Den21vsBal19
06-30-2008, 04:05 PM
Article from the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121477975676614277.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today)
Fairly long read, hopefully of some interest
Inside the Mind of Mike Shanahan
By STEFAN FATSIS
June 29, 2008 8:16 p.m.
In 2006, Stefan Fatsis persuaded the Denver Broncos to allow him to join the team at its summer training camp as a placekicker, becoming the first writer to suit up for a National Football League camp since George Plimpton in 1963. In this excerpt from his new book, "A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL," the author visits with the Broncos' meticulous head coach, Mike Shanahan, to discuss coaching, training camp and the suspension of his punter for violating the league's drug policy.
* * *
After practice, Mike Shanahan's assistant escorts me into his office. Shanahan is seated behind his cluttered desk, today's practice on a monitor. On the bookshelves behind him are binders detailing every minute of every camp he has run. In his how-to-succeed business book, published after Denver's second Super Bowl triumph in 1999, Shanahan said his in-season and off-season lives are similarly structured. "No moment is wasted. In my mind it makes for a lot of happy training campers."
Ryan McKee/Rich Clarkson and Associates LLC
When Mike Shanahan became the Broncos' head coach in 1995, he told his assistants about what he called a "72-point program for success."
Earlier, I watched Shanahan meet the press. He stood on a platform in front of a tarp adorned with logos of the Broncos and the NFL just outside the entrance to the dining room. He was factual but not discursive or revealing. His performance certainly wouldn't make news; he's not Bill Parcells, a coach unable to withhold contempt for the questions and the questioners. As a rule, Shanahan gives the media enough to file their stories but not enough to create distractions for himself or his players, or to draw attention to himself. Reporters are just one more thing on Shanahan's to-do list. He controls the information flow, not the other way around. "A lot of times, [reporters] think they're in control of it," the Broncos' longtime head of communications, Jim Saccomano, had told me. "But when they leave, they'll leave with what Mike tells them."
It's understood that whatever Shanahan tells me is between me and my notebook until my book is published. Granted the protection of time, he seems willing to let the top down a bit. But even in a relatively unguarded setting, Shanahan isn't much more expansive than he is in front of the cameras. More candid, yes. More garrulous, no.
Shanahan grew up in suburban Chicago in the 1960s, the son of an electrician and a housewife. He nearly died when he was speared by a linebacker while playing quarterback at Eastern Illinois, the only college that offered him a football scholarship. A priest was summoned to read last rites. Shanahan lost a kidney, recovered, petitioned unsuccessfully to rejoin the football team and began his coaching career upon graduation. He took a job as a resident assistant in a dormitory at Oklahoma and ingratiated himself with the football staff, eventually ferrying recruits to and from the airport and analyzing game film. Oklahoma won a national championship his first season there. By age 25, he was the offensive coordinator at his alma mater, which won a Division II championship. He took the same job at Minnesota, then Florida, where he rose to assistant head coach. In 1984, at 31, he joined the Broncos as a receivers coach. A year later, he was the offensive coordinator. The next two years, the Broncos reached (and lost) the Super Bowl. At 35, he was hired as head coach of Oakland.
As an assistant coach and coordinator, Shanahan didn't try to get his name in the papers, where it might be noticed by other head coaches and owners. He was withdrawn and cautious, and just wanted to work, says Adam Schefter, who covered the Broncos for both papers in town and ghost-wrote Shanahan's book. Shanahan molded himself into an exceptional X's and O's coach and, by osmosis and design, an astute businessman. When he joined the Broncos, he spent 30 hours a week diagramming plays so he wouldn't forget one at a crucial moment. When he rejoined the team -- after the Raiders' mercurial owner, Al Davis, fired him four games into his second season -- he told an interviewer than he hadn't taken more than a week off in a 15-year coaching career that included a marriage and the birth of two children. After he was hired as the Broncos' head coach in 1995, Shanahan convened a team-wide staff meeting. "I've got a 72-point program for success," he announced. "Maybe I can hit on a few of them."
