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The Kevin Stefanski: Two-Time Coach of the Year Thread

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Grade the signing

  • A+ -Awesome Analytics Alignment!

    Votes: 55 30.9%

  • A - Good choice moving forward

    Votes: 53 29.8%

  • B - Better than the other options

    Votes: 20 11.2%

  • C - Could work out I guess

    Votes: 30 16.9%

  • D - Browns done put their foot in it again, but at least he looks good on TV

    Votes: 9 5.1%

  • F - A failure on every level

    Votes: 11 6.2%
  • Total voters
    178
Was just looking at the picture in the ABJ and told my wife "We hired George Clooney as head coach." She wasn't convinced until I showed her a picture.
 
• Finally, on the search itself—some of the candidates going through Berea found the place to have more red flags than Tiananmen Square. One big one was the, yes, level of involvement of DePodesta’s analytics team. Both Hue Jackson and Freddie Kitchens were basically told to have senior analyst Dave Giuliani on headsets on game day over the last four years, with Guiliani serving as a sort of game management specialist. What alarmed candidates was that Guiliani, who worked for Chip Kelly in Philly, would not be reporting to the head coach. He’d be reporting to DePodesta directly. Another was that the head coach would have twice-weekly meetings with ownership and analytics people. In the past, the Monday meetings have taken up to half a day, and proposed Friday meetings would be for reviewing game plans.

www.si.com

Inside the Process of Electing the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Centennial Class

Also, some notes about the Browns filling out the rest of its coaching staff behind Kevin Stefanski, how Bill Lazor will fit in as the Bears' offensive coordinator and more.
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www.pff.com

Kevin Stefanski is the offensive mind that the Cleveland Browns badly need | NFL News, Rankings and Statistics | PFF

Data scientist Eric Eager uses PFF's play-by-play coaching metric to assess the Cleveland Browns' hiring of former Vikings OC Kevin Stefanski.
www.pff.com www.pff.com

The Cleveland Browns reportedly agreed to a deal with Minnesota Vikingsoffensive coordinator Kevin Stefanski on Sunday following the Vikings’ 27-10 loss at the hands of the San Francisco 49ers. Stefanski appears to have beaten out the likes of Josh McDaniels, Robert Saleh, Brian Daboll and Jim Schwartz, becoming the franchise’s 12th head coach since they returned to the league in 1999 and their seventh head coach since 2010.

THE POSITIVES
Stefanski was the Vikings' offensive coordinator for one full season and oversaw a drastic improvement in production. Under John DeFilippo in 2018, the Vikings finished 25th in the NFL in expected points added (EPA) generated per play (and 26th before DeFillipo was fired), while Stefanski’s offense was a top-five unit in 2019. In terms of more blunt measurements like yards per play, the Vikings jumped from 18th to 10th.

Quarterback Kirk Cousins was the 14th-highest graded passer in the NFL in his first season as a Viking but was the fourth-highest graded passer going into this week under Stefanski. Dalvin Cook and Stefon Diggs also had their best seasons as pros in 2019, despite the Vikings fielding a below-average offensive line and suffering through an injury to Adam Thielen that cost him most of the season.



Using our play-by-play coaching metric — which uses EPA, PFF grades and hierarchical clustering of play types — we ranked Stefanski as the fourth-best play-caller in the league this season. Using our scheme-uniqueness work (which has been updated to take into consideration a finding from ESPN), Stefanski ran what was one of the more unique schemes in the NFL, as well. [jking's note: PFF also finds that scheme uniqueness is the second most important variable determining points scored during the first quarter of games - https://www.pff.com/news/nfl-pff-data-study-can-we-predict-hot-starts]

Coaching_Metric.png


The first two principal components relating to offensive schemes. Distance from (0,0) the most important factor here.

Thus, there’s a decent amount of evidence that the Browns are getting a good offensive mind. With Baker Mayfield, Odell Beckham Jr., Jarvis Landry, Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt (possibly) in the mix, the Browns should be able to improve on their 21st-best EPA per play and make due on a lot of the promise that was generated by their strong finish to the 2018 season.

THE QUESTION MARKS
As with literally every person the Browns have hired since they returned to the league, there are also a ton of question marks around Stefanski. For one, like his predecessor Freddie Kitchens, Stefanski has never been a head coach and has just one year as a coordinator at any level. Because of this, the Vikings hired longtime NFL offensive mind Gary Kubiak to consult with Stefanski for the 2019 season, and Kubiak's stamp (league-high outside zone rates, league-low usage of three-receiver sets) was certainly on the offense. People who are skeptical of Stefanski’s ability to adapt an offensive philosophy to his talent while away from the Kubiak nest have some reason to be so.

Additionally, as my colleague Ben Brown wrote about this week, Stefanski’s offensive philosophy was developed within the confines of Mike Zimmer’s mentality as head coach, which caused them to run the football far too often on early downs. Unlike DeFilippo, who passed the ball a lot on early downs in 2018 (but finished in the bottom third of our coaching rankings in 2018), Stefanski was able to make the best of a bad run/pass ratio, but it was a ratio he was at least partially responsible for. In games where they were not efficient on early downs, they lost games they probably should have won (at Chicago, at Kansas City, versus Green Bay), and they looked horrible in their playoff loss to the 49ers.

Lastly, while the Browns have a ton of talent at the skill position players, they did not take to Kitchens in year one, and it’s reasonable to assume there will be similar skepticism surrounding this hire. Hopefully, for Stefanski, his ability to take weaknesses similar to the ones that have been suffered in Cleveland (poor offensive line, middling quarterback play, irritated skill players) and make them work in Minnesota will please the people of Cleveland.

FINAL WORD
The word is that the analytical decision-makers loved Stefanski as a head coaching candidate for the Browns a season ago, despite him having been a coordinator for just three NFL games. This may be an indication that they are hiring the former Minnesota offensive coordinator for more than just his play-calling acumen, which, while good, has been on display for only 21 games. One of the issues Kitchens had was that he did not properly use Todd Monken, whose down-the-field approach in Tampa Bay was able to squeeze value out of Ryan Fitzpatrick in 2018 and would complement Stefanski’s outside-zone scheme should he stick around and be a part of the team’s play-calling. A lot has yet to be determined personnel- and coaching staff-wise, but at first pass, this looks like a good hire for the Browns, who next year will try yet again to make the playoffs for the first time since 2002.
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Last edited:
NorthCoastBias said:
Breer and Fox with the same info. Gee, I wonder who their source could have been.
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Not only the same info, but both are also forming it as a negative on the organization without even bothering to mention that other teams are doing variations of the exact same things.

Sad part is, especially in Fox's case, he knows damn well the fans will eat that up & use it as more fuel in their Haslam hate and use it to hate the Stefanski hire. It's ignorant and embarrassing. He and Ruiter need to just go in the corner & cry it out already.
 
MoFlo said:
Not only the same info, but both are also forming it as a negative on the organization without even bothering to mention that other teams are doing variations of the exact same things.

Sad part is, especially in Fox's case, he knows damn well the fans will eat that up & use it as more fuel in their Haslam hate and use it to hate the Stefanski hire. It's ignorant and embarrassing. He and Ruiter need to just go in the corner & cry it out already.
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Fox has been unbearable since he got a heads up about Lebron from Sian Cotton
 
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