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Chargers’ Brandon Staley: The math, mindset behind NFL’s most aggressive
coach

Daniel Popper
Aug 15, 2022

COSTA MESA, Calif. — Brandon Staley is sitting on a couch in his corner
office at the Chargers’ facility, freshly brewed coffee in hand. He is
wearing a casual offseason outfit — sneakers, shorts, a thin baby blue
dri-fit hoodie and a black BNP Paribas Open hat.

He considers a question about the value of understanding mathematical
advantages.

“There’s a really powerful part of this book that has stayed with me …”

Staley stands up and walks over to the bookcase along the back wall of
the office, next to his desk. He kneels and scans the shelf with his
index finger until he finds what he is looking for — “The Undoing
Project” by Michael Lewis. Staley pulls it out and starts flipping
through the pages as he walks back to the couch and sits down again.
With the book resting on his lap, he turns page after page, searching
for a specific passage.

His goal here is to teach — he is the son of educators, after all. His
mother, Linda, who died in 2004 after a long battle with breast cancer,
taught sixth-grade English. His father, Bruce, taught fourth grade for a
few years before starting a second career.

The only noise in the office is the flip, flip, flip of turning pages
until Staley finds the passage he is looking for and reads aloud. “The
new definition of a nerd,” he recites. “A person who knows his own mind
well enough to mistrust it.”

He looks up.

“Your instincts aren’t better than everybody on Earth,” Staley says. “Do
I think one of the big reasons why I became the head coach of the
Chargers is because I’ve got instincts? Yes.

“But do I think that when it comes to making these premium decisions in
the heat of the moment that, man, my instincts are so much better than
everybody else, and I would do a perfect job if I didn’t have any
information? There’s just no way.”

For most of football history, coaches have made game-management
decisions using nothing more than tradition and gut feelings. Staley is
as well versed in this history as any person on the planet. He is a
walking football encyclopedia. He has read Bill Polian’s “Super Bowl
Blueprints” cover to cover more times than he can count.

Staley is also determined to find advantages wherever he can, to better
his team and give his players the best opportunities to be successful,
even if it means admitting what he does not know. Staley sees a
potential advantage in the admission — and in acquiring as much
information as he can from as many resources as possible, in knowing his
own mind well enough to mistrust it.

We are discussing fourth downs, opportunities gained and lost in an
eventful 2021 season that fell just short, and the dreaded, polarizing
word that has caused arguments and outrage across sports for most of
this century.

Analytics — people in and around football spend countless hours
dissecting the topic. But when the dissection happens, analytics are
rarely defined as what they actually are: more information.

“I think the problem with ‘analytics,’ when you use that word,
immediately somebody is feeling something, and they shouldn’t be,”
Staley says. “If it was another term that people were more comfortable
with, then there would be a different response. But analytics has … it’s
like, well, it doesn’t belong in ball. It belongs in the CIA. It belongs
in investment banking. It doesn’t belong in sports. And that’s not true.
Information has been how people have been making judgments in this game
since Paul Brown and Vince Lombardi were coaching.

“What we try to do is try to use data to make better decisions.”

For Staley, that process started in the winter of 2021, before he went
for it on fourth down at a higher rate than any coach in the league,
before his in-game decisions helped propel the Chargers to the cusp of
the postseason and before the fierce backlash of the NFL world came
crashing down on the then-rookie head coach when his team came up one
win (or tie) short.

Staley believes in math, but he also acknowledges there is a part of the
game numbers cannot and may never be able to quantify. Mindset.
Emotions. Effort. The human element. And the driving force in Staley’s
approach to in-game decision-making was rooted in that understanding.

“There has to be a fearlessness to play in this game, and what I wanted
to establish was that,” Staley says. “The history of this team when I
got here, it was like someone’s going to get hurt, they’re going to blow
a lead, something catastrophic is going to happen. There’s this
‘Chargering’ thing. There’s all of these external factors that I know in
my life, they’re just all excuses. They’re just all excuses.

“And so, how do you change that? Well, you have to do things different,
you have to have a different approach. … Our mindset’s going to be on
us, it’s not going to be on the opponent. It’s going to be on us. So
creating that fearless mindset of, we are going to be aggressive, we’re
going to put the ball in our hands, we’re going to trust our guys to
make plays.

“If we lose, we’re going to do it on our terms, not someone else’s terms.”

It was crucial to Staley to instill that mindset in all of his players.
But it was most crucial for his rising star quarterback Justin Herbert,
who was set to enter his second pro season after an eye-opening rookie
campaign. Whether he failed or succeeded, Herbert needed to experience
the pressure. He needed to face the do-or-die realities of the NFL head on.

“The first person that I was thinking about was Justin. I wasn’t
thinking about anything or anybody else,” Staley says. “For me, I came
into this and I said, I know I have a special quarterback. I also know
part of my responsibility is to train him. Part of my responsibility is
to get him ready. And I also know that if I take the ball out of his
hands, I know what that’s going to do, too.

“For him to grow and be as good as he’s going to be, he needs to be in
these pressure-packed moments. Whether he throws it or not, it’s not the
point. It’s that the ball is in his hands, it’s in our hands as a team,
and that is where it all started for me.”
The son of educators, Brandon Staley is a teacher at heart. (Scott
Taetsch / Getty Images)

For his vision to be executed, Staley felt he needed to institute a
clear plan for streamlined communication on game days.

Only six people would be involved in game-management discussions on the
headsets. Staley and his three coordinators — offensive coordinator Joe
Lombardi, defensive coordinator Renaldo Hill and then-special teams
coordinator Derius Swinton — plus two staffers devoted exclusively to
game-management strategy, director of football research and analytics
Aditya Krishnan and offensive assistant Dan Shamash, who had previous
game management experience on Anthony Lynn’s staff. (Shamash was hired
away in the offseason by Robert Salah to be the Jets’ situational
football and game management coordinator.)

“Those (six) people are in complete alignment in terms of how we’re
going about these decisions,” Staley says. “You don’t have time to have
a big powwow. You don’t have time to have this intricate back and forth
on a headset during a game.”

Next, Staley constructed the mechanics of the fourth-down
decision-making in a “yes, unless” system.

At the start of each series of downs on offense, win-probability models
from the Chargers football research department would indicate the number
of yards the offense would have to gain on first, second and third down
to make it a go-for-it — or “green,” in the team’s lexicon — decision.

Say the Chargers have a first-and-10 from their own 40-yard line. And
say the model indicates that they would increase their win probability
by going for it on fourth down as long as they have 4 or fewer yards to
gain. That information is communicated to all relevant parties,
including Lombardi. Lombardi can then call plays on first, second and
third down knowing that if he gets to fourth-and-4 or less, the Chargers
are going for it — unless Staley says otherwise.

“You can be a better decision-maker if you have things modeled ahead of
time,” Staley says. “You have to go into the game with a plan, and then
that way you’re saying, ‘No,’ as opposed to deciding yes or no. I’m
going into it saying, we’re doing this unless.”

With the infrastructure built, the Chargers entered the 2021 season.

“It’s not just about that one down on fourth down,” Staley says. “It’s
what happened on the previous three. And that changes the way you play,
and it changes the way they have to play you. And that’s what I wanted
to do, was use mindset and math to our advantage.”

Back in his office, Staley is quoting “The Mighty Ducks.”

He references a scene from the 1992 classic in which protagonist Gordon
Bombay, a defense attorney who takes over coaching a youth hockey team
to fulfill a court-mandated community service sentence, is talking to
one of his players, Charlie Conway. Bombay was a star player as a kid,
and he rehashes a painful childhood memory of a potential winning
penalty shot hitting the post in a championship game.