Rams granted permission to speak with Greg Roman and Kyle Shanahan

@SandoESPN: Timing of #Rams’ OC opening and Kyle Shanahan’s mutual parting from Cleveland is convenient, but we shall see.

Interesting. Fisher is good friends with the Shanahans.

wv wrote:

Does Kyle use the same system
that BS does?

Itz always the same names that
get reshuffled. It annoys me
for some reason. I’d just as soon
Fisher hire from within.

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Shanahan runs a WCO, Schott ran a variation on Coryell.

Bradford won Offensive Rookie of the Year in the WCO, didn’t he? Shurmur, I believe, was the oc. Lots of dinking and dunking, and much easier defenses back then, but still…

zn wrote:

wv wrote:
Does Kyle use the same system
that BS does?

Itz always the same names that
get reshuffled. It annoys me
for some reason. I’d just as soon
Fisher hire from within.

w
v

Shanahan runs a WCO, Schott ran a variation on Coryell.

In a response to the Sando tweet someone wondered whether Fisher would allow Shanahan to use his zone running scheme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_run

what has continuity done for Bradford or the Rams? Bradford cannot stay on the field long enough to benefit from it.
Now his OC is gone. Oh well, too bad.

Grits

i agree. i’d like to see them hire cignetti. i don’t know if he’d change the scheme. but he’s at least be familiar with the personnel which would give him a leg up on any coordinator they’d bring from the outside.

znhater wrote:

Uh no. Rams fans didn’t like Schotty, this guy is worse imo. The niners offense bailed at the end of the season. He does fit fishers plodding offense though sigh.

Well if nuthin else, maybe they can pick his evil 49er-brain.

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What system? That’s the only thing I care about in this hunt. What system was he running? What system are any of ’em running?

…I’m just gonna finish putting up that whole article
cause its good writing and interesting stuff.
w
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http://sports.yahoo.com/news/nfl–offensive-guru-and-coaching-candidate-greg-roman-a-victim-of-his–niners–success-022509392.html
…Adds 49ers running backs coach Tom Rathman: “I was surprised he didn’t get a job this year, because I think he has everything. Not only does he have the X’s and O’s down, but he motivates his players. He’s a real leader. Players love him. He fits the mold of some really good coaches. We were really lucky we got him back again next year. When he gets a shot, I think he’s gonna open a lot of eyes.”

Long before his current colleagues could conjure visions of a Roman Empire, the Jersey Shore native was showing his initiative in the shadow of the Boardwalk Empire.

Greg Roman talks with Colin Kaepernick prior to the Patriots game. (Getty)

Growing up in Atlantic City, Roman spent his summers shuttling ice-cream containers to beachside vendors, probably making less in July and August than the price of prying one’s F-150 from a San Francisco impound lot.

Roman, the youngest of three boys raised by a single mother, was already volunteering with the Special Olympics by the time he was eight. His older brother, Matthew, has Down’s Syndrome, and their close relationship has clearly impacted him on both personal and professional levels.

“That’s my buddy,” Roman says of Matthew. “He’s a huge part of my life.”

When Roman played at John Carroll, a Division III school near Cleveland, Matthew was a frequent visitor. He’d hang out, go to parties and pretty much get treated like the coolest kid at school. The guy has plenty of personality: Once, after being introduced to Panthers owner Jerry Richardson when Greg was a low-level member of Carolina’s coaching staff, Matthew said, “You’re Greg’s boss? You need to pay him more.”

Greg, while at John Carroll, established Project H.O.P.E., a program that brought developmentally disabled kids onto campus to participate in a variety of sports. Says Roman of the event, which still occurs annually at the school: “It was the first time I took the reins over something and brought it up from the ground floor.”

On the football field, Roman was far less altruistic. A 5-foot-8 nose guard, Roman made up for his lack of size with a disproportionate share of attitude.

“On the field he was nasty,” Caldwell recalls. “He was competitive. He was our team leader. He self-proclaimed our defensive line the ‘Legion of Doom.’ The younger guys were probably more intimidated by him than anything. But people gravitated toward him because he was easy to talk to.”

In 1995 Roman hooked on with the expansion Panthers, serving as an unpaid assistant strength and conditioning coach. He segued into a simultaneous gig as Capers’ defensive quality control coach, later switching over to a similar role on the offensive side.

“He came in and was an energetic young guy, anxious to learn as much as he could,” Capers recalls. “Greg’s a loyal guy, a hard worker and has a very good mind. It’s a good combination. He’s earned everything that he’s gotten.”

