Who is Mike Shanahan? Breaking down the Indiana OC as potential Oklahoma Sooners offensive coordinator
The Oklahoma Sooners have fired offensive coordinator Seth Littrell after a dismal 2024 season. The search for a new play-caller on offense is firmly underway, and we know what Sooners’ head coach Brent Venables wants his next offense to look like. This article will be part of a series I will be doing breaking down […]
The Oklahoma Sooners have fired offensive coordinator Seth Littrell after a dismal 2024 season. The search for a new play-caller on offense is firmly underway, and we know what Sooners’ head coach Brent Venables wants his next offense to look like.
This article will be part of a series I will be doing breaking down the 15 most-linked coaches to the Sooners’ open OC position. If new names arise, I will adjust and add or subtract new names as time goes on. I’m aiming to get an article on every coach out daily.
Each article will be linked to each other, so as this goes on, you can find a different coach no matter which article you click on for ease of access to transition to other content.
This piece will be focused on Indiana offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan, who has guided the Hoosiers to an 8-0 start this season with a chance to play for a Big Ten title.
Who is Mike Shanahan?
Mike Shanahan is no stranger to change. As a wide receiver for Pitt from 2009-12, Shanahan played for three head coaches and two starting quarterbacks. Even with all this change, he finished with All-Conference honors twice and is in the top ten in Panthers’ history in receiving yards.
It was at Pitt, however, where Shanahan would make a connection that got him to where he is today. Pitt’s offensive coordinator in 2009 and 2010 was Frank Cignetti Jr., the brother of Curt Cignetti.
After a brief stint playing in the NFL and CFL, Shanahan transitioned to coaching. He was welcomed back to Pitt as a grad assistant working with the wide receivers in 2014 and 2015, where he helped coach Tyler Boyd.
During this time, Curt Cignetti had taken Indiana (PA) to a 9-3 record in 2015. Wide receivers coach Rod Rutherford left after that 2015 season, leaving a vacant spot on their staff. Seeking a replacement, Cignetti asked his brother, Frank, who recommended Shanahan to fill the spot.
Immediately, Cignetti and Shanahan hit it off. The two expressed similar values and beliefs regarding the X’s and O’s of football (which isn’t a total surprise considering Cignetti’s brother helped mold him). Shanahan became the wide receivers coach for IUP for 2016, and then followed Cignetti to Elon the following season.
At Elon, Shanahan coached Kortez Weeks to a third-team All-CAA and Freshman All-America honor in 2017, and Walt Pegues to second-team All-Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference honors in 2016.
Following the 2018 season, Curt Cignetti took over as the head coach of the James Madison Dukes. James Madison had just lost their head coach, Mike Houston, who took over as the head coach of East Carolina. Shanahan followed Cignetti once more, this time working under a new offensive coordinator in Shane Montgomery.
In his first season with the Dukes, Shanahan coached Brandon Polk to second-team All-CAA status, with 74 catches for 1,179 yards and 11 touchdowns. In their COVID-shortened 2020 campaign, Shanahan helped wide receiver Kris Thornton earn first-team All-CAA honors and coached Antwane Wells Jr to Freshman All-American honors.
However, Montgomery left following the 2020 season to become the offensive coordinator of the Buffalo Bulls. Montgomery's leaving opened the door for Shanahan, who Cignetti quickly promoted to fill the gap.
Shanahan has served as the offensive coordinator/wide receivers coach for Cignetti ever since.
His Dukes offenses produced two All-America selections at wide receiver and six of his pupils earned all-conference honors. In his three seasons as offensive coordinator, a JMU quarterback won either Sun Belt Player of the Year (2023) or Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year (2021, 2022).
The 2023 James Madison offense led the Sun Belt in offensive efficiency through the regular season. Quarterback Jordan McCloud was named Sun Belt Player of the Year and wideouts Reggie Brown and Elijah Sarratt were each tabbed first-team all-conference.
Quarterback Todd Centeio was voted Sun Belt Conference Offensive Player and Newcomer of the Year. Wide receiver Kris Thornton became the program’s first two-time 1,000-yard receiver after 1,051 yards receiving in 2022.
Cignetti and Shanahan guided James Madison to three straight winning seasons, compiling a 31-6 record together.
Naturally, Cignetti brought Shanahan (as well as the entire JMU staff and nearly the whole roster) with him to Indiana. As they’ve usually done, the duo are off to a hot start leading one of the best offenses in the country this season and have the Hoosiers undefeated heading into November.
What is Mike Shanahan's offensive scheme?
It’s tough to pin down just what exactly Mike Shanahan’s scheme is. They’ve flipped in between styles every season. In 2021, James Madison threw the ball 442 times for the 10th-most in FCS, and then a year later ran the ball 479 times and only threw roughly 270 times.