In Oakland, Shanahan assigned seats at team meetings. That didn't go over well with the players, and he doesn't do it anymore. But he tried it. Shanahan expects those around him to understand, apply, and enforce his standards of organization, punctuality and responsibility. He has little tolerance for people who don't work as hard he works, as restlessly and as constantly. Which doesn't leave much room.
WSJ's Stefan Fatsis discusses his book, "A Few Seconds of Panic," which details the summer he spent with the NFL's Denver Broncos. He tells Adam Thompson how he was inspired by George Plimpton, how he differs from him and what he learned.
One of my favorite sportswriters, Robert Lipsyte, once described the difference between Vince Lombardi, the legendarily merciless and controlling Green Bay coach of the 1960s, and the generation of coaches he spawned and probably wouldn't recognize. "Lombardi could be a bully but he treated athletes individually and humanely; current bullies tend to treat the athlete as an interchangeable piece in their own intelligent designs," Lipsyte wrote.
Shanahan doesn't seem to be an inhumane bully. If his players, though, are just magnets on a whiteboard, well, he has seen thousands of them come and go. Now 53, Shanahan has honed a style that is part autocrat, part technocrat. His is a reductionist approach to life, but maybe not to modern football. After all, Shanahan has had just one losing season as a head coach in Denver. I'm curious whether he is one of what Lipsyte labeled as the coaching world's "mind-bending manipulators who make athletes believe they alone can make them winners," and whether the players see him that way.
To untrained eyes like mine, I tell Shanahan, the carefully scripted practice sessions, how the players execute the plays, how he responds to them at the end of the day -- all make it appear as if the team is ready for the season. It isn't, Shanahan replies, because the players aren't in top physical condition yet, not as quick or instinctual as they will be by September. Practice only seems finely turned because the players are repeating drills and plays over and over. The NFL-sanctioned "organized team activities" and short camps -- 17 workouts in all -- are designed to be a refresher course for players who have been Broncos before, and "a new language, new terminology, a new system" for the newcomers.
A FEW SECONDS OF PANIC
Read another excerpt from "A Few Seconds of Panic," where the author is forced into a pressure-filled kick in front of the Denver Broncos' players, coaches and fans."This is basically the fourth time they've been introduced to the first three days of camp," Shanahan says. "So when we go to camp and start with the first practice on July 28, it'll be the fifth time they've gone over it. They can react and don't have to think." The coaches then will be better able to evaluate each player's ability, physically and mentally. No one can complain that he hasn't had enough time to learn the team's practice routine and playbook.
But Shanahan also tells me he already has a good idea of who's going to make the 53-man roster. Based on performance and salary, he and the coaches and front office assess the team after each three-day camp. The long camp and the preseason games are the final data points. That essentially means that 30 or so players have little or no chance of making the club. They will suffer through training camp with little hope, barring someone else's injury, of playing for the Denver Broncos in 2006. They just don't know it.
Shanahan opens a blue three-ring binder: his master playbook, which is at least five inches thick. I scoot up on the edge of my chair and lean over the desk. He flips the binder around and opens to day one of the three-day mini-camp we're now experiencing. "You've got all these passes," he says, riffling a few pages of plays, one per line, denoted by football terminology like FAR DBL WING LT 3 JET X CRASH DIN (T) that explains everything from which players are in the game, to where they stand, to whom they block, to what routes each receiver runs, to where the quarterback should look first to throw. "That's just the passing game. This is just all the pass plays you put in in the first day." He counts them: 30 plays, each with five different formations. Then he scrolls through a few more pages listing running plays.
"This is the first day?" I ask.
"First day," he confirms. I detect the pride of a field commander unfurling a painstakingly drafted map detailing how a battle will be won. And he believes his team will win it. Though the starting lineup hasn't changed much from last year's conference championship game, Shanahan says the Broncos have more depth. And they are ready for training camp. "We'll be good," he says. "You just have to stay healthy."
