Page 1 - PDF The Why Is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution by Michael Silver
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PDF The Why Is Everything: A Story



            of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution


            by Michael Silver






            From an award-winning journalist, the inside story of the brilliant, hypercompetitive young coaches who
            threw out decades of received wisdom to fundamentally remake America’s most popular sport.When Kyle
            Shanahan became the NFL’s youngest offensive coordinator in 2008, he had one prevailing rule: Tell me the
            why. If a colleague couldn’t justify his position by providing the unassailable reasoning behind it, he was
            told to get the hell out of Shanahan’s office. Shanahan and the members of his coaching tree?including Sean
            McVay, Mike McDaniel, Raheem Morris, and Matt LaFleur?came up in a sport where innovation was the
            exception, not the rule. There had been brilliant football minds before, from Paul Brown to Bill Walsh to Bill
            Belichick. But for the most part, coaches learned a particular system and stuck to it no matter what?no matter
            the players on their team, no matter what the opponent might do.This group of young coaches would change
            all that. The Why Is Everything is the story of old dogmas falling before astonishingly creative new
            strategies and game plans. Drawing on unmatched access across the league, longtime NFL reporter Mike
            Silver takes us into the key moments in this still-unfolding revolution, from the education of Mike Shanahan,
            Kyle’s father and a two-time Super Bowl champion, in the 1980s; to the Washington Redskins’ football
            laboratory in the early 2010s, where the coaches first worked together, shocking the league with their
            cutting-edge scheme for rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III; to McVay’s Super Bowl victory in 2022 and
            Kyle Shanahan’s Super Bowl agony in 2019 and 2024.Less than a decade after their emergence, these men
            are the stars of their profession and have helped propel the NFL to new heights of viewership and drama.
            With The Why Is Everything, Silver reveals how it all happened, and in the process gives us a timeless
            account of friendship, rivalry, and the never-ending pursuit of perfection. 4 black-and-white illustrations
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