Beyond the Sean McVay effect: Inside the coaching youth revolution that reshaped the NFL

New York Times

26-02-2025

In 2005, 41-year-old Mike McCarthy was the NFL's youngest offensive coordinator. Two decades later, 11 OCs are in their 30s. Two more are in their 20s.
Ask insiders to explain the trend, and they'll point to Jan. 12, 2017.
That was when the Los Angeles Rams shocked the NFL by making Sean McVay, then 30, the league's youngest head coach since Art 'Pappy' Lewis, who was 27 when the Cleveland Browns hired him in 1938. A few weeks after McVay's hiring, the San Francisco 49ers named Kyle Shanahan, then 37, their head coach. Both have led their teams to two Super Bowls, putting their (also young) offensive assistants in demand.
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Teams have hired 20 head coaches younger than 40 since the McVay-Shanahan cycle, after hiring just 11 that young over the preceding 20 years. That includes four sub-40 offensive head coaches hired from McVay's tree — Matt LaFleur, Zac Taylor, Kevin O'Connell and Liam Coen, plus Brian Callahan, who worked under Taylor in Cincinnati — and one from Shanahan's (Mike McDaniel).
'The ripple effect of Sean not failing was huge,' said Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski, who was 37 when the team hired him in 2020.
That 2017 hiring cycle was indeed transformational, but McVay's resounding success merely accelerated a movement spurred by a technological revolution dating to the early 2000s, changing how the game is learned, taught and played.
The old way — toil away in the college ranks, hope to catch on as a position coach in the NFL, work your way up to coordinator if you're lucky and then, just maybe, become a head coach somewhere around age 50 — no longer prevails, especially on offense.
The tradeoffs are significant, many of them exaggerated on offense:
The trend toward youth, especially on offense, is about more than teams trying to replicate McVay's success. The league-wide availability of digital video beginning in the early 2000s increased exponentially how much game tape teams could study. What once consumed 7-10 hours for a video staff on a Monday during the season — recording limited, situation-specific plays (red zone, third down, etc.) onto Betamax tapes — could now be replicated in seconds with greater depth on a computer by any coach.
By the early 2010s, teams were tapping into detailed play-level charting from Pro Football Focus, which the company later synced with NFL game video as part of its 'PFF Ultimate' product.
Staff sizes grew to explore the new possibilities, rising from about 16 per team into the mid- and even upper-20s today. Getting into the NFL became easier, so coaches spent less time at the college level.
On-demand access to game video made it possible to learn scheme quickly.
'Now, it doesn't take that long to become an expert,' a veteran coach said. 'Fifteen years ago, we had to go to a clinic and drive five hours to get there, and you only learned what was at that clinic. Then you waited six months to go to another one. Now, it's at your fingertips.
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'You aren't putting VHS tapes on a FedEx to ship it to someone. The learning curve, if you know what you are doing and have a good mentor, is accelerated.'
The jump from entry-level to coordinator was now within reach, particularly on offense, where teams have prioritized creative play selection over experience.
Brad Childress became an NFL head coach the old-fashioned way: 18 seasons in the college ranks, four years coaching quarterbacks in the NFL, four more years as an NFL offensive coordinator and then, finally, a head-coaching chance with the Minnesota Vikings in 2006. He was five months from age 50.
Kevin Stefanski, now entering his sixth season as the Cleveland Browns' head coach, followed a modernized path. He got his football education without exposure to the college ranks beyond one season as assistant director of football operations at his alma mater, Penn, where he was an All-Ivy League defensive back.
Stefanski sat outside Childress' office in Minnesota, serving as his personal assistant for three seasons. He spent another five as assistant quarterbacks coach, a quality-control position, giving him eight years in the league before he coached a position outright (tight ends for two seasons, running backs for one). A one-year stint as the Vikings' offensive coordinator launched him as a head-coaching candidate in 2020.
Months from his 38th birthday at the time, Stefanski has since become a two-time Associated Press Coach of the Year.
'I was lucky. It wasn't like I set out to do it this way,' Stefanski said. 'I'm sure when I got hired as a head coach, people said, 'This guy? Are you kidding me? He hasn't done anything.''
