LOS ANGELES – A little more than a decade ago, near the end of Indiana offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan’s playing career, Dave Wannstedt got a call from Tony Wise, his old offensive line coach.
Wannstedt, a Yinzer by birth, recruited Shanahan out of Norwin High School to Pitt, where Shanahan finished among the most productive receivers in program history. A physical education major, Shanahan planned to teach and coach in high school after his career ended.
Still, the news Wise delivered that day surprised Wannstedt.
“Shan’s coaching,” Wise told Wannstedt. “Obviously,” Wannstedt replied.
“No, you don’t understand,” Wise continued — he’s helping coach the lacrosse team.
Technically, Shanahan, back at Norwin, was head coach of the lacrosse team. When Wannstedt called his old wide receiver, his first question was the obvious one: “Do you actually know anything about lacrosse?”
“He says, ‘No, I’m Googling it. I’m studying it. I’m learning the game so I can go out there and coach these guys,’” Wannstedt said.
He laughs now, telling that story, but Wannstedt was barely more surprised then than he is now, as he watches Shanahan — now a million-dollar offensive coordinator — steer IU to the Rose Bowl and Fernando Mendoza to a Heisman Trophy.
Wannstedt will tell anyone who asks what makes Mike Shanahan successful the same thing he’s believed about Shanahan for 20 years.
“He’s gonna be a damn good coach,” Wannstedt said. “This guy’s got some stuff normal guys don’t have.”
How Mike Shanahan became one of Pitt’s top receivers
When Wannstedt and his staff recruited Shanahan to Pitt in 2008, they had to fight for his attention.
Not necessarily from other schools, but from another sport. Shanahan was a Division-I prospect in football and basketball, and even for a time gave up the former for the latter.
“When we were originally putting his recruiting together, we said we want guys that are winners, smart guys,” Wannstedt said. “The more that I got around his family and around him off the football field, the more I was convinced he was type of person that would make our program better.”
Football eventually won. And once he got to campus, Wannstedt quickly realized Shanahan — who stretches past 6 foot 3 — was not just more athletic than he realized, but also tougher.
It’s hard for a receiver that size to avoid big hits, when there’s just more body to aim for. Pitt ran a pro-style offense that asked Shanahan to compete for the ball where he knew pain was waiting.
It didn’t matter.
“If the ball hit his hands,” Wannstedt said, “he was holding onto it.”
Offensive staffers suggested bulking Shanahan up, and putting him on the end of the line of scrimmage at tight end.
His receivers coach wouldn’t have it, and with good reason. Shanahan was so productive over four years at Pitt that he remains among the Panthers’ top 10 all-time leaders in receptions and yards receiving.
“Our receivers coach at Pitt never wanted to give him up,” Wannstedt said. “Mike just kept making plays.”
Mike Shanahan learned leadership coaching Norwin High School lacrosse
What Shanahan was not — according to coaches and teammates — was arrogant.
“He was one of these guys,” Wise said, “that was easy to like.”
If anything, finding his voice took time. Sharing a locker room with characters like LeSean McCoy, whose remarkable talent spoke in a roar, Shanahan remained reserved.
Until something needed said.
“Shan, he’s always been a soft-spoken guy,” said Tino Sunseri, who played with Shanahan at Pitt and later coached alongside him at James Madison and Indiana. “He was always going to do the work, wasn’t going to be a real vocal guy. But whenever he needed to say something, he would.”
Teammates admired his attention to detail. His effort and focus.
The respect he commanded made as much impact as the words he chose. And there was never any doubting his right to speak — Shanahan was among the hardest workers on the team.
“Whenever you grow up in Western Pennsylvania, that’s what you know,” Sunseri said. “Hard work.”
Those qualities served him well as he transitioned into coaching, even if he was picking up a brand-new sport.
After cups of coffee with the Jets and Buccaneers, Shanahan found himself at home in the curious limbo of an athlete transitioning out of his playing career. His alma mater reached out asking for help — Norwin was in the process of transitioning its lacrosse program from club to varsity, and it needed a coach.
“I had no experience with it,” Shanahan told IndyStar on Tuesday. “I would watch YouTube videos of drills, and try to learn the game, and then just went out there onto the field to try and apply things I learned through basketball and football. …
“I think I got a couple thousand dollars for it, and it kept me busy for a couple months.”
It’s been more than a decade now, but Shanahan’s memory says Norwin went 4-16 that season. He did not prove a lacrosse savant.
But Shanahan absorbed valuable lessons — as he moved toward a coaching career — about learning as well as he could teach, collaborating productively and pushing his own limits.
“I learned I had to find answers,” Shanahan said. “Nobody was going to walk in and tell me, ‘hey, here’s what you’re going to do.’ I had to do research, I had to look things up on the Internet, I had to use other people.
“I had two young assistants that worked with me. I kind of relied on them a little bit, which I think I still do today. It kind of got me out of my comfort zone.”
Norwin High School lacrosse helped set Mike Shanahan on a career path now arriving at the Rose Bowl.
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What makes Indiana offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan great
That’s the what. For Shanahan, Sunseri said, the why is simple.
“Being able to give people a better chance of going further than we did,” he said.
A cursory glance at those career lists Shanahan still occupies at Pitt include some remarkable players: Tyler Boyd, Jordan Addison, Antonio Bryant, Larry Fitzgerald.
