s offense and Ryans’ defense. With Arik Armstead returning and star left tackle Terron Armstead doubtful, there could be a substantial mismatch available for Nick Bosa, Samson Ebukam and Charles Omenihu.
Miami’s defense is middle of the pack statistically, but they’ve got some premium edge rushers in Melvin Ingram, Nick Chubb and Jaelan Phillips. And the 49ers could miss their own star left tackle, Trent Williams, who dealt with back spasms Friday.
Four of those last six names are elite at winning their matchups, and the other two are solidly above average, per Pro Football Focus:
| Name | Pass rush win rate (NFL avg. 12.2%) | Pressures per opportunity (NFL avg. 9.57%) |
| Nick Bosa | 23.8%, 5th | 18.8%, 10th |
| Charles Omenihu | 22.8%, 8th | 15.1%, 27th |
| Samson Ebukam | 15.4%, 60th | 12.9%, 50th |
| Jaelan Phillips | 20.8%, 15th | 16.1%, 17th |
| Melvin Ingram | 20.5%, 17th | 14.5%, 35th |
| Bradley Chubb | 14.5%, 75th | 12.4%, 59th |
That is elite pass-rushing talent on either side. Having Armstead back also allows more flexibility in how the 49ers use Omenihu, whose length often presents problems up the middle in a similar way to Arden Key last season.
If I had to favor one team, it would be the 49ers at home, though a lot relies on the statuses of Deebo Samuel and Trent Williams. Omenihu, as well as Spencer Burford, are questionable, too. The likely loss of Armstead for the Dolphins is enormous.
While the Dolphins have the better quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo has performed well this season, and there are more weaknesses in the Dolphins’ defense than the 49ers.
San Francisco — particularly Fred Warner — makes it difficult to attack the middle of the field, and while there is familiarity on either side, the 49ers have a more physical group. That’s no shade at Dolphins right guard Robert Hunt, who consistently pancakes people and did this to Warner a couple years ago:
The 49ers probably won’t prevent the Dolphins from connecting on explosive plays to Waddle and Hill, but if they can limit them, and force Miami to take field goals — albeit in a red zone where they’ve scored touchdowns 64 percent of the time (7th-best in the league) — they have enough offensively to attack the Dolphins.
Questions still linger over how much Christian McCaffrey will be used, and what looms behind him in Jordan Mason and Ty Davis-Price.
Through a pessimistic lens, those are two inexperienced runners you can’t trust yet, let alone in a game of this magnitude. Through an optimistic lens, they’re both bruising, physical runners who might be just what you need in a game like this. Of course, mentioning them at all probably ensures that Tevin Coleman will appear in a bizarrely large role.
On the whole, this is just a feel-good game that should be a deeply entertaining watch.
Miami brings McDaniel and a host of other former 49ers in fellow coaches Wes Welker (wide receivers) Jon Embree (assistant HC/tight ends), Mike Person (offensive assistant) and players in Raheem Mostert, Jeff Wilson Jr., Salvon Ahmed (was in 49ers camp a couple years back) Trent Sherfield and River Cracraft.
The ties run deep. 49ers O-Line coach and run game coordinator Chris Foerster even recalled being the oldest man at McDaniel’s wedding — though he said he “acted the youngest at the time” — and added that McDaniel probably saved he and Kyle Shanahan’s relationship back in Washington.
“He was instrumental in my relationship with Kyle,” Foerster said. “Mike would take the run list down to Kyle. Mike was like a ping-pong ball between me and Kyle. And half the time if Kyle didn’t like the ideas I was sending down there, he’d yell at Mike for it. So he kind of saved me and Kyle’s relationship, because we didn’t have to argue.”
This would be an appealing matchup even if there wasn’t much overlap.
It’s two elite teams with elite weapons that happen to have an endearing familiarity. Storylines don’t mean much when the talent and execution isn’t there. But there’s every reason to believe both teams will execute on Sunday.
And after that, assuming it’s a close game, the vibes should be wholesome. See:
This should be fun.