Eagles-49ers is really a matchup of Nick Sirianni and Kyle Shanahan, savants in their own ways

For most of professional football’s history, few people among the millions who tuned in every Sunday and every Monday night actually understood what was happening on the field. There was a quarterback, of course, dashing and rugged, the clear leader. There were collisions of giant bodies. There were smaller, faster men with a ballet dancer’s flexibility and a sprinter’s speed who made breathtaking plays. But no one really knew how those men freed themselves, or were freed, to make those plays. How did anyone get open? Who was supposed to block that blitzing linebacker?

This is a newer, more informed era. This is the era of All-22 film, available to everyone, showing everything. This is the era of the next-level analyst, the football-aholic who grinds tape, the mind who can demystify an entire sport for you. Which means that, when it comes to NFL coaches, this is the era of the great play-caller, the great play-designer, the great scheme-creator, the brilliant and beautiful brain. The players are more than just athletes with distinct strengths and roles and personalities. They are clusters of pixels on a screen, moving as if drawn by a magnet on a particular route to a particular spot on the field.

» READ MORE: Nick Sirianni did the smart thing by resting his starters. Now the Eagles have to show he was right.

Kyle Shanahan, the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, whom the Eagles face Sunday in the NFC wild-card round, is considered one of these savants. He is a terrific coach in just about every regard, having guided the 49ers to two Super Bowls and two other appearances in the NFC championship game. But it is in his creativity and orchestration of the team’s offense where he is truly elite.

Shanahan calls all the 49ers’ plays, and his offense is so quarterback-friendly that the team has reached those two Super Bowls and four NFC title games with Jimmy Garoppolo, who backed up Tom Brady in New England, and Brock Purdy, who was the last player picked in the 2022 draft, as its starters at the position. Loaded with motion and deception, based on a zone-running attack that features Christian McCaffrey, Shanahan runs as close to a plug-and-play system for a quarterback as it gets in the NFL, and it works. San Francisco has finished among the top 10 teams in scoring in four of the last seven years.

“They have a really good scheme,” Eagles defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said Tuesday. “It’s all packaged together very nicely. They give you a lot of good motions. Everything they do is with a purpose and they do a really good job of it.”

Nick Sirianni, the Eagles’ head coach, and Kevin Patullo, their offensive coordinator, are not considered the same kinds of coaches that Shanahan is. Say what you want about them — and a lot of what is said about them around here, especially about Patullo, can’t be repeated in decent company — but generally they are not among the first names mentioned when anyone starts listing the top offensive minds in the NFL. Sirianni stopped calling plays, for instance, in 2021, his first season as a head coach. Patullo had never been an NFL coordinator or play-caller before this season, and the Eagles’ up-and-down (to put it kindly) performance has made him a convenient and oft-deserved target of criticism.

NFL coaching, though, is about more than being an offensive wizard. Shanahan hasn’t won a Super Bowl in his career yet, and one of the reasons is that, when he and his teams have had opportunities to bury their opponents, they’ve failed to do it. He was the offensive coordinator of the 2016 Atlanta Falcons, who infamously blew a 28-3 lead in Super Bowl LI to the Patriots in part because Shanahan got too aggressive in his late-game play selection. Under him, the 49ers had double-digit fourth-quarter leads in Super Bowl LIV and in the 2021 season’s NFC title game … and lost both. And in Super Bowl LVIII against the Kansas City Chiefs, Shanahan took the ball first in overtime, opted to kick a field goal on fourth-and-4 from the Chiefs’ 9-yard line, and handed the ball back to Patrick Mahomes with a chance to win the game. Patrick Mahomes, to no one’s surprise, won the game.

Sirianni, meanwhile, has won a Super Bowl, has reached another, and has yet to have a losing season or miss the playoffs in his five years with the Eagles. Does he need a Shanahan-like or Shane Steichen-style play-caller to make his offense go? The presence of such an assistant certainly helps. But by all indications, he makes up for whatever shortcomings his coordinators — or, in fairness, his quarterback, Jalen Hurts — might have with his abilities as a culture-builder.

» READ MORE: The Eagles are going to keep driving you crazy with their passive offense. Get used to it.

“Week-to-week, day-to-day, his energy, his passion, everything you want in a leader who stands in front of this team in team meetings and at practice, he gives you,” Patullo said. “His attention to detail — we talk about core values all the time: toughness, together, detailed, all that stuff. And when we look at those things, that’s what he embodies and brings that to the team. Every day, he’s consistent in who he is. You’re not going to get somebody who goes back and forth on what they say, and I think when he speaks, everybody receives it and they’re ready to go.”

There’s more than one way to be an excellent head coach, even if one of those ways gets a little more attention, a little more scrutiny, a little more credit these days. The film can tell you how good a coach Kyle Shanahan is. What Nick Sirianni does well sometimes isn’t so easy to see. Come Sunday, may the best savant win.