CoachMoag

Kyle Shanahan explains why some of the 49ers’ most innovative offensive ideas had nothing to do with coaches being geniuses, and says great leaders have to be willing to change their system when they discover what their great players can uniquely do “One thing I’ve learned over the years, anytime I’ve changed the offense up, it’s never just been a dream that you have where you come up with some random idea.” “Scheme changes are usually because of a player. You get a unique player and you’re like, ‘Man, I haven’t done this, but I think this guy might be able to do this. Let me try it.’ Then he does it, and it’s something you haven’t done before. Someone sees something new, and then you can put 10 things off of that. It just kind of evolves.” “Other things that will have you change offensively are based off of what defenses are doing. There are plays I would have never run seven years ago because I thought defenses were good at stopping them.” “Then they start paying attention to other things, and now it’s like, ‘Wait a second. I used to hate this stuff, but defenses don’t pay attention to it anymore.’ Now all of a sudden I like it, and it becomes part of your offense.” “When you get different players, they change things. George Kittle, when he got here, could do some things different than I’d done with tight ends in the past. So you start asking tight ends to do different stuff, which evolves your offense.” “Deebo was a unique receiver. Some of the things we could do with him in the run game, we evolved our offense with that. It wasn’t that we were just geniuses coming up with all these receiver runs. It was because we had a different receiver who could do those runs.” “When Christian got here, we started doing things with the running back that other people hadn’t done. It wasn’t because we’re geniuses or anything. It’s because we had a running back who was capable of doing it. When those things happen, that’s when you really can evolve your offense and be different.”