It was a few months before the United Football League officially began its inaugural season and Dennis Green, with decades and decades of NFL experience, wanted to make sure his California Redwoods would be as ready to go as possible, so, in June of 2009, he flew his entire coaching staff out to San Diego for preseason meetings. The coaches came from all different backgrounds and he wanted them to spend some time together.
There were longtime college coaches in the mix, like legendary Miami Hurricanes offensive line coach Art Kehoe and former UCF Knights head coach Mike Kruczek. There were established NFL position coaches trying to extend their careers, like defensive coordinator Ricky Hunley and special teams coordinator Gary Zauner. They were almost all at least in their 30s or 40s and those who weren’t yet NFL lifers were at least accomplished college players.
And then there was Mike McDaniel, 5-foot-9 and 26, decked out in loafers and thick-rimmed glasses, eager to take on his biggest coaching job yet. He had been working various jobs in the NFL for nearly a decade by then and, after one season as an intern with the Denver Broncos and three as an offensive assistant for the Houston Texans, he found himself in California as the running backs coach in an upstart league.
“When you physically look like him, he doesn’t look like it,” Kruczek said and then he laughed. “I was more amazed he played wide receiver at Yale.”
He started to learn about his new colleague’s background — the years he spent hanging out around Broncos training camp and the summers spent interning for former Denver coach Mike Shanahan, the incredible story of how he wound up the stepson of a Broncos video assistant and his four years playing for the Yale Bulldogs in what’s now FCS — and his preconceived notions quickly faded.
Almost 13 years later, McDaniel became the unlikely — yet, at the same time, completely logical — 11th coach of the Miami Dolphins on Feb. 6.
McDaniel, after all, is a man of contradictions. He’s an underdog and a wunderkind, given his first NFL coaching opportunity at 22, but it only came after he spent four years — and caught zero passes — as a walk-on at Yale. He’s a 5-9 former receiver, but he’s now best known for crafting the closest thing the modern NFL has to a smash-mouth running game as a part of Shanahan’s coaching tree. He has been blessed by privilege as the stepson of Gary McCune, but this familial tie only came about because he was so ever-present at Denver camp that his mother wound up marrying the Broncos assistant.
Early on, his Ivy League background and unorthodox NFL look usually got him questions like, “Why are you doing this?” His degree, people figured, could certainly be put to better use somewhere other than the now-defunct United Football League.
Now still only 38, he’s facing questions like, “Why are you ready to lead an NFL team? Why are you the right person to break the Dolphins out of two decades of mediocrity?”
The answers have always been the same.
“It sounds crazy, but it really isn’t in this game,” said Kruczek, who’s now the coach at Trinity Preparatory School in Winter Park. “It really lined up for him. He had a plan and followed it.
“You grind and you grind, and you grind and you grind.”
The student
It began in Colorado, where McDaniel, Kruczek quickly learned, had been — very literally — part of the Broncos family since he was in high school and spent an inordinate time around the team even longer.
McDaniel, he told Kruczek, had his sights set on becoming an NFL coach, using his connections to open doors and his intelligence to burst through them.
“His vision was really predicated on the people and the relationships that he had established,” Kruczek said. “He had a vision for his career and he had this planned out as he moved along, and it’s worked out perfectly.”
It starts, McDaniel admits, with a funny story.
When he was in elementary school, McDaniel was the only child of a working single mother in Greeley. His favorite team became his summertime babysitter.
From the time he was 5 or 6, McDaniel would get up early on his summer mornings and make the 25-minute bike ride to the University of Northern Colorado, where Denver was holding training camp. He would spend entire days at Northern Colorado, hunting for autographs and watching everything an NFL team put into those 12-hour preseason work days.
“It built sort of this idea that cool things you have to work for in that process,” McDaniel said. “I wanted to be a pro football player.”
At the same time, it opened up the unlikely avenue he used to get his foot into the world of coaching. One day when he was 10, McDaniel took off his Charlotte Hornets hat and set it the ground to go chase down running back Robert Delpino for an autograph for his card collection — he already got one from him earlier in the morning and the old-school Hornets colors are pretty gaudy — and the hat was gone when he got back. He started crying and McCune tried to help him find it. When they couldn’t, McCune came back the next day with a new Broncos hat.
When McDaniel told his mother the story, Donna McDaniel, understandably, wanted to figure out who this strange man was. They met and wound up getting married. The family moved to Aurora and McDaniel spent his high school years as a football-obsessed ball boy for his childhood team.
He also became a pretty good wide receiver, even though he couldn’t have been bigger than 5-9 and 140 pounds by the end of his time at Smoky Hill High School. He did it through singular commitment to the sport.
When he was young, he wrote, “I will be in the NFL,” on the inside of his helmet — “I didn’t say I’d play,” he quipped — and he became legendarily good at “Tecmo Super Bowl” on the Super Nintendo. He compulsively collected football cards — his most valuable, he thinks, is a Jerry Rice rookie card — and would get up at 8 a.m. every Sunday to watch ESPN’s NFL preview shows after staying up late the night before to watch “Saturday Night Live” with childhood friend Dan Soder, who’s now a comedian and actor.
“He’s just a fun weirdo,” Soder said on NBC Sports Bay Area’s “49ers Talk” podcast last year.
When realistic NFL dreams faded for McDaniel, he set his sights on playing for the Stanford Cardinal. When he knew he probably wouldn’t get much playing time if he was to walk on at Stanford, he pivoted to Yale. Coaching was not part of the equation. After he graduated, he spent a summer interning at an investment-banking firm, only he didn’t love it like he loved football.
