The closer we seem to be coming to more head coaching hires, the more teams keep adding candidates to their interview list. This has been the most sprawling search I can remember. In my top head coaches list back in November, I listed 27 names that could possibly become a factor and, at last count, only five of those coaches have yet to receive an interview request.
Today, I want to dump out the notebook on two of those candidates in particular (Adam Stenavich of the Green Bay Packers and Arthur Smith of the Pittsburgh Steelers) and highlight two different trends—and perhaps two different sides of the same trend—that I’ve seen popping up during the search. We’ll also dig into some granular details about their respective rises in coaching I found interesting (we’re just now arriving at a point where coaches are getting pressed on game management in interviews, so owners are clearly not getting in depth enough).
While some people aren’t interested in an explanation (at least based on the cesspool occurring underneath most teams’ social media posts about the candidates), there is a why behind everything. And after a continuous string of conversations this cycle, these are some whys I think are worth addressing.
Let’s get to it.
Arthur Smith
The play call was “15 Snatch,” an inside zone concept in the Pittsburgh Steelers’ playbook. Dan Moore Jr., the team’s starting left tackle, doesn’t remember the call as much for the result—a 10-yard Najee Harris touchdown that shut the door on the New York Jets back in October—but the thought behind it.
Moore told me that there were two particular aspects about the moment that made him appreciate his offensive coordinator, Arthur Smith.
• The inside zone play was a nod specifically to Harris. Harris, Moore says, is a fan of inside zone concepts because he’s a bigger back and the action on the play helps him feel like he’s coming downhill. Even if he makes contact at the line of scrimmage, Harris’s body size allows him to fall forward for positive yardage.
• Smith called the play early during a timeout, allowing it some time to reverberate. Calling a back’s favorite play with a longer runway before the snap, according to Moore, builds excitement and anticipation, almost like a miniature pep rally. Naturally, the offensive line feeds off the excitement of Harris, who feels like the offensive coordinator is dialing it up specifically for him.
“[That call] put the dagger in ‘em,” Moore says.
Smith, according to a source briefed on the matter, interviewed for the Chicago Bears head coaching job on Wednesday and the Jets head coaching job on Thursday. During his three stops as an offensive play-caller—as the OC in Pittsburgh and Tennessee and the head coach in Atlanta—he managed to build a handful of offenses known for physicality, so much so that, Moore says, the Steelers used Smith’s Falcons tape as an example when preparing to play other opponents in Atlanta’s division when Smith was coaching there.
But he is also in a group of prospective second-chance head coaches who may have been undervalued based on the circumstances of their first job. Matt Nagy, another coach interviewing for the Jets’ job, was dismissed after going 34–31 in four seasons with the Bears; a stint that included two playoff appearances. At the time, Nagy was somewhat scapegoated for the inability to develop the franchise’s highly selected first-round quarterbacks. Those players ended up being Mitch Trubisky, now backing up in his third different team, and Justin Fields, who could not fend off Russell Wilson for the starting job in Pittsburgh.
For Smith, it was being head coach of the Atlanta Falcons while the team had to swallow an enormous amount of dead cap space. Smith had one year of an in-decline Matt Ryan (who had one more season in Indianapolis with a career-low success rate). Then, Marcus Mariota (now a backup in Washington) and Desmond Ridder (now on his third team, the Las Vegas Raiders). In 2023, the Falcons had more 40-plus yard explosive plays than Detroit, Buffalo, Baltimore, Kansas City, the Rams, Philadelphia or Minnesota. Smith’s Falcons were fourth in rushing EPA back in '22, and both Tyler Allgeier (first) and Bijan Robinson (third) rewrote Atlanta’s rookie rushing record book.
Atlanta upgraded at quarterback this past offseason, hired a coordinator from the Sean McVay tree and had each of the team’s premier playmakers with a year more experience than Smith and won just one more game than the Falcons did last season.
While none of this guarantees that Smith or Nagy would be successful head coaches again, their candidacy occurs amid a year where some industry experts believe the cliff drops off at the play-caller position after Ben Johnson, then a second time after Joe Brady, Liam Coen and Kellen Moore, leaving teams to wonder if second-chance playcalling head coaches—who were both highly sought after during their respective hiring windows—may do better under different circumstances and with some introspection.