Recalls Caldwell, who rented a room from Roman after coming to the Panthers as a scouting assistant in ’96: “I remember I’d come home, it’d be May or June, and Greg would be in the kitchen, diagramming plays and studying the playbook. It was our off time. I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

Capers was fired following the ’98 season and replaced by George Seifert, who’d coached the Niners to a pair of Super Bowl victories. Seifert kept Roman on as an offensive assistant assigned to the team’s tight ends — and began noticing similarities to another highly motivated young staffer who’d started off in San Francisco handling player ticket requests for road games.

“He kind of reminded me of [Jon] Gruden,” Seifert recalls. “Gruden would always sit and watch [veteran offensive line coach] Bobb McKittrick’s meetings and delve into all aspects of the game. Basically, Greg was the same kind of guy. It wasn’t like he was just gonna work with the tight ends. He was gonna know every facet of the offense. He knew it, in some ways, better than some of the coaches on the staff.

“He asked a lot of questions. He was very specific and he was a sponge. He wanted to know everything. He was bright. He had a smirk. He could tell a joke, and if it didn’t go over, he could take the abuse.”

Roman’s strong sense of self served him well in subsequent stints with the Texans (where he coached tight ends and quarterbacks from 2002-05) and Ravens (where he was an assistant offensive line coach from 2006-07). When he arrived in San Francisco with Harbaugh, he remembered his roots, making the team’s position coaches feel invested in the product and creating an inclusive environment. Roman not only delegates game-planning responsibilities to Rathman, quarterbacks coach Geep Chryst, offensive line coach Mike Solari and receivers coach John Morton, but he also solicits their play-calling suggestions in the heat of battle.

“We sit in the room and he’ll put his thoughts up on the board and ask what we think, and we’ll collectively discuss things,” Rathman says of Roman. “It’s not just him. He’s looking for input from all the coaches he works with. And he listens.”

[More: Near-death experience doesn’t deter prospect Dion Jordan]

Says Roman: “I’ve been in that position — the frustrated assistant who wants to voice his opinion. It’s frustrating. I used to throw out insane stuff, just to get people going.”

Roman may not be a dictator, but he has no problem dictating to opposing defenses. “He knows how to take that defense apart,” Rathman says. “He breaks ’em down. He definitely has [swagger]. He’s got a lot of confidence. But he should have a lot of confidence.”

“I’m a riveter in the morning and a poet at night,” Roman says, twirling some cellophane noodles with Dungeness crab on his fork. He is sitting at a bayside table at the Slanted Door, a trendy Vietnamese restaurant, with a crystal-clear view of Alcatraz Island.

While providing insight into the way he crafts and executes a game plan — a lengthy explanation that will ultimately lead us to the impound lot — Roman manages to make a brutally violent sport with 22 simultaneous moving parts seem suspiciously like a chess match.

“Play-calling, it’s week to week, but sometimes it goes beyond that, too,” Roman says. “I don’t want to sound too melodramatic. But here’s what it is: I orchestrate sequences of events. I don’t just grab plays. Everything I do has a purpose. I’m thinking big picture.”

And as Roman suggests, many of those thoughts come at odd hours. “A lot of my [expletive] happens at night — late at night,” he says. “I’m nocturnal. I’ll be in bed, asleep, and I’ll get up and walk into the other room and start writing things down. It’s hard to turn it off.”

To turn it back on the next day, Roman employs a strategy familiar to many working Americans.

“He drinks a lot of coffee in the morning,” Staley says. “He’s like a mad scientist in his room, scheming up plays. He comes down to our install meetings on Wednesdays just pouring sweat. He looks like a nervous high school student. We ask him, ‘Are you all right? You just sweat profusely.’ I’m in the front row, too. There are times when he’s dripping sweat on the overhead projector.”

The plays Roman unveils on the screen, of course, are far more aesthetically pleasing. “He’s a genius when it comes to football,” Staley says. “He comes up with crazy stuff you don’t see anywhere else — and he calls it at the perfect time.”

Except, of course, when he intentionally doesn’t. In mid-December, after the Niners pulled out a 41-34 victory over the New England Patriots to improve to 10-3-1, Roman consciously decided to dial back the offense in order to keep potential playoff opponents off balance.

That approach seemed dubious the following Sunday night in Seattle, when the 49ers absorbed a 42-13 thrashing at the hands of the Seahawks, but Roman took solace in the fight Kaepernick displayed in leading San Francisco to a late touchdown. The next week, though Roman kept things relatively conservative, the 49ers defeated the Arizona Cardinals to clinch the NFC West title and a first-round bye.

Two weeks later against the Packers, Roman unleashed the fury.

“My post-New England mindset was to hold back and try to save things for the playoffs,” Roman says. “We did a bunch of [read-option plays] against New England, but you run into that question of exposure. The reality is that you’ve got to win playoff games. That was definitely part of the plan. Because NFL teams are too good — you start showing something and having success, they’re gonna find a way to stop it.

