“[Mike Shanahan] has a different way of disciplining. He is stern when he needs to be, is lenient when it calls for it.”LINEBACKER JOHN MOBLEY MIAMI – The dirty, low-down sneak who conspired with John Elway against Dan Reeves didn’t want his job after all. In 1992, Bronco owner Patrick Bowlen tied the can to Dan (who earlier had tied one to Mike Shanahan), with the plan to make Shanahan the new man. But Shanahan decided to stay as San Francisco’s offensive co-ordinator.
“Things had gotten so bad with me and Dan the previous year, and everyone thought I was after his job,” Shanahan said. “It just didn’t feel right.”
Nor, in San Francisco, did Shanahan want anything to do with a Carmen Policy brainchild to make the offensive co-ordinator the official coach-in-waiting for George Seifert, who was thought to be retiring one or two years down the road. This would indicate that despite whatever Reeves thought was going on behind his back, it involved no twisting of knives, clipping on runbacks or anything Bill Romanowski might have ever done on a football field.
You don’t see any blood on Shanahan’s hands, and not much time either. He is more organized than a Jamal Anderson self-promotional campaign, and leaves less to chance than Linda Tripp. Not only does he tape games, but Bronco team meetings, and then actually watches them.
Shanahan has film of Reeves doing The Dirty Bird, and undoubtedly has plans to blackmail him with it. From a secret office by the meeting rooms, Shanahan can pick up things on a closed-circuit monitoring system that are not meant for a coach’s ears, like about what a meticulous S.O.B. he is.
“I’d hear [players] say things about me, how they didn’t like something I did, or I was bugging them in some way,” he said. “So I’d file it away and later say to them, ‘So you didn’t like what we did in practice?'”
Until they figured out how he knew, Shanahan loved the look on their faces. This may be because the last time he looked surprised himself was when Al Davis didn’t talk nice to him. The Raider boss fired Shanahan from his first NFL head coaching job barely into his second season, when he had a cumulative record of 8-12, which shows that genius doesn’t always come instantaneously, more often after years of study under many coaches and systems, and never until you get hired by a team with a future Hall of Fame quarterback.
The consensus around the NFL is that Shanahan has become one of the league’s best coaches – the reigning Super Bowl champ usually gets close consideration, except in years when Barry Switzer wins – but the Broncos say he is the best coach to play for, too. And not just because when they win, he gives them Mondays off. No cheap motivational tricks for this coach, only an attention to detail that makes the bright, motivated players he chooses play better.
“We concern ourselves more about our team,” he said. “We don’t put things on the bulletin board, don’t really talk about the other team other than at their strengths and weaknesses, and we’re pretty honest about it.
“I’m more concerned about our team, take more pride in how we execute.”
He rarely snarls, except at reporters who ask him about Reeves. Also, he never asks guys to do more than they are capable of, except last year when he sent Terrell Davis into the game when he was blinded by migraine headaches. Just to be a decoy, mind you.
The coach is thinking all the time. He learned how to organize his time down to nanoseconds in his four years at San Francisco. The 49ers’ way has largely become the Broncos’ way. But there is only one way to treat players, according to Shanahan. And that’s the way he wanted to be treated himself as a player.
“I didn’t like people that yelled at me,” he said yesterday. “If you wanted me to do something, just tell me, and if I’m doing something wrong, tell me. And if I knew you cared about me, I would run through a wall for you.
“If I knew somebody was going to look at me and yell at me for doing something, then that wasn’t the way to get to me. So I like to treat people the way I liked to be treated.
“Once in a while, you can’t do it that way. If they want to be treated like boys, we’ll treat them like boys.”
And that’s not very often. “I’ve never seen such a laid-back coach in all my life,” said linebacker John Mobley. “It’s great that he respects you as a man.
“I don’t know if it’s just because of the levels I’ve played at, where they yell at you. But he is very open to his players. He looks at you, you know what you did wrong, and it’s up to you to fix it.
“He has a different way of disciplining. He is stern when he needs to be, is lenient when it calls for it. We just know what would tick him off, what we can’t do. I think that has a lot to say about us and the people he wants on his team.
“We stay grounded. In the meantime, he always says good is not good enough, that he wants everything to be perfect.”