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MIKE SHANAHAN
BRONCOS COACHING GREAT
The World Champion Denver Broncos stand as the perfect symbol of a team manifesting the personality of its head coach—maintaining discipline, focus, preparation, mental toughness, and physical effort—all qualities indelibly stamped onto the franchise by Head Coach Mike Shanahan.
Mike took his career and the Broncos to a new level in 1997 as the intense and personable Denver Broncos head coach became one of just five active National Football League mentors with Super Bowl victories (joining Mike Ditka, Mike Holmgren, Jimmy Johnson, and Bill Parcells). While his seal of leadership already had been permanently ingrained into the entire Broncos organization, Shanahan took a step in the direction of legend when he joined Tom Flores as the only two coaches in pro football history to post four wins in one postseason.
In his third season at the helm of the Denver Broncos, Mike not only led the Broncos to their Super Bowl victory, but became the winningest active coach in postseason play in the process. The Broncos stormed through postseason play to their eventual World Championship with a home win over Jacksonville and subsequent road victories at Kansas City and Pittsburgh, defeating those Super Bowl contenders in their home parks on back-to-back weeks, answering any lingering questions about the status of Denver as the best team in the American Football Conference.
It has been widely documented that the Broncos posted one of the greatest upsets in Super Bowl history, played in perhaps the best Super Bowl game ever, and ended the National football Conference’s 13-year domination in the NFL’s Championship Game.
Mike now has that postseason record of 4-1, which added to a regular season mark of 33-15 give him a combined record of 37-16 (an exceptional .698 percentage) in three years as head coach of the Broncos. Not only is that record the best among all coaches in Denver history, but his home record at Mile High Stadium is a staggering 22-2 (.917) in regular season play.
Last year he directed a Denver offense that scored a total of 583 points (29.2 per game) during the 1997 season, the fifth-highest total in NFL history and the second highest total in AFC history for combined regular and postseason. The all-time high of 636 points came from the 1994 World Champion San Francisco 49ers, for whom Shanahan was the offensive coordinator. He led his team to a 12-4 regular season record in 1997, marking the first time in franchise history that the team has won 12 or more games in back-to-back seasons.
Since Mike took over the Broncos’ coaching reins in 1995, Denver has scored 30 or more points 24 times (including twice in postseason) and 20 or more points 39 times (including four times in postseason) in the 53 regular and postseason games of Shanahan’s career. Denver’s record in the 24 games in which it has scored 30 or more points under Shanahan is an amazing 23-1, including a 16-0 mark at Mile High Stadium.
Over the last six years (three in Denver and the three previous in San Francisco) Mike’s offenses have finished No. 1 in the NFL four times, second once and third once, falling just 17 yards and 83 yards short, respectively, from the No. 1 spot in those two years.
Under Shanahan’s tutelage the Broncos led the entire NFL in total offense in 1996, after having rewritten the Denver record books in 1995. In fact, the last three Broncos’ seasons have produced the most prolific three-year total offense statistics in franchise history.
Shanahan came to Denver from the World Champion San Francisco 49ers, where he served as offensive coordinator for three seasons. San Francisco’s three-year offensive averages under Shanahan’s direction were the most productive in the history of pro football. His three-year averages included being number one in total points (an average of 470 per year), total touchdowns (61), rushing TD’s (24), passing TD’s (32), third-down efficiency (49%), total offense (an average of 6,225 yards annually) and average yards per play (6.2 yards per attempt).
During his NFL career Shanahan has been a part of teams that have played in eight AFC or NFC Championship Games, in addition to his five Super Bowl appearances, four with Denver and Super Bowl XXIX with San Francisco. In his nine seasons coaching at the collegiate level, Shanahan’s teams participated in eight bowl games, winning two national championships.
A native of Oak Park, IL, Mike attended East Leyden High School in Franklin Park. In a student body population of 2,500, Shanahan was voted athlete of the year as well as most valuable player in both football and track. He set a still-standing single-game school record with 258 yards rushing on 17 carries. He received a scholarship to Eastern Illinois University, where he played quarterback and lost a kidney in the spring game of his junior year, which began his coaching career a year earlier than was intended. Mike also received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at EIU.
He began his coaching career at Oklahoma in 1975-76, serving as the offensive backfield coach for the Sooners, and they won the national championship in his first year on their staff (1975).
Shanahan was Northern Arizona’s backfield coach in 1977 at the age of 24, and the Lumberjacks averaged a school-record 391.1 yards that season. A year later, Shanahan returned to Eastern Illinois as offensive coordinator and helped guide them to a Division II title. The year before Shanahan’s arrival the team was 1-10. In 1979 he served as offensive coordinator at Minnesota, with the result being that the Gophers set 40 school offensive records. Mike moved on to Florida the following year, inheriting the second poorest offense in Division I football, as well as a team record of 0-10-1. In Mike’s four years the team broke many offensive school records and went to four straight bowl games. During his stint at the collegiate coaching level, his teams had a combined record of 77-29-3.
Recognized as one of the most dynamic offensive minds in the game, Shanahan thus was an assistant coach in college at age 21, an offensive coordinator at the Division I level by 25 and at the NFL level at 32 in his first Denver stint.
Mike and his wife Peggy have two children, son Kyle and daughter, Krystal.
