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Cleveland Browns: Contrasting Kyle Shanahan, John DeFilippo

By Peter Smith

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The Cleveland Browns have found an unusual amount of offensive success, especially this early in the 2015 season. The offense was expected to be the major weakness on the team with the defense being tasked with keeping them in games and doing the heavy lifting.

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The opposite has occurred an while the Browns’ biggest loss in some people’s minds was the loss of offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan, John DeFilippo has been more than up to the task. Their methods for how they have attacked offensively have been completely differently, but have both been able to find success with the Browns and largely the same cast of players.

Before Kyle Shanahan’s exit in Cleveland, which was far less quitting and far more quitting before he was fired, the Browns offensive attack found a great deal of success under his guidance. Shanahan is a certified coaching prodigy when it comes to X’s and O’s, coming up with gameplans and his methods of attacking defenses. He is legitimately one of the brightest offensive minds in the game right now.

Mandatory Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

Shanahan employed the pure zone blocking scheme that he learned under his father, Mike Shanahan, the two time Super Bowl champion. The concept has offensive linemen to win with position, athleticism and spacing to create multiple running lanes for which a running back has to choose. This puts a premium on running back vision and instincts. It is a system that has helped to create some stars out of players that other teams did not value highly.

Defensive coordinators try their best to take an offense’s best player away from them as much as possible, thereby forcing the offense to beat them with secondary or even tertiary options to beat them. Shanahan’s acumen and brilliance in coaching has been in his ability to create opportunities and isolate matchups for the team’s best player to succeed despite the defense’s attempts to contain them.

This is something he has done at every place he has been from Houston with Andre Johnson and is currently doing with Julio Jones in Atlanta. Johnson put up Hall of Fame numbers and Jones, right now, has been so dominant that he is in the MVP discussion at this stage of the season. Shanahan maximizes his best player and really lets them shine, regardless of the opponent.

The flip side of this is that while Shanahan has maximized his best players, the ancillary players tend to fall by the way side to some extent. With Andre Johnson and Julio Jones in particular, they eat up so many targets that the rest of the offense’s production tends to be relatively ordinary and even somewhat underutilized.

When it works, the team is winning and no one is terribly concerned as is being seen with the Falcons. Their running game is productive, Julio Jones is having the best season of his career and the team is 5-0 in the standings.

Jun 17, 2015; Atlanta, GA, USA; Atlanta Falcons offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan coaches during minicamp at Falcons Training Facility. Mandatory Credit: Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports

Contrast that to what DeFilippo is doing in Cleveland. Flip has kept some of the zone concepts in the running game but added gap concepts to it, to be able to have their linemen attack at the opponent as opposed to winning in space and position. Under Flip, the running game has not been nearly as successful as it was under Shanahan and not all of the issues are due to Flip, but certainly, that advantage goes heavily to Shanahan.

Where Flip is successful is how he spreads the ball around, creates mismatches and attacks them as opposed to focusing it all on the main playmaker. As a result, through five weeks of the season, their top seven targets have 24, 22, 21, 17, 14, nine and seven receptions respectively.

Jun 16, 2015; Berea, OH, USA; Cleveland Browns quarterback Josh McCown (13) and Cleveland Browns offensive coordinator John DeFilippo during minicamp at the Cleveland Browns practice facility. Mandatory Credit: Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports

One of the key differences in the passing game is the usage of the running back position, which is where Flip is trying to make up the difference in what they are not getting from the running game. Under Shanahan in ’14, the Browns had a total of 32 catches from the running back position (under 12% of the team’s total). With Flip, the emphasis has been far different, where through five weeks, the running back position has the same 32 receptions, but it accounts for over a quarter of the team’s receptions thus far (over 26%).

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Whereas Shanahan found a star and emphasized them as much as they possibly could, Flip targets guys he believes can make plays, but really only seems worried with finding guys that can produce; not really discriminating in terms of position. If a player can produce, Flip will try to find a winning matchup and capitalize on it.