“You don’t want to make a living on it. If you can win a game and hold that back, why not? I coached defense. I know what it’s like when you have to prepare for something like that. It’s all hands on deck. It’s mayhem.”

The Niners faced some chaos of their own in each of their final two games of 2012. Against the Falcons in the NFC championship game, they trailed 17-0 before rallying to win 28-24. In the Super Bowl, the Ravens took a 28-6 lead early in the second half before the lights went out in the Superdome and the light went on for San Francisco’s offense. In both crises, Roman kept his cool.

“We’re down in the NFC championship game, and he stays calm and sticks to his game plan, and we launch that comeback,” Gore recalls. “In the Super Bowl, same thing: We don’t panic. When we started clicking, the [Ravens’] defense, they didn’t have a clue.”

And then, seven yards from a potential go-ahead touchdown, the Niners’ offense mysteriously stalled. In the weeks since, Roman has been questioned by armchair coordinators for everything from not calling more running plays to not staying exclusively with the read option to trying to force the ball to Crabtree at the expense of other targets. If it makes them feel any better, he has broken it down thousands of times in his mind — and, of course, in his sleep.

Roman knows what he called, and knows how close he was to riding in a parade down Market Street while being lauded by the same people as the second coming of Bill Walsh. And now, as he stands on Bryant Street underneath a raised portion of the interstate, preparing to reclaim his ride, the riveter/poet is being asked to relive the maddening sequence yet again.

First-and-goal from the 7, 2:39 remaining: Gore, who’d just busted off a 33-yard run, was on the sidelines as backup running back LaMichael James lined up behind Kaepernick in a full-house Pistol formation. James took a handoff and slipped through a hole to his immediate right; Ravens linebacker Dannell Ellerbee plugged the gap and nailed him after a two-yard gain. In retrospect, Roman’s cool with his decision — a little more room and James could have made a cut and cruised into the end zone.

Second-and-goal from the 5, following the two-minute warning: Kaepernick, lined up in the shotgun, rolled right and threw short and off target to Crabtree, who’d been bumped by cornerback Corey Graham. Many observers later wondered whether Kaepernick should have instead tried to thread a high pass over the middle to Randy Moss, who appeared to be open on the play. In the Niners’ coaching box, they were yelling for a pass interference call on Graham.

Third-and-goal from the 5, 1:55 remaining: This one was the killer. Kaepernick lined up in the Pistol, with Gore to his immediate right. It was a read-option play, in theory, but it essentially was a quarterback counter. Kaepernick, after a step backward, was going to run behind right guard Alex Boone and Gore, each of whom was pulling left.

Roman was sure the quarterback was going to score. He was sure the Ravens’ coaches were sure a touchdown was imminent. Yet with the play clock nearing zero, Harbaugh called timeout. Chalk it up to the downside of having turned over an offense to a tantalizingly talented but inexperienced quarterback in November. Harbaugh and Roman took a calculated risk, and it was a split-second away from paying off.

At that point, with the Ravens’ coaches having just watched their season flash before their eyes, Roman was convinced of one thing: There’s no way Baltimore would stay passive. Sure enough, two “Cover 0” blitzes were coming. And Roman, playing the percentages, dialed up plays that called for Crabtree — Kaepernick’s favorite target — to be the “hot” receiver. “Wouldn’t you rather give your guys a chance to make a play?” Roman asks rhetorically.

[Related: Michael Crabtree said he was momentarily blinded on last play]

Third-and-goal, Part II: Kaepernick lined up under center, took a conventional snap, dropped back and made a quick pass to Crabtree, who had gone in motion to the right and cut hard to the sideline. Cornerback Jimmy Smith got there quickly and dislodged the ball from the receiver’s hand, setting up the final play.

Fourth-and-goal from the 5, 1:50 remaining: Kaepernick, from the Pistol, had little time to throw as Ellerbee came in hard and unblocked on the blitz. Crabtree and Smith did some back-and-forth pushing before Kaepernick threw for the receiver and the ball fell incomplete. On the sideline, Harbaugh went crazy, gesturing for defensive holding. No call. No Super Bowl triumph. No satisfaction.

View gallery
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Michael Crabtree reaches for the ball on fourth down in the fourth quarter against the Ravens. (USA TODAY Spor …
Suffice it to say that Roman is highly motivated to end next season under a stream of red-and-gold confetti — ideally, with another franchise waiting impatiently to hire him as its head coach. Surely, that inconvenient timing issue could hamstring him the way it did this past season, though the buzz about Roman in league circles will likely be louder in 2013. Says Caldwell: “I would envision him being one of the top (head-coaching candidates), with his track record of success, his experiences both at the college and pro level, and his offensive IQ and his defensive IQ.”

