Brown says he was happy to oblige. He also was willing to satisfy another of Kyle’s requests: In Austin, he didn’t want to be known as Mike’s son.
“He wanted to be Kyle,” Brown says.
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‘I wanted to show him’
After he graduated, Kyle told his father that he wanted to join the family business. He says now that he hoped, again, to test himself away from his father’s spotlight. He refused to pursue a spot on Mike’s staff. The elder Shanahan remembers it differently.
“He never had an option,” Mike says.
He instead became a graduate assistant at UCLA before joining Jon Gruden’s staff in Tampa Bay as an offensive quality control coach in 2004. Kyle was hundreds of miles from his father, but Mike Shanahan’s words followed him: To coach offense, you must first understand defense.
Kyle sat in meetings with defensive backs coach Mike Tomlin and his assistant, Raheem Morris, then left to shadow defensive line coach Rod Marinelli and coordinator Monte Kiffin.
“Really, he was just figuring out ways how to beat us,” says Morris, now Washington’s secondary coach,
He left Tampa in 2006 to join Gary Kubiak’s staff in Houston. He coached receivers, then quarterbacks, and realizing Kyle’s ambition, Kubiak and offensive coordinator Mike Sherman let Kyle design third-down concepts. When Sherman left in ’08, Kubiak promoted the youngster. An NFL offense belonged to Kyle, who was 28.
With Kubiak’s supervision, the Texans finished Kyle’s two seasons as coordinator in the top five in total offense. Still, the old theories circulated: Kubiak had been a backup quarterback in Denver. Had he just done Mike Shanahan a favor?
“People acted like I got that just because my dad worked with him,” Kyle says. “But I had earned it.”
No matter how far he ran, there was always a connection if someone looked hard enough. Brown, the head coach at Texas, and Mike Shanahan were old friends; the coach at UCLA, Karl Dorrell, coached wide receivers for the Broncos; Gruden and Mike had each worked for George Seifert in San Francisco. Now Kubiak had hired and promoted his former coach’s son.
“I didn’t say one thing to Gary,” Mike says now.
Sherman agrees.
“It had nothing to do with his dad,” Sherman says. “This guy can stand by himself.”
Kyle says that, when the Broncos fired his father in 2008, he realized something: He had been too consumed by perception. If Kyle could coach, why did he care what others thought? He decided that, whenever Mike returned to football, he would follow him.
“No matter what the situation was,” Kyle says.
After Mike joined the Redskins in 2010, he warned his son that leaving Houston would be risky. Heck, it could be a career-killer. But if he truly wanted this, he’d see how a team was built.
Kyle was resolute. He had his reasons, personal and professional. He wanted to work for his father and allow his wife, Mandy, and two children to live close to his parents. Above all, one person’s opinion still mattered.
“I wanted to show him,” Kyle says of his father, “that I thought I was pretty good.”
‘He was in complete charge’
In February 2010, Kyle began teaching Mike, himself an offensive master, his offensive philosophy. It was similar to the zone offense Kyle had learned watching his dad’s teams years earlier, but with his own nuances. Mike listened, but he learned the most – and saw his controversial hire validated – by seeing how Kyle led meetings; how he commanded respect when he had no idea his father was watching in his office on a closed-circuit feed.
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