“If you want to be good at something, you better be passionate about it and my OCD made me passionate about one thing,” McDaniel said. “I chose to go after it.”
His passion brought him back to Denver, where he spent one season as an intern before Gary Kubiak left to become the coach of the Texans and decided to take McDaniel with him as an offensive assistant.
It’s where his career-spanning bond with San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan really started to form. Shanahan, whom McDaniel coached with in 14 of the last 16 seasons, was the wide receivers coach. McDaniel, then 22, was his assistant.
“I needed to coach Andre Johnson in his prime. I remember thinking I think he’s going to listen to me, but we’ll see, then you find out it’s the simplest formula ever known to man,” McDaniel said. “You establish with them early that you can help them with their dream.”
It’s a fitting philosophy for McDaniel, who never got to get by on natural gifts alone and, until the last few years, was a little-known figure in football.
“He’s kind of unassuming at first,” said Nate Lawrie, who was a tight end for the Redwoods, which later became the Sacramento Mountain Lions. “That’s just the impression that you get when you’re first meeting him.”
The teacher
By 2009, Lawrie was far beyond first impressions from McDaniel. They were college teammates and, even though Lawrie never expected McDaniel to be a coach, Lawrie knew how bright the former wideout was.
In the Ivy, four-year walk-ons are unusual.
“Most,” former Bulldogs coach Jack Siedlecki said, “were gone by their sophomore year.”
McDaniel, he estimates, was one of fewer than five he had at Yale and he didn’t act like a walk-on, even though he barely saw the field until his senior year.
His best friend on the team, Siedlecki recalled, was Chandler Henley, who’s now an assistant offensive line coach for the Atlanta Falcons, and the two wide receivers watched more film than anyone else. Whenever McDaniel had an open period in the middle of the day, he’d drop by for 45 minutes or an hour.
“We used to have to beat some of the guys over the head that were starting for us to come into the office, let alone a guy who wasn’t playing a lot,” Siedlecki said. “He was very unusual in that way.”
On the field, it made him a reliable blocker — those are the highlights former Bulldogs wide receivers coach Matt Dence most remembers. In practice, it made him a fixture at the front of the line in drills and the guy defensive backs always wanted to match up against in 1-on-1s.
“He practiced his stance more than anyone, he practiced his start more than anyone, he practiced release moves more than anyone,” said Dence, who’s now the coach at Germantown Academy in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. “He was that guy, just went above and beyond, and it translated.”
A decade later, McDaniel was the wide receivers coach for the 2014 Cleveland Browns and Andrew Hawkins, who has been one of McDaniel’s most outspoken advocates, had the best season of his career.
At 5-7, Hawkins is even smaller than McDaniel and had to use the same sort of precision to get open. The former wide receiver considered his releases to be a strength and McDaniel still “recrafted everything.”
“Even the way he explained it was different,” Hawkins said. “He would use basketball analogies, so when he taught how to get off the line of scrimmage he’s not putting on a tape of Jerry Rice, he’s not putting on any receiver. He’s showing you Allen Iverson and the crossover: Look how he uses his body so efficiently. It’s not about how quick or fast you are. It’s making the other guy believe you’re going one direction without giving an indicator.
“He’s allergic to doing things the way that they’ve always been done.”
The leader
The United Football League (UFL) was something like summer camp, at least for McDaniel’s Mountain Lions. The seasons were short and everyone planned — or at least hoped — their stay in the UFL would be temporary, so no one bought houses or rented apartments.
Instead, players and coaches all lived together at the Hilton Sacramento Arden West, with hotel rooms converted into meeting rooms on the floor below the one where everyone lived. It wasn’t unusual for players to take the elevator down a floor and pop into the meeting rooms in the evenings for late-night film sessions.
“Mike was always in that room,” Lawrie said. “I remember it being 7:30 at night and being like, Ah, I’ll go watch film, see what’s going on down in the film room, and Mike would be there with the center, the left guard, two running backs and he’d just be talking ball. And everyone’s joking and having a great time.”
In those meeting rooms, he helped turn running back Cory Ross into the 2010 UFL Offensive Player of the Year — and coached future Golden Globe Award-nominated actor John David Washington — and proved he could command a entire room in the way he’ll need to as Miami’s coach.
A favorite tradition for the Mountain Lions, Lawrie said, was a McDaniel invention: At the end of every postgame film review, McDaniel screened a highlight reel of plays when guys were being “football players” — hustle plays, good blocks and playing to the whistle. It was mostly for the offensive linemen, but wide receivers and running backs popped up, too.
“It was a point of pride to be on this tape,” Lawrie said.
In 2010, Daunte Culpepper played his final professional season in Sacramento, trying to maybe get one last look from the league. The star quarterback was 33 and a former All-Pro, and even he couldn’t resist the allure of McDaniel’s highlight reel.
“At some point,” Lawrie said, “he made the tape.”
Culpepper jumped out of his seat and started celebrating. He went around the room pumping his fists and high-fiving everyone.
From the has-beens to the never-weres and everything beyond, McDaniel left an impression they could never forget.
The skeptics are quieter now.
“You’ve got all shapes and size of coaches in college and the National Football League,” Kruczek said. ‘It’s what’s between your ears and what’s in your heart, and I think he’s got a lot of both.”
Daniel Oyefusi contributed reporting.
