Football strategy can be like a see-saw, with offensive minds developing new ideas to tilt things their way until their defensive rivals find new approaches that shift the balance back. Michael Silver’s The Why Is Everything digs into the recent wave of offensive innovation, driven by Kyle Shanahan and a cohort of young football brains who came together in Washington in the early 2010s.
Shanahan built on the style of his father, Mike, to create a system that evolved to attack defenses with formation shifts, motions, and versatile players. As the league moved to 11 personnel – one running back and one tight end, Shanahan deployed more 21 and 22, forcing defenses that were relying on smaller, faster players to deal with bigger, stronger offenses.
Shanahan developed his ideas as offensive coordinator with Houston, Washington, Cleveland and Atlanta, before taking the head coach job with the 49ers in 2017. As his ideas found success, other NFL teams poached his assistant coaches, spreading this style across the league. Silver tracks this process, following Shanahan’s career but also the development of Sean McVay with the Rams, Mike McDaniel at the Dolphins, Matt LaFleur at the Packers, and Raheem Morris at the Falcons.
Title: The Why is Everything
Author: Michael Silver
First published: WW Norton & Co, 2024
Buy the Book: Amazon US | Amazon UK
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Silver has good access to his main characters, frequently giving us the inside story of off-season meetings about player futures or sharing a reaction to a big game. The rivalry between Shanahan and McVay is a particular theme, with McVay having won a Super Bowl in the 2021 season (beating Shanahan’s 49ers in the NFL Championship Game), while Shanahan has lost three Super Bowls – one as offensive coordinator for the Falcons and two as head coach of the 49ers.
Shanahan continues to pursue victory in the big game, driven by an insatiable desire to question anything. Whenever anyone brings an idea to him, Silver says, Shanahan has to know ‘the why’. What is the purpose of this play, that strategic shift, etc? With too many coaches doing things because that’s the way they have always been done, Shanahan refuses to take anything for granted. Few would bet against him one day matching – or exceeding – his father’s two Super Bowl titles.
THE AUTHOR
Michael Silver is an NFL Senior Writer for the Athletic who has strong links to the Bay Area. He first covered the 49ers in 1990 and covered them for the San Francisco Chronicle between 2022 and 2024. He has previously worked on the autobiographies of Jerry Rice and Kurt Warner.
EXCERPTS
“Their [Kyle Shanahan and his assistants] influence can be felt in so many ways, from the proliferation of outside zone–based attacks, to the tightening of traditional wide receiver splits, to the way coaches position themselves on the sidelines, to the expanding group of coaches who’ve decided to blow off the league’s annual scouting combine.”
Mike McDaniel: “Kyle’s genius was creativity, but it was also how to manage information for players so that the sum of the parts would be less than the whole. And that’s how we’ve all learned.”
McVay had known Gruden forever, but he didn’t take this opportunity lightly. Their football families were intertwined: Sean’s grandfather, John, while coaching at Dayton, had hired Gruden’s dad, Jim, as one of his assistants. Later, as an assistant coach at Indiana, Jim Gruden had recruited Sean’s father, Tim, to play safety for the Hoosiers.
“Very rarely do you see quarterbacks that go through that much failure the first year,” Matt LaFleur said [about Jared Goff]. “He started seven games, and I don’t think they won a game when he started. I think that’s why a lot of quarterbacks get scars in this league, and they don’t get an opportunity to really develop. Once they lose confidence, it’s fucking over.”
With McVay, there is always an inclination to try to distill football to its basics and avoid overly glamorizing the Xs and Os. Shanahan, conversely, makes it known that his endeavors are both uniquely intricate and non-replicable.
As they neared the door, Shanahan said something that remains burned into his close friend’s memory. “I feel like God doesn’t want me to win a Super Bowl.”
REVIEWS
This is an excellent book for anyone interested in today’s NFL. Though defences have begun to unveil responses to the innovations driven by Kyle Shanahan, his offensive approach still dominates the NFL and Michael Silver does an excellent job of showing us how that came to be and explaining what it means.
The writing is lucid and engaging, with Silver displaying a strong grasp of pacing and an eye for the right detail to make a point or illuminate an example. For those, like me, who are fascinated by football strategy, there is plenty to keep us interested but Silver centres the narrative on the characters, so even those who find football strategy writing dry will be drawn in.
My only criticisms are small. First, Silver is clearly close to this group of coaches so the narrative very much leans to their version of events. We hear, for example, that Falcons receiver Roddy White “encouraged the perception in some league circles that Shanahan was an entitled nepo baby” but we don’t get White’s side of the story. Likewise, we get the coaches’ take on Jimmy Garoppolo going dark on the team during the off-season but we don’t have the former 49ers QB’s version of events. This isn’t a problem so long as you remember that this story is told from inside one particular camp.
The second, minor, issue concerns the way nepotism is written about. Shanahan and McVay both got their start in the NFL thanks to family connections and Silver makes the point a few times that they worked extra hard in response. McVay, for example, was “determined to dispel any whiff of entitlement by grinding like a maniac”. But the problem with nepotism is not that its beneficiaries don’t work hard. It’s that there might be people just as talented and hardworking who don’t get the opportunity because they lack connections.
These quibbles aside, The Why Is Everything is a book I would recommend to any football fan.
Shane Richmond, Pigskin Books
“Any other year and this would have been my book of the year. A fantastic overview of football’s evolution in recent years through the Shanahan and McVay coaching trees. Great storytelling and explanations of tactical evolution. Sports writing at its finest.”
All Sports Books
“Silver is a true football wonk, delving into the minutiae of Shanahan and company’s plays to explain what made them so brilliant. By tracing how five Redskins assistant coaches went on to become head coaches in the NFL, he makes a persuasive case that the brat pack has been a ‘pivotal force in football.’ This deep dive delivers plenty of rewards.”
Publisher’s Weekly
“As the book progresses, Silver’s why framing thins out, threatening to become just one of the floating signifiers that make up sports jargon: ‘he’s different,’ ‘he’s got that dog in him,’ or my personal favorite expressive tautology: ‘he’s him.’ These phrases have real psychological value, even if they don’t exactly have much of an actual referent. The why is like that too: not quite empty verbiage, but not what it claims to describe either. You’re not allowed, so Silver tells us, to give Kyle any idea without demonstrating why in a granular way that’s not just Xs and Os. The direction the linemen set their feet, the hip movement of a receiver—it all comes in for microanalysis. Those things really do matter, but it’s less clear that they end up making the difference at the level of the system that the culture claims they do. Always giving the why is more a statement about the relentless crush of the mental labor of coaching—and playing for these coaches—than it is about insight into how to actually win games.”
Leif Weatherby, The Baffler
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Photo: Erik Drost