In the case of Steelers players, they could tell Smith had learned some lessons from his first stint as a head coach and found him to be a near endless font of thought-provoking quotes (along with some funnier, unrepeatable ones) and good book recommendations. Example: Defeat Into Victory, Sir William Slim’s account of the Burma Campaign. Apt? Perhaps.
“The way he approached our meetings, the way that he interacted with us, you could just tell he had something to prove,” Moore says. “Very similar to everyone in that room coming from our team. We bought into what he was saying and it worked for us.”
Adam Stenavich
When Adam Stenavich arrived in Green Bay from an assistant role in San Francisco, he inherited an offensive line almost exclusively comprised of veterans, many of whom were playing the best football of their careers, or already had. In terms of heading a position room for the first time, it was a difficult ask.
David Bakhtiari put it to me this way: “It’s pretty hard to tell veterans who are pretty established how to do it. I was pretty established and I don’t know if you’d notice, but what I was doing was working. For a coach to tell me a tip or how to block something, if I’m a betting man I’d bet on how I think I should do it versus how you think I should do it.”
But, Stenavich endeared himself to the group in two ways.
The first: He was easy to make fun of and had an evident emotional intelligence. There are coaches who are technically sound but fail in their ability to talk and relate to people. There are also great interpersonal coaches with bad technical skills. Stenavich, for example, would be routinely made fun of for both his baldness and the fact that he preferred, as Bakhtiari put it, “early 2000s style” streetwear. His shorts would lean into “capri territory,” according to the three-time Pro Bowler. He would take the criticism in stride and then, on a random day, show up in the “flyest outfit you’ve ever seen” just to let everyone know he was in on the joke.
The second: He could add value, even to a room with a combined 25 years of experience. I spoke to both Bakhtiari and Bryan Bulaga while doing background research on Stenavich and both mentioned the way that Stenavich taught them to sell run fakes within their pass protection more effectively. Under the Mike McCarthy regime before Stenavich arrived, the Packers were routinely dropping back 30-plus times per game without a run game that was tied together. That meant play action was less effective and the offensive line regularly found themselves getting a full-force pass rush from defensive linemen and ends who didn’t fear the run.
“By connecting with me, talking with me, helping me understand it on a holistic level, it became one of my strongest techniques,” Bakhtiari says. “Before he got there we were battered. We were on an island and everyone knew we were passing 50 times a game.”
The first point ties into the theme of the Bears’ coaching search. From the outset, the team has been in search of what many refer to as the “leader of men” type candidate. My read, obviously, is someone with former player street credentials (Stenavich was an All-Big 10 selection at Michigan and played for the Panthers, Packers, Cowboys and Texans) and a kind of everyman who could shine in front of a room (something Matt Eberflus clearly struggled with). After his playing career, Stenavich drove a beer truck to support his family until he broke into coaching at his alma mater.
The latter point brings me to what makes Stenavich uniquely valuable. Despite the immense popularity of both the Kyle Shanahan and McVay trees, there are still a shortage of coaches available who understand the offense well enough to install it the way it needs to be; enough to bring the scheme full circle. Stunningly, not every NFL team has a married run and pass offense (a concept that, while complex, essentially means that the action from an offensive line and the types of plays called prevent defenses from keying on whether it will be a run or a pass given that nearly everything looks uniform). Green Bay’s offense, after promoting Stenavich from offensive line coach to coordinator, is one of only two teams during that timeframe to have a top-five unit in total offense, rushing offense, fewest sacks allowed and yards per play.
Above, we mentioned that some in the industry are leaning toward second-chance head coaches during this cycle with the group of offensive minds representing something of an unknown. The inverse to that? There could be a truly successful wild-card candidate. On Saturday, the Bears will be the first team to give Stenavich a thorough look and evaluate that possibility.
Before the Packers promoted Stenavich, head coach Matt LaFleur approached Bakhtiari on the practice field and asked him if he thought Stenavich was ready to graduate from the offensive line room to the coordinator position, which entailed addressing a bigger group and melding his area of expertise with the grander scale of the offense.
His response? “If you don’t do it, someone else will.”
“When you’ve been around the block, you know that guys who are really good at their job coaching their individual position don’t stay at that job. So, that’s what I saw in Adam. He came in very raw, but he was smart, willing to adapt, grew and grew quickly to the point where I was like, He’s going to be out of this room soon.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why Two Relatively Unheralded NFL Assistants Are Drawing Head Coaching Buzz.