Shanahan’s top receiver in Cleveland was Andrew Hawkins, who had 63 receptions and was 16 more than the second leading receiver, Miles Austin, with 47. 5 receivers in total ended up with 5 players in total that eclipsed 20 receptions on the season. Flip is on pace to have seven and the difference between his top receiver (Gary Barnidge, 24 receptions) to his fifth receiver (Taylor Gabriel, 14), is just 10 catches to this point.

Shanahan employed more of a downfield passing attack, trying to attack defenses deep, further opening running lanes and forcing defenses to cover a ton of ground. Playaction and bootlegs were used extensively because of the threat of the running game, moving the pocket and giving receivers time to get down the field to strike. The longer developing routes gave receivers time to beat defenders and get open for big plays. These plays tended to keep more protection into block, limiting the number of receivers to find and hit with passes.

While Flip will take his share of shots down the field, he tends to favor more of a West Coast attack, stretching defenses horizontally while forcing them to stay honest over the top. The space created by these concepts makes finding open receivers easier and creating opportunities for yards after the catch underneath as defenses tend to be inclined to drop back and tackle the pass. Under Flip, the offense works with quicker passes that can have the same impact as running plays.

Both coordinators have been able to elevate mediocre career quarterbacks far above where their talent level suggests. Brian Hoyer had the best year of his career with Shanahan and Josh McCown is enjoying the best season of his career under Flip, at age 36.

The last part of this discussion comes down to the environment created and the wake left with their departures. Shanahan has struggled with his people skills in the NFL and it was a problem in Washington as well as Cleveland, at least that has come out publicly. Shanahan struggled to deal with coworkers and while he was great for some players, he had a tendency to alienate others. He had ‘his’ guys and is a little bit of a diva.

Shanahan’s issues with the Browns came to a head when he came up with a substantial PowerPoint presentation explaining why he was leaving. And while that may have been true, there is reason to believe that, there is also reason to believe he quit before he was going to get fired – that the environment was so toxic that something had to give and he burned that bridge on his way out of town.

Shanahan is undoubtedly brilliant and as talented a young offensive mind as exists in the NFL. His results and production will buy him countless opportunities and as long as he can get results, organizations will put up with the selfishness and lack of people skills. At some point, Shanahan’s acumen will get him the opportunity to be a head coach, whether in college or the NFL. It will be interesting to see if his idiosyncratic tendencies prove effective in that role or if they ultimately lead him to ruin.

Meanwhile, Flip is not nearly as highly regarded as Shanahan as an offensive mind. This job with the Browns is actually his first as an NFL coordinator. He has not called plays since he was an assistant at San Jose State under then head coach Mike MacIntyre, who is now the head coach at Colorado. Flip has been a quarterbacks coach in the NFL, most recently with the Oakland Raiders.

Jun 2, 2014; Alameda, CA, USA; Oakland Raiders quarterbacks coach John DeFilippo at organized team activities at the Raiders Practice Facility. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Nevertheless, in coaching circles Flip is regarded as a bright mind, a good communicator and teacher. Maybe just as important, Flip has a reputation of leaving jobs well. For example, Raiders quarterback Derek Carr was extremely complimentary of Flip when it was announced he was going to take the offensive coordinator job in Cleveland after getting to work with him for just his rookie year.

This is a common trend from both players and coaches in Flip’s past as a coach, suggesting he is an inclusive coach that tries to do right by his players as opposed to just going for results. If he is unable to get the job done, that factor will not save him but players seem to like to playing under him.

Shanahan and Flip have both found successful ways to create offensive production, but are doing it in completely different, almost diametrically opposed philosophies. Given that Flip is currently with the Browns, the challenge for him is to work to improve the production of the running game to make it easier to create more and larger plays in the passing games.

If he and the Browns are able to do that, he has a far more complete offensive attack. Nevertheless, despite different offensive coordinators, for the second year in a row, the Cleveland Browns are overachieving on the offensive side of the ball and as it turns out, needs every ounce of it just to compete so far this year.

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