In Nick Sirianni and Mike McDaniel, the Eagles and Dolphins are out with the old and in with the millennials

One coach compared his team to a flower’s roots. The other dropped a rapper’s catchphrase. One coach stammered his way through his introductory press conference but has grown more comfortable with each subsequent public appearance. The other noticed the microphone wasn’t working at his introductory press conference, tapped the head until the sound was restored, and began his remarks with no sign of bother. One coach wears shirts and hats with his players’ names and faces splashed across them. The other recently said his starting quarterback, who was benched two years ago as a rookie and has averaged fewer than 192 passing yards per game in his career, throws the most accurate, catchable passes he’s ever seen.

The Eagles and Dolphins will hold joint practices and play a preseason game this week. Their head coaches, Nick Sirianni and Mike McDaniel, are 41 and 39, respectively. You probably could have guessed their ages, or come close, from those facts and descriptions. They are two of the eight youngest coaches in the NFL. Eight head coaches, 41 or younger. That’s a quarter of the league. The average age of an NFL head coach is now 48.5, according to the Sporting News, which is six years younger than it was just “just a few years ago.” That’s not an anomaly. That’s a trend.

There are reasons for it, and Sirianni and McDaniel are emblematic of it: a pair of offensively minded, emotionally open millennials charged with reaching and teaching today’s pro football players — but not necessarily preaching to them. The Rams’ Sean McVay, the Bengals’ Zac Taylor, the Browns’ Kevin Stefanski: All of them fit this mold. Even veteran coaches such as Andy Reid, Mike Tomlin and Pete Carroll have lasted as long and been as successful as they have by connecting on levels that go deeper than the athletes’ on-field performance.

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Reid (who is 64), Tomlin (50), and Carroll (70) have had to evolve, because the generational distance between themselves and their players keeps widening. The website Football Outsiders tracks a statistic that it calls Snap-Related Age, which calculates the average age of each team’s roster “by weighting the age of each player by the number of snaps he played in the regular season.” Put simply, it’s a way to gauge how much older or younger the guys who play the most are getting. The figure has been dropping steadily for years, to an all-time low of 26.4 in 2020.

“I got into the NFL in 2005,” McDaniel told reporters in February, just after the Dolphins hired him. “Twitter, Instagram, or ADD addictions weren’t really prevalent or existed. That’s just an example of how things change over time. I think the one thing in terms of studying the learning process in general is that people can attach to ideas when they’re in a linear story or if you can tell a story and go from Point A to Point B to Point C. I’ve been fortunate within the scheme to coach every single position in this offense. Whether you’re dealing with different players or different personalities, that is one true common denominator. You have to have a starting point of understanding that you can bridge to the next point.”

McDaniel cuts up video clips, edits them, and organizes them in a way “so you can battle that ADD issue. … You’d better bring some energy. You’d better entertain them while getting them to learn. But you always have to listen, ask questions, see if they get it, and adjust.”

The person whom McDaniel is describing doesn’t sound like the stereotypical football coach, grabbing face masks, screaming at linemen to slam themselves into the blocking sled, making the entire team run gassers after a bad practice. The person whom McDaniel is describing, the football coach he apparently is striving to be, sounds instead like the smartest, most charismatic, most influential teacher or professor you can imagine, a Dead Poets Society version of Bill Walsh. It remains to be seen whether McDaniel can and will be that kind of coach. Just because he’s talking up Tua Tagovailoa doesn’t mean that Tagovailoa’s spotty first two seasons with the Dolphins didn’t happen or that he will develop into an excellent starter. But it’s McDaniel’s striving that is the interesting part.

Around here, there’s always skepticism whenever a coach, in balancing toughness against empathy, starts tilting toward the latter. It has taken a while for those who root for and follow the Eagles to get accustomed to a head coach who isn’t, or doesn’t present the image of, a hard-driving authoritarian, a dictator with varying measures of benevolence.

Dick Vermeil wore every organ and gland in his system on his sleeve — heart, spleen, tear ducts, the whole schmear — but he also pushed himself and his players to the edge with his demanding rules and relentless work ethic. Buddy Ryan transformed training camp and practice into a kill-or-be-killed thunderdome; he’d have been comfortable coaching in the Roman Colosseum. Ray Rhodes invoked all manner of primal, violent imagery during his pregame speeches. As disliked as Chip Kelly was, people snickered when Jeffrey Lurie cited “emotional intelligence” as a compelling reason to fire him and hire Doug Pederson, who two years later won the franchise’s first Super Bowl.

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Now here is Sirianni, who can be credibly accused of pandering to fans and players alike: his propensity for donning Phillies and Sixers and Flyers gear, his admission that he will stand up for Jalen Hurts against any and all public criticism, his 58-minute practices and sometimes-tortured metaphors. He’s a new-wave coach by Philadelphia standards, but he is nothing if not himself. He is authentic, and his players perceive him as such. He is not the only coach in the NFL banking that such qualities, no matter his age, count most to the men he’s supposed to lead. McVay won a Super Bowl. Taylor reached one. Sirianni shepherded the Eagles to the postseason in a season when they weren’t necessarily supposed to be a playoff team. Sometimes the tried is no longer the true.