On offense, Dolphins look like funhouse mirror version of LaFleur's Packers

The Packers' Matt LaFleur and the Dolphins' Mike McDaniel learned their coaching philosophies from the same place, but their offenses no longer look alike.

When the Green Bay Packers travel south for a showdown with the Miami Dolphins this weekend, two longtime friends and former colleagues will face off for the first time as head coaches. Matt LaFleur and Mike McDaniel, now in charge of their own teams after a slow but steady rise through the coaching ranks, will provide a fascinating glimpse into how two coaches with almost identical roots and experiences have diverged over time.

The careers of LaFleur and McDaniel have intersected on so many occasions that the coaching trees from which they branched off have inosculated. The two first worked together in 2008 as low-level assistants for the Gary Kubiak-led Houston Texans. Neither would serve as on-field coaches until years later, instead both toiled in obscurity while performing the menial tasks commonly dumped on the youngest, least experienced members of the staff.

Though Kubiak's stamp remains present on each of their identities as coaches, another connection made that season would alter their professional trajectories: Kyle Shanahan. Shanahan took over as the offensive coordinator in Houston that year, a promotion that kickstarted his own rise to the top of the coaching ranks. He would take both LaFleur and McDaniel with him to multiple stops in the ensuing years.

When Shanahan left to run the offense in Washington under his father, Mike, LaFleur immediately followed. McDaniel would arrive a year later after a short coaching stint in the similarly short-lived United Football League. By 2011, the staff in Washington would feature an embarrassment of coaching riches, though few knew it at the time. Along with Kyle Shanahan (offensive coordinator), LaFleur (quarterbacks coach), and McDaniel (offensive assistant and wide-receivers coach), the team also employed a 25-year-old Sean McVay (tight-ends coach).

Washington would go 24-40 during the four years of the Shanahan era, reaching the playoffs just once. However, those teams incubated the modern version of the wide-zone, play-action-based system that has grown into the dominant offense in the NFL. Each of those assistant coaches would eventually go on to run their own clubs and install a version of that scheme.

But while the paths of the four coaches would cross multiple times after Washington, the offenses they ran would begin to diverge. By 2017, Shanahan had constructed the San Francisco 49ers' offensive identity around one of the most diverse and creative ground games in the league, a process in which McDaniel played a significant role. Meanwhile, McVay veered in the other direction after taking over the Los Angeles Rams, reimagining the scheme out of almost exclusively 11 personnel with the passing game front and center. LaFleur served as McVay's first offensive coordinator.

Those trends continued even as LaFleur departed Los Angeles. Within two years, he had become the head coach of the Packers, building one of the most pass-heavy offenses in the league soon thereafter. During that same span, McDaniel remained under Shanahan in San Francisco and continued to lean extensively on the ground game. While the two sides of the divide shared a common football language and philosophy, the approaches almost couldn't look more different.