Don't Worry About Coaching Trees

When Matt LaFleur conducted his first search for a defensive coordinator, he made one thing clear: he wanted someone who would run a Vic Fangio-style defense. 

Fangio, then the head of the Denver Broncos, has long been lauded as one of the brightest defensive minds working today. A disciple of Dick LeBeau and Dom Capers, Fangio’s zone coverages stymied some of the best quarterbacks of the era. He had noteworthy success against Aaron Rodgers during his time as the defensive mastermind of the Chicago Bears, and as he ascended through the coaching ranks, his adherents proliferated throughout the league. And why wouldn’t they? The NFL is an offensive league, and anybody who has any success slowing the best offenses will almost necessarily be a hot commodity.

LaFleur, of course, ultimately hired Joe Barry, whose connection to Fangio is tenuous at the very best. He worked under Brandon Staley for a single season with the Rams in Los Angeles, and that single year represents the sum total of his connection to the Fangio tree. 

Staley, to be sure, is one of the most dyed-in-the-wool Fangio disciples, having worked under the man himself in both Chicago and Denver. But Barry had a lot more experience under coordinators springing from the Tampa 2 scheme family, including Monte Kiffin, the godfather of the scheme, and Rod Marinelli, who happens to be Barry’s father-in-law.

Nevertheless, Barry was labeled as the latest fruit of the Fangio tree, which is important because now that he’s gone, conventional wisdom suggests LaFleur will go back to that same tree for his next hire.

But I think this is a bad way to approach the process, both from the hiring side and from the media coverage side, for two big reasons.

The first is that the coaching tree from which you spring is virtually irrelevant to what you do as a coach. It’s certainly true that the defense you run is going to be influenced by the coaches you work for prior to becoming a playcaller yourself. How could it not? Why would you not want it to, if the guy you worked for was good? But it’s not as though a coordinator is just copying and pasting his previous boss’s playbook and doing the exact same thing in a new gig. A coach will inevitably do things differently, both from a conscious desire to set himself apart (why not become the next guy a scheme tree is named after?) but also in the unconscious ways that two human beings are different from one another.

Two coordinators will run the same scheme in two different ways just by virtue of the fact that they’re two different people, and characterizing them the same way because they come from the same tree is practically pointless.

But secondly, a “tree” is just a poor metaphor. Branches from a given tree trunk are always going to be the same as the trunk itself. You will never find a branch of an apple tree that suddenly starts producing cherries. But the difference between the branches of a coaching tree can and will be wildly different.

Looking at the difference between Matt LaFleur and Arthur Smith, both nominally branches of the vaunted Shanahan coaching tree. In the Packers’ Week 2 meeting with the Falcons, the difference between the two could not have been more apparent. The Packers trusted Jordan Love to throw and throw, while the Falcons ground away with their rushing attack, letting their two powerful backs hammer away at the Packer’s front, an approach from which Smith famously failed to deviate no matter what the game situation Two members of the Shanahan tree, but very different fruit. 

But in addition to being a poor metaphor, talking about trees is just woefully imprecise. Consider the case of Dennard Wilson, one of the six candidates to interview for the Packers’ current defensive coordinator job. Wilson, a long-time position coach, has worked for four different defensive coordinators: Gregg Williams (with the Rams and the Browns), Todd Bowles (with the Jets), Jonathan Gannon (with the Eagles), and Mike MacDonald (with the Ravens). To whose tree does he belong? Does characterizing him as a “Williams guy” versus a “Gannon guy” or a “MacDonald guy” versus a “Bowles guy” change how we think about him? If so, why?

I think, at the very least, we can see how a guy like Wilson makes it hard to use the tree metaphor. Instead, I think we should think of coaching backgrounds as pedigrees. The experiences you have as a coach, both major and minor, before you get a coordinator job will affect what you do in the rest of your career. But those experiences are going to affect every coach differently, even if their experiences are all basically identical. 

Just understanding the full picture of a coach’s background still puts us on a better path to understanding who they are before they get a playcalling gig. It’s not as simple as saying a coach comes from a given tree, and changing how we think about coaching backgrounds will help us form better and more accurate opinions about them.