LOS ANGELES — Jim Harbaugh’s credo, instilled in himself and brother John Harbaugh by their father, Jack, is “enthusiasm unknown to mankind.”
As it pertains to Mike McDaniel, reported Tuesday night to be in the process of becoming the next offensive coordinator of Jim Harbaugh’s Los Angeles Chargers, one part of that phrase especially sticks out:
“Unknown to mankind.”
For all of McDaniel’s many viral moments — schematic wizardry, quirky quips and the public backing (followed by public backing-off) of embattled quarterback Tua Tagovailoa in Miami — there are layers to this coach that I believe people have yet to see.
Not that many were interested in looking once the Dolphins, the team McDaniel coached from 2022 until he was fired this month, failed to win either of their two playoff appearances in his first two seasons before imploding through the first half of 2025. Tagovailoa, who signed a four-year, $212 million contract — a deal that McDaniel advocated for after coaching Tagovailoa to the best seasons of his career in 2022 and 2023 — backslid big time. Disgruntled star receiver Tyreek Hill got hurt. General manager Chris Grier was fired in October, and the biggest headline of the second half of the Dolphins’ season was that McDaniel was almost certainly next. Then the Dolphins started winning, rattling off four straight after Grier’s dismissal and doing so with creative concepts and players who clearly hadn’t quit on their coach.
But outside of the Miami beat writers, was anyone even paying attention to the stuff McDaniel is really made of?
McDaniel is an innovator of offense. Years ago, he helped 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan meld the partner systems — Gary Kubiak’s and Mike Shanahan’s – into one modern and constantly evolving scheme that is now the NFL’s most popular. In Los Angeles, he’ll marry this system to a quarterback in Justin Herbert who may as well have been built in a lab, and an offensive line and running backs/tight ends room with the collective mass of a small planet.
If I know anything about McDaniel, the scheme will be alive; it’ll shift and change with his players. Where the McDaniel/Shanahan partnership in San Francisco featured heavy personnel and a layered, suffocating run game that directly built out an arsenal of after-the-catch passing plays, the Miami offense capitalized on the speed of its skill players combined with timing throws by the quarterback. It was sleeker and faster than its 49ers relative (though it didn’t always travel well).
When healthy, the Chargers’ blend of size and speed on offense plus Herbert’s elite ability give McDaniel an exciting foundation. Whatever he builds, it will hark back to both offenses yet somehow also look totally different.
McDaniel is unafraid to go anywhere for a new idea. I have sat tucked away, listening intently in the back corner of rooms where he’s debated defensive coaches at offseason seminars in the deep summer, football far away from the minds of many of his contemporaries in the sport. I once followed one of his motion concepts from team to team across the NFL as coaches borrowed it McDaniel and built their own versions. Inspiration for Miami’s hottest play that season had actually started in the freezing Canadian Football League, which may as well be a different sport given all the extra player movement allowed before the snap. McDaniel saw how CFL offenses exploited defenders with these motions, and appropriated one he felt could stretch both defenses and the NFL rulebook to its limit. His 2023 Dolphins offense ranked No. 3 in expected points added per play, third in scoring and second in explosive plays. Every NFL team had a version of the motion in their playbooks by the summer.
When I next saw McDaniel the following spring, he was thinking about whether he could get defenders to hesitate at the snap by messing around with formation changes, handoffs and Tagovailoa’s inverted progressions as a left-handed quarterback. It probably was a dead end; defenses are too smart these days. But what if it wasn’t? It was worth trying. That’s McDaniel.
Yet to many, he is a caricature. A meme, a punchline. A punching bag for certain TV analysts. Rex Ryan called McDaniel “nerd boy” on ESPN in September as his deskmates chuckled along, the Dolphins firmly en route to losing six of their first seven games. Was Ryan so immersed in his own television caricature that he forgot he was one of football’s premier nerds not so very long ago?
Here are two layers of irony: if Ryan and McDaniel ever had a football conversation I am certain they’d get along brilliantly, and that in Harbaugh, McDaniel will soon work for a man whose broader schematic vision Ryan played a part in influencing.
OK, three layers: For all his own brilliant scheming and ideas that will be borrowed by coaches for generations, Ryan was also a failed head coach. That’s now on McDaniel’s resume too.
Mike McDaniel took the Dolphins to the playoffs in his first two seasons in Miami. (Jim Rassol / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
Forget quirky, Ryan’s broader comments that day revealed a deeper criticism of McDaniel that has often floated throughout league circles, which I’ll paraphrase here: neither he, nor his teams, were tough enough. Was it because his Miami rosters legitimately couldn’t compete in freezing temperatures? Was it because his quarterback, often through sheer bad luck and awful hits, was branded as “injury prone”? Hell, was it that McDaniel is a head shorter, a frame slighter and a shade weirder than most men who fancy themselves “football guys”?
OK, four layers: McDaniel, coveted for multiple job openings this month, including as a potential head coach, is about to be hired by football’s ultimate tough guy.
You just can’t see some types of “tough enough.” As a young offensive assistant in Houston, already an employee of the ascending Kyle Shanahan and a co-worker to Matt LaFleur and Robert Saleh, McDaniel discovered his demons. He drank himself out of dream jobs, out of the NFL altogether. He got sober. He’s been through his worst days already. What’s getting fired and starting over again to a person who has already seen rock bottom?
All the while, McDaniel has had a sort of mania to him that actual “football guys” understand. So he didn’t work out as the head coach in Miami. He’d probably say a lot of that was his fault — though not all of it. Any good coach has an ego, after all. He wants to be the best, the smartest, the most successful. He has always understood what he has to prove. He likely knows he has to win in order to do it (and even then, some people will never come around). I’d bet Harbaugh saw those parts of McDaniel immediately. People can recognize their own traits in others.
I’m betting on McDaniel’s traits — on his ideas, on his drive, on not judging a book by its bespectacled cover even if the words sound a little funny sometimes. And I’m betting McDaniel’s quirks are more than welcome in a building with plenty of space for a few oddballs and introverts, starting with the head coach and quarterback.
I think Harbaugh knows what many still don’t: that McDaniel’s best coaching days are still ahead of him — that McDaniel is exactly his type of football mind, and made of exactly his kind of toughness.