Continued Below
Fairly long read, hopefully of some interest
Inside the Mind of Mike Shanahan
By STEFAN FATSIS
June 29, 2008 8:16 p.m.
In 2006, Stefan Fatsis persuaded the Denver Broncos to allow him to join the team at its summer training camp as a placekicker, becoming the first writer to suit up for a National Football League camp since George Plimpton in 1963. In this excerpt from his new book, "A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL," the author visits with the Broncos' meticulous head coach, Mike Shanahan, to discuss coaching, training camp and the suspension of his punter for violating the league's drug policy.
* * *
After practice, Mike Shanahan's assistant escorts me into his office. Shanahan is seated behind his cluttered desk, today's practice on a monitor. On the bookshelves behind him are binders detailing every minute of every camp he has run. In his how-to-succeed business book, published after Denver's second Super Bowl triumph in 1999, Shanahan said his in-season and off-season lives are similarly structured. "No moment is wasted. In my mind it makes for a lot of happy training campers."
Ryan McKee/Rich Clarkson and Associates LLC
When Mike Shanahan became the Broncos' head coach in 1995, he told his assistants about what he called a "72-point program for success."
Earlier, I watched Shanahan meet the press. He stood on a platform in front of a tarp adorned with logos of the Broncos and the NFL just outside the entrance to the dining room. He was factual but not discursive or revealing. His performance certainly wouldn't make news; he's not Bill Parcells, a coach unable to withhold contempt for the questions and the questioners. As a rule, Shanahan gives the media enough to file their stories but not enough to create distractions for himself or his players, or to draw attention to himself. Reporters are just one more thing on Shanahan's to-do list. He controls the information flow, not the other way around. "A lot of times, [reporters] think they're in control of it," the Broncos' longtime head of communications, Jim Saccomano, had told me. "But when they leave, they'll leave with what Mike tells them."
It's understood that whatever Shanahan tells me is between me and my notebook until my book is published. Granted the protection of time, he seems willing to let the top down a bit. But even in a relatively unguarded setting, Shanahan isn't much more expansive than he is in front of the cameras. More candid, yes. More garrulous, no.
Shanahan grew up in suburban Chicago in the 1960s, the son of an electrician and a housewife. He nearly died when he was speared by a linebacker while playing quarterback at Eastern Illinois, the only college that offered him a football scholarship. A priest was summoned to read last rites. Shanahan lost a kidney, recovered, petitioned unsuccessfully to rejoin the football team and began his coaching career upon graduation. He took a job as a resident assistant in a dormitory at Oklahoma and ingratiated himself with the football staff, eventually ferrying recruits to and from the airport and analyzing game film. Oklahoma won a national championship his first season there. By age 25, he was the offensive coordinator at his alma mater, which won a Division II championship. He took the same job at Minnesota, then Florida, where he rose to assistant head coach. In 1984, at 31, he joined the Broncos as a receivers coach. A year later, he was the offensive coordinator. The next two years, the Broncos reached (and lost) the Super Bowl. At 35, he was hired as head coach of Oakland.
As an assistant coach and coordinator, Shanahan didn't try to get his name in the papers, where it might be noticed by other head coaches and owners. He was withdrawn and cautious, and just wanted to work, says Adam Schefter, who covered the Broncos for both papers in town and ghost-wrote Shanahan's book. Shanahan molded himself into an exceptional X's and O's coach and, by osmosis and design, an astute businessman. When he joined the Broncos, he spent 30 hours a week diagramming plays so he wouldn't forget one at a crucial moment. When he rejoined the team -- after the Raiders' mercurial owner, Al Davis, fired him four games into his second season -- he told an interviewer than he hadn't taken more than a week off in a 15-year coaching career that included a marriage and the birth of two children. After he was hired as the Broncos' head coach in 1995, Shanahan convened a team-wide staff meeting. "I've got a 72-point program for success," he announced. "Maybe I can hit on a few of them."
