Here’s what Dolphins GM Chris Grier liked about Mike McDaniel, a ‘swagged-out’ coach that was brains behind 49ers’ run game

Miami Dolphins general manager Chris Grier didn’t know Mike McDaniel that well going into the process that eventually landed McDaniel the head coaching role with the team, but it didn’t take long for Grier and the rest of the organization to become enamored with the idea of him leading the franchise.

McDaniel was an assistant coach that the Dolphins would always hear about around league circles, and there was reported interest in meeting with him about the 2021 offseason’s offensive coordinator vacancy before he was promoted to the same role with the San Francisco 49ers.

When the Dolphins fired former coach Brian Flores on Jan. 10, immediately opening up for interviews that week, Miami had to find out more about this “most swagged-out guy” that Grier kept hearing about, as he said in Wednesday comments from the NFL scouting combine.

“You always kind of appreciated the 49ers, like, ‘Wow, how do these guys keep running the ball?’” said Grier in his first session taking questions from the media since Nov. 3, the day after the trade deadline. “How do they keep doing what they’re doing? And you watch them, and the sum of their parts ended up being better than some individual players — and they have some great individual players.”

The 49ers’ run game spearheaded the offense when San Francisco made a run to the Super Bowl in 2019, and then again when the 49ers reached the NFC Championship Game and lost to the eventual Super Bowl-champion Los Angeles Rams this postseason. Before the promotion to coordinator in 2021, McDaniel was the run game coordinator from 2018 to 2020 and had the “run game specialist” title in 2017, coming over from the Atlanta Falcons’ staff with Kyle Shanahan going from Falcons offensive coordinator to San Francisco coach.

“Everyone was always saying he was kind of the brains behind everything going on,” said Grier, while making sure not to discredit Shanahan with that sentiment.

The Dolphins included him among seven known candidates they met with in a first round of interviews, but even then there were reservations around the league Grier would he of about whether his style could lead a franchise, given his unconventional appearance for a head coach.

Any concerns there could have been were quickly erased once that initial interview took place, eventually leading to McDaniel being one of two finalists once a third, Brian Daboll, took the job with the New York Giants.

“How he looks, you don’t think that he can connect with people like that. But then, he’s just got this way and personality of dealing with people,” Grier said. “When I got to know him and being around him, it was really interesting. He told us from Day 1 in the interview this was his dream opportunity and had been waiting for someone, I guess, to acknowledge him for all the hard work he’s done.”

Of all the young wiz-kid assistants on the tree of Mike and Kyle Shanahan, McDaniel had watched his peers become head coaches: the Rams’ Sean McVay, Green Bay Packers’ Matt LaFleur and Kyle Shanahan himself.

“He made no bones about he wanted the job,” Grier recalled. “He thought it was a great fit for him and everything. And so, as I got to know him more, I became more excited as we spent more time with him.”

Grier and the Dolphins pulled a 180 in the demeanor of their new coach after Flores was a strict, hard-nosed, intense personality. McDaniel is jovial. He enjoys expressing himself. He freely jokes and kids, while maintaining a serious approach to the football side of things.

But Grier, even after owner Steve Ross noted Flores’ lack of communication and collaboration as reasons for firing him, said he didn’t necessarily enter the coaching search looking for certain characteristics, even if they did happen to counter Flores’ traits.

McDaniel also ended up winning the job over more than just fellow finalist Kellen Moore, who remains Dallas Cowboys offensive coordinator, or the other known candidates: Daboll, Dan Quinn, Leslie Frazier, Vance Joseph and Thomas Brown.

“I talked to some guys that you guys didn’t even know we talked about that were interested, very interested, in the job,” Grier said of the process.

Grier indicated that McDaniel was a popular choice around the league with other general managers that already have head coaches and would’ve considered McDaniel next time they had an opening. They would tell him, “You got my guy.”

Now, the hope is McDaniel can replicate the success others on his same tree, like Shanahan, McVay and LaFleur have had, but he brings his own unique way to it.

“He’s his own guy,” Grier said. “I think if you talk to him, he has his own thoughts and beliefs. And I think they’re all from that same tree and have some of the same kind of philosophies on stuff, but even some of the stuff he’s talked about doing now is so outside the box.”

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from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/DXJxKi6