Philadelphia Eagles: Shane Steichen can be Nick Sirianni’s Frank Reich
No matter how much we’d like to speculate, extrapolate, or assume, there’s no way to truly know what kind of offense the Philadelphia Eagles will run in 2021 until Nick Sirianni‘s squad takes the field this summer.
I know, I know, that not what anyone wants to hear, but it’s objectively true. Sirianni never called plays at any point in his NFL coaching career, and neither did his new passing game coordinator, Hillsborough, New Jersey’s Kevin Patullo, so assuming the Eagles will transplant the Colts offense one for one is incorrect.
Doug Pederson didn’t call the same West Coast offense we saw from his predecessor, Andy Reid. Chip Kelly did run basically the same offense from his time at Oregon, and we all saw how that went.
The NFL is about change.
Even during Sirianni’s tenure as OC paired up with Frank Reich, the Colts ran slightly different offenses whether they had Andrew Luck, Jacoby Brissett, or Philip Rivers under center.
However, one thing we can definitively quantify is what Sirianni’s new offensive coordinator, Shane Steichen, likes to do with the play-calling sheet in his hands, as the 35-year-old ran the show offensively for the Los Angeles Chargers in 2019 on an interim basis and in 2020 full-time under then-head coach Anthony Lynn.
Shane Steichen brings a diversity of opinions to the Philadelphia Eagles’ offense.
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2020 was a weird, weird year for the Los Angeles Chargers.
From having their starting quarterback get his lung punctured by the team’s medical staff (literally), to finding a diamond in the rough quarterback sixth overall in Oregon’s Justin Herbert, the Chargers’ initial plans of running a run-heavy offense centered around Tyrod Taylor almost immediately flew out the window.
Now granted, I don’t think anyone’s complaining that the team had to change things up to better fit Herbert’s talents, because he was, after all, sensational, it still caused the Chargers to fight through some pretty big growing pains that they were ultimately unable to overcome to make the playoffs.
Good news for Brandon Staley, who now gets to coach Herbert as a first-year head coach but bad news for Lynn and Steichen, who were both relieved of their duties heading into the offseason.
So what gives? What did Steichen do to unlock Herbert’s potential right out of the gate, all the while fielding an offense that ranked 18th in points scored and only averaged 20.6 points per game over the final six games of the season?
I’m glad you asked.
Well, first and foremost, Steichen likes to run his offense from a variety of different looks. Sure, he’ll run the plurality, if not the majority of his plays from the shotgun like any red-blooded, under-40-year-old offensive play-caller not named Kevin Stefanski or Arthur Smith, but he’ll call plays out of the pistol, and even from under center.
Steichen also likes running play-action, like a lot. Steichen uses the simple act of faking a handoff to cause linebackers and would-be rushers to hesitate for a second in order to open up passing plays both down the field and near the line of scrimmage.
If you watched how Jason Garrett used the play-action with Dak Prescott during his final few years with the Cowboys, you’d surely recognize that aspect of Steichen’s playbook almost immediately.
Once the play is snapped and either Herbert or Taylor opts to keep the ball if there’s an option on the table – which Steichen does like to use situationally – the 2020 Chargers like to go vertical, regardless of whether he’s spreading the defensive backfield out with five-wide looks or running a two-receiver concept with stacked routes from under center. Steichen is also a fan of anticipation routes, as Herbert’s highlight reel is littered with throws to receivers running one way who turn around at the last second to secure the pass – many of which turn into 50-50 balls where the Chargers’ taller receivers have a decided advantage.
Heck, Steichen is even down to just straight-up run his quarterback on designed runs, a look the Eagles shied away from with Carson Wentz from 2018 on but were willing to do when Jalen Hurts became their QB1.
But at their core, the Chargers were a team committed to running the ball, and that is likely why Sirianni opted to bring Steichen to town – that and their shared time together in LA.
In 2020, the Chargers ran the ball 466 times, which ranked ninth in the league. Granted, they weren’t particularly good at running the ball, as they finished out the season with the 18th most rushing yards and the 27th most rushing touchdowns. According to Sharp Football (via our friends at Bolt Beat), the Chargers ran the ball on first down 53 percent of the time. They, again, weren’t particularly successful at it, as the Chargers were the only team in the top-10 to average fewer than four yards per carry (3.9) and had the lowest success rate (42%).
Is that good? No, the Chargers fared far better when they threw the ball than when they opted to run it with a motley crew of role players like Austin Ekeler, Joshua Kelley, Kalen Ballage, and Justin Jackson, but through it all, the team stuck to the way they wanted to do things and remained committed to a sub-60-40 run-to-pass ratio using a similar zone-blocking scheme to what both Kelly and Pederson liked to run.
Steichen also went out of his way to get said motley crew involved in the passing game, as 24 percent of the team’s passing attempts went to running backs.
If you’ve ever pulled your hair out after watching the Eagles throw the ball 20 straight times to close out a game without so much as a single target going to Miles Sanders, you’d love watching an uninterrupted Steichen offense at work, as he’ll run the ball in the fourth quarter even if it costs his team a win due to a lack of clock awareness.
Hey, a lack of clock awareness! Are we sure Steichen isn’t coming from the Andy Reid coaching tree?
Now, much like with Serianni, some of the issues with the Chargers’ offense could be directly attributed to Lynn, as he played six years in the NFL as a running back before coaching the position extensively from 2003-2016. Maybe he implemented a run-focused scheme, and Serianni just did the best with what he was given to produce a top-6 passing offense. Maybe we’ll see the Eagles running a bunch of play-action to set up deep vertical touchdowns after running the ball on first down from under the center, or maybe we’ll see the Eagles remain a shotgun-only team who continue to go for it on fourth down for no reason in particular after punting in a more advantageous situation earlier in the game.
dark. Next. Ja’Marr Chase or DeVonta Smith, who’s better?
Either way, expect Shane Steichen to bring a slightly different perspective to the Philadelphia Eagles’ offensive strategy room, even if he isn’t tasked with calling plays. In a way, that’s kind of the beauty of having an offensive coordinator who isn’t an in-house replacement or someone from the same coaching staff as the head coach. In 2016, Howie Roseman and company paired up Doug Pederson with another former quarterback in Frank Reich, who brought a slightly different offensive outlook from his time with the Chargers. Huh, in that regard, I guess hiring Steichen really is giving Nick Sirianni his own version of Frank Reich – oh, how the tables have turned.