Doing Things the Right Way

Retired Super Bowl Winning Head Coach Mike Shanahan Stays Connected to the Game

- Jeremy Glowacki

Mike Shanahan (71) is best known as the head coach of the NFL’s Denver Broncos from 1995 to 2008, where he led his team to two consecutive Super Bowl victories in 1997 and 1998. To younger football fans, he is also the father of current San Francisco 49ers head coach, Kyle Shanahan, who led his team to the Super Bowl this year against the Kansas City Chiefs.

His head coaching career spanned a total of 20 seasons and also included stints with the Los Angeles Raiders and Washington Redskins. Between 1996 and 1998, his Broncos teams set the NFL record for victories by going 46-10 over a three-year span. The 1998 Broncos won their first 13 games on their way to a 14–2 mark. Shanahan, taking his cue from West Coast offense guru Bill Walsh, was well known for scripting the first 15 offensive plays of the game, and helped the 1998 Broncos set an NFL record for first quarter points scored in a season. In 2005, he passed Dan Reeves as the winningest coach in franchise history.

Shanahan is known for an offense featuring zone running plays and play-action passes. He has often found unheralded running backs from later rounds of the annual NFL Draft and then turned them into league-leading rushers behind small-but-powerful offensive lines. Examples of this phenomenon are Terrell Davis, Mike Anderson, Olandis Gary, Clinton Portis, Reuben Droughns and Tatum Bell, all of whom have had at least one 1,000-yard season in a Denver uniform during Shanahan’s tenure.