Conveniently, the Niners remain loaded, with the prospect for improvement, having added to their already large pool of draft picks by trading Smith to the Kansas City Chiefs. And Roman has a new toy in ex-Ravens wideout Anquan Boldin, stolen for a sixth-round selection earlier this month.

On paper, the 49ers look like preseason Super Bowl favorites. Yet, as Roman knows all too well, nothing is promised in the NFL. For one thing, Capers and his fellow defensive coordinators will devote much of their offseason to devising ways to combat the read option.

“Oh yeah, they’re gonna find ways to stop it,” Roman says as he gets behind the wheel of his truck and prepares to head south into rush-hour traffic, with a stop to pick up some Febreze on his immediate agenda. “It’s gonna go back and forth. And we’ve gotta predict what they will do and figure out how to counter that.

“But the reality is, if you’ve got a guy who can throw the ball like [Kaepernick] can and run it like he can, it eventually becomes a numbers game. What do you want to stop? Then we turn to something we call play-action, and it’s a huge advantage.

“So yeah, they’re gonna be spending a lot of time on this. They should. This is real. And we’re just getting started.”

More from Michael Silver on the NFC West:

Herzog wrote:

What system? That’s the only thing I care about in this hunt. What system was he running? What system are any of ‘em running?

Both Shanahan and Roman run WCOs. Bradford spent 2 years in a WCO, of course (Shurmur).

My guess is that Roman is more of a “adapt to what they have” kind of coordinator, while KS shows up with the Daddy Shanahan running game concepts, and is more of a “adapt to my system” kind of coach, at least in terms of the running game.

Without knowing much more about them, I do know they differ in this respect.

Roman, with SF, was obviously getting a lot of success with read option stuff programmed in with CK. Though, Smith played well for him too. In the 9 games he played in 2012, Smith completed 70.2% of his passes for 8.0 an attempt, had a 6.0% TD percentage, a 2.3% INT percentage, and a qb rating of 104.1. The TD percentage, completion percentage, and qb rating are all the best of his career.

I know another thing about the SF offense. It is said, rightly, that Schott’s passing scheme was complicated because it built in so many sight adjustments (MCD was the same way). It takes rookie WRs a while to adapt to that because sight adjustments means reading the defense pre-snap, and college receivers never have to do that. Well, in SF, Harbaugh made a big deal about not using sight adjustments. I don’t know if that was because of Roman, or if Roman liked that, or whatever. But it is at least 1 possible difference between Roman and Schott.

Shanahan I know less about in general but he does run the zone blocking running scheme his father lived off of. That would mean a big transformation in how the OL plays. But then Baltimore, which made the same switch for this season under Kubiak (a Shanahan the elder’s disciple), made that work for this season. Baltimore is 8th in rushing yards this year with Justin Forsett as their feature back. So there’s a lot to be said for that scheme though it is also utterly different from anything this OL and Boudreau have done before. But thats; the scheme. IN Cleveland, with Kyle, they were 17th in rushing yards in spite of being 6th in attempts, but then their primary backs were Terrance West and Isaiah Crowell.

Personally I prefer Roman, but then, he is probably the hotter commodity on the market.

JackPMiller wrote:

It is part of a process. Everyone eventually will get a call. Heck, Fisher might be on our phones wanting to talk to some of us of our offensive system. Just kidding of course. But it is standard to talk to people and to fit what Fisher wants to do. Whoever comes in here, will have to run the offense that Fisher wants.

Which means as a rule, he’s interviewing people who already fit that profile.

Which raises interesting questions about KS. Kyle Shanahan is not going to abandon zone-blocking running schemes. It’s who he is. Same with Kubiak, same with Shanahan Sr. That would be like asking Martz to run a ground and pound Seattle running attack while being 32nd in the league in passing attempts. So if Fisher is approaching KS, it means Fisher is open to that kind of change. Whether Boudreau wants to do it is another issue entirely.

Steven Gerwel ‏@Steve_Ger 22m22 minutes ago
Shanahan mini has 3 top5 & 4 top10 offenses in his 6 yrs as coordinator. Never finished below 18th. Meanwhile Schotty has excuses. #Rams 2/2

zn wrote:

If you can’t name examples, the idea that that is an “excuse” obviously looks like bs. Cause it’s just an unreal expectation that is never met in reality.

Speaking of context, the Cleveland offense last year was 23rd, which is below 18th. Now what are KS’s “excuses” in Cleveland? Oh yeah qb issues. (And that’s in spite of having a top OL.) Sound familiar? Funny how that works.

Well, i wanna know what BS’s excuses were
for finishing first in offense
those two years in NY.

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