So many offensive-minded coaches specialize in the passing game, which can make them dependent on offensive line coaches to handle the running game. Coaching tight ends or other positions associated with running the ball can expand a pass-oriented coach's horizons.
Stefanski had that in Minnesota. McDaniel had that with Denver under Mike Shanahan and with San Francisco under Kyle Shanahan.
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Both also entered the league when quality-control coaches were fewer in number. They painstakingly logged dozens of data points for each play on their own. That level of grunt work started fading by the mid-2010s, when PFF charting across more than 150 categories became available for every play across the league.
"You can't really supplement experience, but you can accelerate experience with hard work," McVay said. 'If you want to immerse yourself in this, I would venture to say that you can get two or three years' worth of experience in a year."
Now, any coach can go into PFF and, say, sort all the running plays by scheme (gap, zone, etc.), then watch those plays immediately. Before, the tedious work required to perform such projects helped McDaniel and others become experts on a granular level. But efficiency lagged.

As some seasoned NFL observers survey the new landscape, they see a lesser product. Most agree fundamentals have eroded as rules have limited offseason practice time and technology has shifted the focus toward plays and scheme, away from comprehensive systems with intricate answers for every scenario.
We pick up the conversation there with Al Saunders, who coached in the NFL from 1983 to 2018 and became a head coach in 1986, at age 39, when Don Coryell resigned from the San Diego Chargers.
A Mike Martz assistant on the 1999 Super Bowl-champion St. Louis Rams, Saunders owns advanced degrees in education from Stanford and USC. He was around long enough to coach on teams with Dan Fouts, Kurt Warner, Trent Green, Carson Palmer, Derek Carr and Baker Mayfield behind center.
The Kansas City Chiefs offense that Saunders coordinated in 2005 ranked sixth in scoring. Back then, Saunders was one of 13 OCs age 55 or older. Today there are three: Chip Kelly, Todd Monken and Johnny Morton.
Average ages for offensive coordinators have plummeted from a peak of 53 in 2005 to 43 now.
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No one is suggesting the group from 2005 or any other long-ago season had all the answers simply because they were older. Every era has its good coordinators and lesser ones. The new wave of coordinators has helped deliver innovation: increased and varied usage of motion, tempo and packaged plays like run-pass options (RPOs).
The jobs are not the same in some cases. All but eight offensive coordinators in 2005 called plays. Seventeen will not in 2025 — eclipsing 2019 (16) for the most since 2000. That includes eight of the 13 OCs under 40.
"These are quarterback coaches they are hiring in some cases," a veteran offensive coach said. "The head coach is calling the plays. Sometimes they have another senior position to help with the game planning."
Offensive coaches lament that as age 50 creeps closer, most fall into the "senior assistant" bin, no longer marketable as coordinator candidates, despite being better than they've ever been.
"I don't have dementia," a former offensive coordinator in his 50s said. "It's not like I lost what I've learned all these years."
Young offensive-minded head coaches typically hire young offensive coordinators. Front offices then frequently push for seasoned defensive coordinators as a counterbalance.
The nearly four-decade age gap between McVay and his first defensive coordinator, Wade Phillips (who was months from turning 70), illustrates the dynamic. Minnesota paired O'Connell (then 36) with defensive coordinator Ed Donatell (65). Atlanta paired Arthur Smith (38) with Dean Pees (71).
Partly because of this dynamic, defensive coordinators got older on average from 2008 until peaking at 55.1 in 2019. Their average age has settled near 48 as Phillips, Pees and other veterans filtered out.
Leaning younger on offense and older on defense can make it tougher for young defensive coaches to become coordinators, let alone head coaches.
Black coaches can feel the effects disproportionately because their numbers are concentrated on defense (for the second consecutive year, none of the league's 32 offensive coordinators entering the season is Black).
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The rush to promote young offensive coaches does not exist to the same degree on the defensive side, even though defensive coaches (and special teams coaches, to some degree) can be well-suited to coach the entire team.
