The Why Is Everything

A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution

by Michael Silver

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Pub Date Oct 01 2024 | Archive Date Sep 30 2024

W. W. Norton & Company

Business, Leadership, Finance | Nonfiction (Adult) | Sports

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Description

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.

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Advance Praise

"Coaching at the highest level of sports is a tricky pursuit. We often try to control the uncontrollable, and the relentless quest for even the slightest edge can drive you crazy at times. Michael Silver takes us inside the madness, introducing us to a crew of ultracompetitive innovators who’ve challenged the tenets of their sport and pushed it forward while trying to retain their foundational essence. It’s a wild ride, and it’s not for the meek." -Steve Kerr, Golden State Warriors and USA Basketball head coach, nine-time NBA champion

"I knew something about how the Mike Shanahan tree remade offensive football in this century, but the genius of those inspired by him—Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, Mike McDaniel, Raheem Morris, Matt LaFleur—is delineated in fascinating, oft-profane, always-real detail. Detail after detail, story after story. You’ll get to know Kyle Shanahan, for my money the most interesting man in the NFL today, better than anyone’s ever portrayed him. New stuff about the RG3–Dan Snyder fiasco in Washington, the recent Shanahan and McVay Super Bowl foibles, the Spy vs. Spy chess matches with Bill Belichick . . . Just riveting. In all, this book will enlighten you about the modern game like nothing you’ve ever read." -Peter King

"Michael Silver has written a beautiful study about a group of men who started out on a journey with a shared goal of being one of the handful of people each generation who revolutionize their craft, seen by millions and measured by championships but recognized by only a select few. It’s not only an insightful and entertaining read on the sport America cares about most and knows about least. It’s a reminder that the validation of work is in the work itself." -Seth Wickersham, New York Times best-selling author of It’s Better to Be Feared

"If football is the ultimate team game, then football coaching is the ultimate obsessive’s vocation. The new generation of innovative NFL play callers portrayed in Michael Silver’s The Why Is Everything are competitive, combative, and at times monomaniacal in their dedication to the craft, often at the expense of everything else in their lives. And yet in this intimate chronicle of how and why the game compels, their humanity and vulnerability keep pushing through." -Michael MacCambridge, author of America’s Game

"Coaching at the highest level of sports is a tricky pursuit. We often try to control the uncontrollable, and the relentless quest for even the slightest edge can drive you crazy at times. Michael...