Shanahan might have been an excellent athlete, but he learned early he could not ignore the fine margins that separate good from great.
“You don’t have the career he did at Pitt, as a wide receiver, unless you are doing the little things,” Wannstedt said. “In his playing career, he had to be exact, and he had to take advantage of every little coaching point. He had to be precise in his movements and his steps.
“Everything he did, that carries over.”
Here, the why meshed with the how.
Across multiple sports, Western Pennsylvania has proven remarkably adept at turning out coaches.
Wannstedt grew up in Baldwin, Mike Ditka in Aliquippa. Bill Cowher is from Western PA. In basketball, John Calipari, Herb Sendek and the entire Miller family all trace their roots back to the region.
At one point during Wannstedt’s time with the Bears, he counted six different NFL head coaches came from the area.
“Maybe it’s the Iron City beer,” Wannstedt deadpanned.
Jokes aside, Wannstedt attributes the region’s coaching roots to an ability to communicate with people at any level. To, as he put it, “walk on both sides of the track, talk to the blue-collar guy and the white-collar guy,” qualities Shanahan possesses in abundance.
“He wanted to be able to teach, to help people, let people expand past what they were capable of doing,” Sunseri said. “All those guys in the locker room love him and want to play hard for him, because they know he truly, honestly cares.”
That care manifests itself in the investment Shanahan makes in terms of time with his players, his preparation and his planning, all the same qualities that made him successful as a player.
And it comes packaged in a coach’s single most valuable quality.
“I appreciate how much he trusted his players, trusted me last year and I’m sure Fernando this year,” former IU quarterback Kurtis Rourke, now with the San Francisco 49ers, said. “He’s always going to stick to the game plan, trust his players, trust his guys to get it done, and not really change the way he calls it.”
Who is Indiana offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan?
Which arrives any Shanahan discussion at its final destination: the who.
Coaching is, in essence, teaching. IU defensive coordinator Bryant Haines describes it as “the least amount of words with the largest amount of impact.” Spend five minutes with any player on Indiana’s roster, and they will invariably bring up their coaching staff’s ability not to scheme elaborate ideas, but to communicate successful ones, clearly and simply.
And if you ask them about Shanahan, they are bound to circle back to one word: ego.
“He lets his,” center Pat Coogan said, “go at the door.”
“The biggest thing with Shan is, there is zero ego,” Sunseri said. “To have that unbelievable humility of taking in everything and being able to decipher what he felt was great and able to put into the plan.
“He was always able to ask what people liked, what were the things at the top of the list. What do you see? What do you feel? As good of a coach as he is, he’s even a better person, being able to take everything in and apply it.”
The results speak for themselves.
Cignetti promoted Shanahan to coordinator in 2021, and their teams since have bullied the Big Ten just as comfortably as they did the Sun Belt.
In his first year in Bloomington, Shanahan coordinated arguably the most productive offense in program history. In his second, Indiana’s quarterback won the program’s first Heisman Trophy.
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“They are elite at putting defenses in conflict,” said Haines, a veteran of trying to unpack Shanahan’s offenses in practice. “That sounds like a simple answer but it’s harder to do than you might think.”
An offensive coach by trade, Cignetti remains more involved on that side of the ball than on defense.
He also gives Shanahan considerable leash to make that unit his own.
“Mike does a really nice job of preparing and collaborating,” Cignetti said in October, following a win over UCLA. “Mike’s got a great work ethic. He’s a smart guy.”
Underscoring his point, Cignetti said that afternoon that he can be “pretty rough” on Shanahan in game.
“Every time I questioned a call the last three weeks,” he said, smiling, “it’s gone for a big play.”
Indeed, the Hoosiers lead the Big Ten in explosive plays this season, just one of the dozens of small bits of evidence arguing Shanahan’s case as among the best young offensive coordinators in America.
Why Mike Shanahan remains loyal to Curt Cignetti, IU football
Watching his tough, old receiver excel in the coaching booth now, Wannstedt’s memory sometimes drifts back to a meeting he had with Shanahan in a Naples, Florida, Starbucks years ago. Back when Shanahan was just beginning to explore coaching as a profession, and he needed his coach’s advice.
There’s a truth, Wannstedt said, in their profession that coaches don’t like to talk about: the what-if.
What if Shanahan hadn’t taken that job at IUP, or followed Cignetti to Elon, or JMU and Indiana after that.
“That,” Wannstedt said, “is what people don’t admit.”
Shanahan can explain his loyalty to Cignetti without much trouble.
“I just respect what coach does so much, how he goes about his business, how he treats us,” he said. “Every year that’s gone by, I appreciate that more and more. Knowing what to expect on a daily basis is a real positive for me. But coach also doesn’t let us get comfortable, so there’s always that sense of urgency, that sense of growth, that expanding knowledge.”
Everything about Mike Shanahan the player that informs Mike Shahanan the coach is reflected in his decision to stick with Cignetti, and in Shanahan’s own remarkable success as IU’s offensive coordinator.
From his career at Pitt onward, Shanahan’s choices have always been measured, thoughtful, considered and earnest. Made without ego or arrogance. Calculated and informed.
And, ultimately, successful.
“I think that’s what makes a great coordinator, being able to take in that information knowing what you want to do at the end of the day,” Sunseri said. “All you have is 40 seconds.”
Mike Shanahan has spent a football life making the most of them.
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