. INDIANAPOLIS — Philip Rivers could sometimes read Shane Steichen’s mind.
They’d known each other for years, spent hours talking football into the late hours of the night at the Chargers complex, and now Steichen was the primary play caller, the voice in Rivers’s helmet in the final season of his Chargers career.
When Rivers was rolling, Steichen could always feel it.
“I’d hear him sometimes start to call it in, he’d have the button pushed and I’d hear him tell the other coaches, ‘He’s got it,’” Rivers said. “‘I’m about to give him something, but he’s already got it.’”
Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers (17) talks with offensive coordinator Shane Steichen, left, and offensive line coach Pat Meyer on the sideline during the second half of an NFL football game against the Jacksonville Jaguars Sunday, Dec. 8, 2019, in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
A couple of plays later, Steichen would read his quarterback’s mind.
The voice would pop into Rivers’ helmet, he’d hear the call and the veteran quarterback would feel a little rush of excitement.
“I’d be like, ‘Heck yeah, that’s what I was hoping for,’” Rivers said. “‘Dang, he’s rolling.’”
Rivers is one of the reasons Steichen is the new head coach in Indianapolis, the former Colts quarterback whose glowing recommendation got team owner Jim Irsay’s attention in the middle of a lengthy, exhaustive interview process and helped tip the scales in Steichen’s direction.
“Philip had a lot of input,” Irsay said. “Him and I talked for a very long time about Shane.”
When Steichen was introduced last week, Rivers was the first player he thanked, the first in a long line of players who’ve helped him get to this point.
“I can’t say enough about how much you’ve had an impact on me as a coach,” Steichen said. “So many great memories together, and couldn’t be more thankful for our friendship.”
Rivers got to watch Steichen grow into head coaching material.
That’s rare.
Even for a quarterback who spent 16 seasons in one organization. A coach typically has to bounce around the NFL to work his way up the ladder; a quarterback like Rivers gets used to the constant change, forging relationships with young coaches over a couple of seasons and then watching them realize their potential from afar.
Steichen spent seven of his first eight seasons in the NFL with the Chargers, rising from a defensive assistant under his mentor, Norv Turner, to the team’s interim offensive coordinator in Rivers’ final season, 2019, and then to full-time offensive coordinator in 2020, when Rivers was quarterbacking the Colts.
The two men hit it off right away, long before Steichen ever worked on the offensive side of the ball.
When Steichen first arrived in San Diego, the former UNLV quarterback spent long hours in the office working on the defensive cards and the defensive cut-ups of film, and if Rivers had free time, he often ended up hanging around the team facilities late at night, talking to the coaches who were still hard at work.
“I just kind of naturally gravitated toward where Shane was,” Rivers said. “For me, it was fun because I was talking to another quarterback mind, and for him, I think it was fun because he was stuck with the defensive guys.”
Steichen followed Turner to Cleveland for a season, then returned to the Chargers a year later, working his way more and more into the orbit of Rivers, first as the wide receivers coach and then over four seasons as the team’s quarterbacks coach.
A relationship that began with late-night conversations blossomed in position meetings, in game-planning, in the quarterback competitions that ended most Chargers training-camp practices.
Because he’d been a quarterback at UNLV, Steichen was always in the mix, going head to head with Rivers and the rest of the team’s rostered quarterbacks in challenges.
“I got a special kick out of it, because at the time, I would throw last, because we always went youngest to oldest,” Rivers said. “I’d be like, ‘Shane, I’m after you, get in there.’”
Rivers developed a deep appreciation for the way Steichen saw the game, the way he wanted to coach offense, the way he handled positional drills.
Unlike a lot of older quarterbacks, Rivers never liked going through a lengthy, extended routine of drills in practices. Rivers always wanted to get his arm warm as quickly as possible and then start playing the game.
Steichen responded by creating position drills designed to make Rivers feel like he was halfway playing the game already.
“His quarterback drills were applicable to the game, and also to the player,” Rivers said. “So for me, it was: ’You’re going to be in a tight pocket, let’s find a way to create that as much as we can, and work on it. I just watched 500 pass plays from last year, and here’s how you threw a lot of them, and here’s a running back running a sneak or a burst away from you, and here’s how you had to throw it, so let’s work on that.’”
The more time the two men spent together, the more Steichen grew, the more Rivers became convinced that his first impression of the young defensive assistant had been right on the money.
“I was like, ‘This guy’s going to be a heck of a coach,’” Rivers said. “At some point he’ll be on the offensive side, at some point he’ll be an OC, at some point he’ll be a head coach.”
Shane Steichen's passion
Steichen’s coaching style has been described as a little bit fiery, a little bit unafraid to get in people’s faces, a little bit more outwardly emotional than his predecessor in Indianapolis, Frank Reich.
Rivers can see that.
But there’s an important distinction to the legendary quarterback.
“He’s got some fire to him, but it’s very genuine, it’s a passion, it’s not just this, put-on-a show, screamer-and-yeller.” Rivers said. “But yes, there’s a fire because of the love of what he does, and there’s a genuine cheering for the guys that he’s around.”
The same goes for the easy description that’s been thrown around comparing Steichen to Nick Sirianni, the man who hired Steichen as an offensive coordinator in Philadelphia and finished off the final step in Steichen’s development into head-coaching material.