It tweaks itself to fit its personnel, which is a good thing. This season, the offense has run through quarterback Kurtis Rourke, who has responded with aplomb. Rourke leads all quarterbacks in EPA/dropback, total EPA, and passing success rate.
Most of Rourke’s attempts come in short, quick passes underneath and take shots off of play action. They use Rourke to essentially play point guard and distribute the ball quickly to his playmakers. Over half of his passing yards have come after the catch this season. They do a good job of scheming players open for him to hit, but there are plenty of plays that require Rourke to make a tough throw to convert.
They use RPOs, though it’s not fair to label them an RPO-driven team. They’ve run an RPO on less than 25% of plays this season, with most of them being runs.
Indiana is primarily an 11-personnel team (1 TE, 1 RB, 3 WR) with 70% of plays coming out of 11. They’ve used six more different personnel alignments on the season, but 12 and 10 are their only other personnel group with double-digit reps this season.
The offense is fairly static regarding motion. They’re right at the national average for motion rate at 49.8% of plays. Again, the goal of the offense is to distribute quickly, and sometimes motion can distract a quarterback from his pre-snap read in that style.
The Hoosiers do boast a pretty diverse run game that hits from wherever they want it to. While they are primarily an inside zone team, they’ve run double-digit attempts of duo, outside zone, counter, and power this season.
They aren’t nearly as good rushing as they are passing, but they are still 16th in rushing success rate this season.
The offense works. Indiana’s fourth in the country in EPA/Play, sixth in yards/play, second in success rate, second in scoring offense, and third in third-down conversion percentage.
Is Mike Shanahan a fit for the Oklahoma Sooners?
There are a few obvious concerns here with Shanahan, but I’ll start from the top general concerns before I get into the nitty-gritty.
To start, it’s difficult to separate where Cignetti ends and where Shanahan begins with this offense. Shanahan is the play-caller, but it’s been Cignetti’s offense the entire time and it shifts to match its personnel. I’m sure he’s put his own spin on the plays, but by and large, I’m not too certain what his offense would look like away from Cignetti. He’s only coached away from the man for a brief time, and that was as a grad assistant a decade ago. I'm not totally convinced that he does enough for Indiana that would sell me that he should be in charge of an offense for a blue-blood like Oklahoma.
Secondly, he might not even be in control of their biggest factor of success this season. Tino Sunseri was promoted to co-offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach at Indiana after serving as the quarterbacks coach at James Madison under Cignetti and Shanahan from 2021-23. While the offense itself is good, it’s carried by the quarterback this season, who is directly under Sunseri instead.
Shanahan has primarily served as a wide receivers coach in his time as well, and has never coached quarterbacks. Now while this could be solved by making Shanahan the OC outright and hiring a quarterbacks coach, how many teams have a dedicated QB coach nowadays?
I have my own concerns about the offense as well. This season, we’ve not seen them play a real defense (and they might not play one the entire season, depending on if Ohio State figures out how to play football). They’ve run circles around less talented teams the entire season.
The offense at Indiana pretty clearly runs through Rourke as well. When he missed the Washington game, the offense plummeted to a 38th percentile EPA/Play, 48th percentile success rate, 17th percentile in yards/play, and their explosive play rate fell all the way to 4th percentile. Indiana primarily scored off of turnovers from Washington, though they did hit one explosive play through the air in the second quarter to score. They ran the ball 52 times on Washington, averaging just 3.6 yards per carry.
Yes, losing your starting quarterback is going to change the offense. If we’re projecting translatability across teams, however, I’d feel a bit concerned that the offense completely fell to pieces when Rourke missed time. They can put things on Rourke because he’s been playing college football since 2019. How does that look when they don’t have a super-senior at quarterback? We saw that against Washington.
As another point on this topic, their offenses at James Madison were good, but they were never this good. In 2022, JMU was 70th in EPA/Play. The Dukes finished 2023 at 40th in EPA/Play. You don’t go from around or slightly above average to a top-five offense in the country without something changing, and that something might be Kurtis Rourke.
Mike Shanahan Summary
Overall, Mike Shanahan is a hot name right now due to the success of Indiana’s offense. It makes sense why people want to get a piece of the pie with the darling story of this 2024 college football season.
On a personal level, I feel pretty cautious that he isn’t proven enough away from Cignetti to be comfortable hiring him at an SEC school. Given that this might be the most important hire Brent Venables will have to make at Oklahoma, I don’t think he, or anyone involved, would be comfortable banking on that, especially with just one season at a Power Four level against some pretty suspect defenses.
Still, Shanahan and Cignetti do share a lot of similarities and are closely aligned with their goals, and Cignetti has done nothing but win no matter where he’s at. A huge critique of Oklahoma’s offense this season has been their inability to properly play to the strength of their personnel. Shanahan (and Cignetti) have done that at multiple stops.