"A guy who coaches the quarterback is coaching the most cerebral person in the building," a defensive coach said. "When you make him be head coach, he's not used to coaching that defensive lineman who will tell you to go to hell. That is why a lot of guys fail.
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'They are so computer-driven, and you have to be a leader of men when you are running a football team."
Jacksonville recently stocked its leadership with first-timers at executive vice president (Tony Boselli, 52), general manager (James Gladstone, 34), head coach (Coen, 39), offensive coordinator (Grant Udinski, 29) and defensive coordinator (Anthony Campanile 42). Owner Shad Khan welcomed Gladstone to a "football leadership team of Liam Coen, Tony Boselli and Tony Khan," son of the owner.
"The NFL is more and more an owner-driven league," an offensive coach in his 50s said. "They want to call a lot of the shots behind the scenes and not be responsible for them publicly."
That's tougher to do when the head coach is an empowered star or even an established veteran. Younger coaches also tend to cost owners less in salary, which could be another reason behind the NFL's youth movement. As college salaries and buyouts have increased, including for assistant coaches, NFL teams have become less likely to lure established figures from those ranks.
"I don't think the NFL wants coaches that are stars,' the offensive coach in his 50s added. 'I don't think they want the Belichicks, the Bill Cowhers and that like. They want pawns that they can manipulate and basically control.
"So when you hire those kinds of people, they are going to hire what? Young guys that they can control."
Most coaches say experience is especially valuable for making in-game adjustments.
"There is no substitute for calling games where the s--- counts," McVay said.
Experience also helps build foundational knowledge of a system, so that solutions become ready on the fly. Coordinating a coherent offense entails much more than picking plays. It's also about marrying concepts.
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"Guys do not know how to adjust," a former offensive-minded head coach said. "Just call plays and it will work. If you go up against a Vic Fangio, who is a really good defensive coordinator, he is going to kill you."
Defensive coordinators are constantly adjusting to whatever opposing offenses present, more than the other way around. That could be another reason experience prevails on defense.
Defensive coordinators seem more durable. Failing on offense can seem more fatal to career advancement.
"Go be a glorious offensive coach, you get a chance to be a head coach in five years," a defensive coach said. "You could be the greatest defensive coordinator, you'll be able to take care of your kids for the rest of your life."
While the league churned through more offensive coordinators (115) than defensive ones (94) from 2013 to '19, teams hired nearly identical numbers on each side of the ball for the other seasons since 2000. There have been 101 offensive coordinators and 97 defensive coordinators since 2020.
The 2013-19 window was notable for college-flavored schemes proliferating (think Chip Kelly) while massive amounts of new play-level data were becoming available. One defensive coach pointed to a few distinct offensive trends through this general window: quarterback zone-read, Kyle Shanahan's version of the West Coast offense on display in Atlanta, RPOs, more aggressive decision-making on fourth down and McVay's usage of jet motion and varied tempo from condensed formations.
"There have been a couple more wrinkles — Miami did a little cheat motion with Tyreek Hill — but things have kind of settled down a little bit, and defenses have caught up to jet motions, tempos," the defensive coach said.
There's no concrete evidence suggesting teams fare better on offense with young, offensive-minded head coaches. Last season, the top five offenses by EPA per play — Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, Tampa Bay and Washington — featured zero head coaches doubling as offensive play callers.
Some see big gaps between McVay-level offensive architects and young copycats who know successful plays when they see them, but haven't learned enough of the why to implement the details coherently.
"I was just watching a tight-red zone tape, and I think the details suck in the NFL — it is frustrating to watch," Hall of Fame quarterback and NFL Network analyst Kurt Warner said. "It's like, 'Hey, somebody ran this, so let's run it.' And they don't understand the details of how all that stuff helps the quarterbacks."
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With NFL rosters and staffs turning over more frequently, only the best teams maintain the continuity required to keep adding layers.
Teams are also starting rookie quarterbacks with greater frequency, another limiting factor. In 2023, the opening-week starters were younger than they had been since 1957. Some of that is cyclical, as a long list of veterans retired recently. Players have gotten younger overall since the 2011 labor agreement created a cheaper wage scale for rookie contracts.