Sirianni, like Steichen, is a fiery, emotional guy with a knack for relating to his players.
“I think you would say, yes, they’re similar if you had them on a chart, but if you were around both guys for a while, you’d know why they work together well, or why they hit it off, is because they complement each other very well,” Rivers said, acknowledging that it’s hard to explain the differences between the two coaches in easy, concise terms. “When you get down to the nitty gritty, they’re different.”
For Rivers, one word keeps coming up in regards to Steichen’s coaching style.
Passion.
“I think that’s what guys are going to feel from him,” Rivers said. “Here’s this young coach, 37 or whatever, and he knows a ton of football, but he’s not one of those that needs to shove it in your face or tries to make it sound like, ‘I know more than everybody in this room.’ It’s more like, 'Hey, I need every stinking coach to help me, I need every player, I don’t have all the answers, but I do stinking know what the heck’s going on,' and they’re going to feel that genuineness.”
Why Shane Steichen's offense isn't built around a mobile quarterback
Passion defines Steichen’s offensive approach.
An approach that’s probably been pigeonholed, somewhat unfairly, as the offensive system the Eagles are using, focused heavily on the run game and the mobility of Jalen Hurts.
When Steichen talks about his offensive philosophy, other than saying in his introductory press conference that he believes teams “throw to score points and run to win,” the new Colts head coach has spent most of his career saying his system will be whatever fits his players best, the quarterback being the most important player in that equation, and tailored on a weekly basis to take advantage of the opponent’s weaknesses.
Rivers knows why Steichen’s adopted that approach.
The new Colts head coach simply can’t ignore an opportunity.
"I just remember in general, us working through the week and him being like: ‘Look at this, we need to put him on this, and run him on a dover, and him on this, and gosh, it’s just stealing.’ Look at this. I don’t even care, we’ve got to put it in. What do you want to call it?’” Rivers said. "It was not so much, ‘This is the system, and we don’t have that play.’ It was, ‘Well, we need to have it, because we’re about to have a 30-yard chunk.”
The same goes for Steichen’s approach to tailoring the offense to his quarterback, an approach Steichen referenced in his introductory press conference.
If there’s something a young quarterback did well in college, or a play that can feature one of the Colts’ best weapons, Steichen’s going to make it a part of the playbook.
Rivers was quick to point out that Steichen’s approach doesn’t mean the offensive system is a free-for-all, a system where anybody can add anything they want.
But the flexibility in the offense, and Steichen’s devotion to finding concepts that highlight his players’ strengths, make it fun to be a piece on the Colts head coach’s chess board.
“It doesn’t feel static, like. 'Oh yeah, this is the same stuff.' It doesn’t feel robotic and stagnant,” Rivers said. “Players feel some ownership in what they’re doing.”
Why Shane Steichen's play calling was called savant-like
Rivers caught Irsay’s attention during the interview process with one anecdote about Steichen’s prowess as a play-caller.
“I know Philip said at one point he threw away the play card and was calling plays from (his) head),” Irsay said.
Working with Turner taught both Steichen and Rivers that a play-caller could tell he was in the zone when he didn’t need to use the play sheet much, if at all.
And the practice sounds “savant-like,” the term Irsay used in Steichen’s introductory press conference.
Pulling it off in games requires a remarkable combination of preparation and feel.
“You do all this work during the week, you’re watching cut-ups, and you’re watching: ‘What do they run on 3rd-and-4 or 6 — and I did this as a quarterback as well — you’re writing down the coverages, 'Oh, they do this 33% of the time, they blitz this percent of the time,'” Rivers said. “That helps you, here’s the percentages of what they play with their fronts and their coverages, and that helps contribute to the game plan, but you have to have a feel element.”
Steichen’s always had that element to his style.
“I’m a gut feeling guy,” Steichen said. “Especially on game day.”
Rivers can explain why that feeling matters.
A handful of times in every game, in big moments, the defense is going to play against type, throw in a wrinkle that couldn’t be found on a tape.
Rivers has always believed the best play-callers can feel it coming, sniff out the ambush before it happens.
“To me, it’s the guys that can stay a play ahead … the defensive coordinator’s in catch-up mode,” Rivers said. “You’re not saying, ‘Oh, well that would work well against that coverage, we’ll come back to it.' You might not ever get to. You’ve got to be a play ahead, because they’re in the NFL, too. The defensive coordinators are saying the same thing.”
Steichen only called plays for Rivers officially for half a season.
But Rivers also credits Steichen for a lot of the play-calling during the Chargers’ highly successful 2018 season, and the work he’s done with Philadelphia’s offense the past couple of years only backs it up.
When a coach has worked as hard as Steichen does to find the best ways to attack a defense, it can be easy to get in a zone, like a 3-point shooter on fire in NBA Jam.
“I think the guys I’ve been around, really all of them had a little bit of that, but Shane does have it,” Rivers said. “I do think if you stole his call sheet on Sunday morning, he’d be all right.”
Steichen will probably even know what his quarterback’s thinking.
Sometimes even before he thinks it.
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02-21-2023, 09:13 AM
Why Philip Rivers believes Shane Steichen's the right man for the Colts
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