NCAAF
Kellen Moore can’t remember exactly when Dan Casey first got on his radar but the new Philadelphia Eagles offensive coordinator became such a big fan of the Texas high school coach’s work that he invited Casey to sit in on his quarterback meetings last year when Moore was the Los Angeles Chargers’ coordinator.
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None of the players may have known who the former Davidson College defensive back was. Still, to Moore and countless coaches at all levels of football, the 32-year-old Casey — just seven years removed from divinity school — has been an invaluable resource when it comes to game-planning and helping grow the sport. The relationship started over e-mail, where the two football junkies discussed ideas before Casey flew to Los Angeles while the Chargers were having OTAs.
Casey thought it was “a high school coach’s dream.” For four days, he observed how Moore and the Chargers operated. Casey was fascinated to see the dynamic between Moore and Chargers quarterbacks coach Doug Nussmeier, who also worked with Moore in Dallas: how they were both so open to different ideas but how collaborative they were with their players.
What Casey never expected was that Moore wanted to pick his brain too.
One of the things Moore was curious about was the Tennessee Volunteers offense. They led the nation in scoring the previous season, just two years removed from ranking No. 108. Casey had run a version of the UT offense in 2022. The two coaches discussed the Vols’ choice routes and drilled down on the particular way that coaches have to teach inside routes. Moore was trying to figure out how that would translate with NFL hash marks not being as wide as college ones.
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“Dan has great resources and was able to share some different clips on the way they read their routes,” Moore said. “It was awesome.”
The Chargers never actually ran those concepts during the 2023 season, but they did workshop them. Moore, like several NFL coaches, has a burner X account just for football research purposes. That’s why Casey’s @CoachDanCasey feed (with more than 107,000 followers) has emerged as a go-to for folks like Moore. At 5:29 AM CST every day, Casey sends out his “One Play a Day” e-mail to thousands of coaches and football fanatics. He has a website, CoachDanCasey.com, a YouTube channel and a podcast, and he has published five books geared to coaches, including one that came out last month on the biggest trends in the sport in 2023.
Casey’s feeds have proven to be a good resource, similar to other feeds (@JamesALight) and sites (Cody Alexander’s matchquarters.com).
“You’re always looking for plays and looking for ideas,” Moore said. “You only have so much time during the week. Dan and so many other people do such a great job on social media of finding all the different things that came up that week during the season, whether it’s college, NFL or in high school. It’s really an awesome research bank. Not that it necessarily might apply that week, but it might apply in future weeks, where you might be game-planning, ‘Hey, wait a second. I think there’s an idea where Dan posted something three or four weeks ago.’
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“What’s funny is how many people really use social media for game-planning ideas. There’s definitely a copy-cat element to it where someone may hit something in college football, and all of a sudden, that play will show up in the NFL by three teams. Texas did a really good job in their screen game, and then all of a sudden, a lot of people were running those sort of half-rollout screens.
“Obviously, Miami had that with their Cheetah motion stuff. For us, you can watch an entire game and see if you can find a couple of plays out of it, but if we’re game-planning for an opponent, I don’t have all the time in the world to go watch the Rams, watch the Dolphins, watch the 49ers, but if you can grab a couple of clips that come up and become relevant, that’s really all you’re looking for. What amazes me is how many resources that Dan pulls from. He’s got stuff from everywhere.”
GO DEEPER
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Casey comes from a family of basketball coaches in New Jersey. His cousin, Ryan Kelly, won a national title at Duke and later played for the Lakers. Kelly’s younger brother, Sean won a national title as a walk-on at Duke.
Casey lived the nomadic life of a coach growing up. The oldest son of 12 children, he was born in Pennsylvania and went to high school in three states. He spent his freshman and sophomore years in Indianapolis. After his grandfather passed away, he moved to Raleigh for his junior season, and then his family relocated for his senior season to Rock Hill, S.C., where the biggest recruit in the country, Jadeveon Clowney was playing across town.
Somewhere in his home, Casey has a newspaper clipping of him and Clowney on an all-region team.
“I was a high school quarterback and found out pretty quickly that I wasn’t good enough, so I got moved to safety,” he said.
Casey signed with FCS Davidson in North Carolina and started for teams that went 2-30 in his final three seasons.
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“We were terrible,” he said.