In Oakland, Shanahan assigned seats at team meetings. That didn't go over well with the players, and he doesn't do it anymore. But he tried it. Shanahan expects those around him to understand, apply, and enforce his standards of organization, punctuality and responsibility. He has little tolerance for people who don't work as hard he works, as restlessly and as constantly. Which doesn't leave much room.
WSJ's Stefan Fatsis discusses his book, "A Few Seconds of Panic," which details the summer he spent with the NFL's Denver Broncos. He tells Adam Thompson how he was inspired by George Plimpton, how he differs from him and what he learned.
One of my favorite sportswriters, Robert Lipsyte, once described the difference between Vince Lombardi, the legendarily merciless and controlling Green Bay coach of the 1960s, and the generation of coaches he spawned and probably wouldn't recognize. "Lombardi could be a bully but he treated athletes individually and humanely; current bullies tend to treat the athlete as an interchangeable piece in their own intelligent designs," Lipsyte wrote.
Shanahan doesn't seem to be an inhumane bully. If his players, though, are just magnets on a whiteboard, well, he has seen thousands of them come and go. Now 53, Shanahan has honed a style that is part autocrat, part technocrat. His is a reductionist approach to life, but maybe not to modern football. After all, Shanahan has had just one losing season as a head coach in Denver. I'm curious whether he is one of what Lipsyte labeled as the coaching world's "mind-bending manipulators who make athletes believe they alone can make them winners," and whether the players see him that way.
To untrained eyes like mine, I tell Shanahan, the carefully scripted practice sessions, how the players execute the plays, how he responds to them at the end of the day -- all make it appear as if the team is ready for the season. It isn't, Shanahan replies, because the players aren't in top physical condition yet, not as quick or instinctual as they will be by September. Practice only seems finely turned because the players are repeating drills and plays over and over. The NFL-sanctioned "organized team activities" and short camps -- 17 workouts in all -- are designed to be a refresher course for players who have been Broncos before, and "a new language, new terminology, a new system" for the newcomers.
A FEW SECONDS OF PANIC
Read another excerpt from "A Few Seconds of Panic," where the author is forced into a pressure-filled kick in front of the Denver Broncos' players, coaches and fans."This is basically the fourth time they've been introduced to the first three days of camp," Shanahan says. "So when we go to camp and start with the first practice on July 28, it'll be the fifth time they've gone over it. They can react and don't have to think." The coaches then will be better able to evaluate each player's ability, physically and mentally. No one can complain that he hasn't had enough time to learn the team's practice routine and playbook.
But Shanahan also tells me he already has a good idea of who's going to make the 53-man roster. Based on performance and salary, he and the coaches and front office assess the team after each three-day camp. The long camp and the preseason games are the final data points. That essentially means that 30 or so players have little or no chance of making the club. They will suffer through training camp with little hope, barring someone else's injury, of playing for the Denver Broncos in 2006. They just don't know it.
Shanahan opens a blue three-ring binder: his master playbook, which is at least five inches thick. I scoot up on the edge of my chair and lean over the desk. He flips the binder around and opens to day one of the three-day mini-camp we're now experiencing. "You've got all these passes," he says, riffling a few pages of plays, one per line, denoted by football terminology like FAR DBL WING LT 3 JET X CRASH DIN (T) that explains everything from which players are in the game, to where they stand, to whom they block, to what routes each receiver runs, to where the quarterback should look first to throw. "That's just the passing game. This is just all the pass plays you put in in the first day." He counts them: 30 plays, each with five different formations. Then he scrolls through a few more pages listing running plays.
"This is the first day?" I ask.
"First day," he confirms. I detect the pride of a field commander unfurling a painstakingly drafted map detailing how a battle will be won. And he believes his team will win it. Though the starting lineup hasn't changed much from last year's conference championship game, Shanahan says the Broncos have more depth. And they are ready for training camp. "We'll be good," he says. "You just have to stay healthy."
Continued Below