Acknowledging that he was “a little bit delusional as a player,” he thought he would be able to play in the CFL or Europe but soon realized he wasn’t good enough. He went to divinity school at Duke but came to another realization in his first year when he found himself distracted in the back of his seminary classes.
“Seeing behind the scenes of my life as a pastor aside from Sunday mornings and occasional meetings with people, I really don’t get to build those bonds with people,” he said. “Obviously, faith is a big part of my life, but I felt like I could have a bigger impact in coaching, and quite frankly, sitting in the back of my seminary classes watching film, thinking, ‘Eh, this is probably a sign that I’m heading in the wrong direction.’”
Casey sent out e-mails to high schools in the area asking if they needed a volunteer coach.
“Literally, nobody responded to me,” he said.
The following season while he continued working on a graduate degree that he finished in 2017, Casey worked as a volunteer defensive back coach for a small Raleigh high school that played eight-man football.
“That first year was an adventure,” he said. “I was all over the place. It was kind of a grab-bag of copy and pasting what other coaches were doing.”
The next season, Casey was the play caller on both sides of the ball. He simplified the offense and became a better teacher, he said. His team went undefeated before losing in the state title game.
He wanted to get into college coaching, but Casey and his wife were in the process of adopting two young children, ages 2 and 1, and Casey felt the timing was wrong to put his young family through the exhausting college football calendar.
“It was not the right time to be out recruiting and be an absentee dad,” he said.
The Caseys relocated to Texas, where his wife is from. There, he could coach in a place that treated high school football like college, minus all the recruiting demands. In his first year as a head coach in 2017 in North Carolina, Casey started a Twitter account, now known as X.
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For half a year, he had another coach on campus who worked with him, but that coach moved on.
“I was the only football coach on campus,” he said. “In Texas, you can just walk down the hall to the history teacher, and you can get on the whiteboard and talk, but in North Carolina, it was crickets. I was thinking, ‘Who do I get to talk football with?’”
Like a lot of football coaches, especially younger ones, Casey had ideas rattling around in his brain, and he realized he was still in the drinking-from-a-firehose part of his existence as a coach.
“As a discipline for myself, I was going to post one play a day (on his social media feed) and try and figure out what’s going on and share it with the abyss,” he said. “Eventually, it kind of caught on. People got involved in it, and a lot of coaches would correct me: ‘No, you’re wrong about this. You’re wrong about that.’ That was a cool way to learn. You put yourself out there publicly, and you’re open to criticism, but you’re not defensive and you can learn a lot.”
Casey noticed his feed got traction almost immediately, and he relished connecting with people.
“I was having conversations that were way above my pay grade,” he said. “I was this itty-bitty, eight-man football coach in North Carolina getting to have conversations with coaches at Auburn and Penn State. All these guys are reaching out, and they’re willing to talk because they know I’m trying to learn. That was the coolest thing, ‘Holy cow. I’m getting to learn so much from so many guys.’ It was like magic.”
Among the first coaches to reach out were Josh Gattis when he was the passing game coordinator at Penn State; Kenny Dillingham, formerly the quarterback coach at Memphis; and Howard offensive coordinator Brennan Marion.
“There’s definitely huge egos in the profession, but the guys who are passionate and really want to learn and are open to new ideas, I think the mark of those guys is they are willing to find stuff from anywhere,” Casey said.
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More than just out of curiosity, Casey’s endless pursuit of football knowledge was rooted in his players. If they ever had a question about anything, he felt either he had to have the answer or be able to find the answer.
“That’s what drives me,” he said. “I am so obsessed with the intricacies of the game, that for me to be able to sit in the QB meeting room with (UCLA recruit) Karson Gordon, and for him to have a question, I either had the answer or would find the answer, or we would work together to find the answer. When you do achieve something together, there is like this, ‘Eureka!’ moment, like, ‘Man, we’re problem-solving together at the highest level with the highest stakes.’
“Now, I know it’s high school football, but for these kids, it’s the most important thing in their life at the time.”
Casey estimates he spends around 30 hours every week scouring the internet on his quest to find the most interesting and unique football wrinkles. It could be anything from William & Mary running a fake quarterback sneak snapped through the legs of one quarterback that turns into a speed option play, to Florida’s DeLand High School running a single-wing spinner pop pass that came out of Casey researching Paul Johnson’s days at Hawaii, to some grainy footage of Mike Leach and Hal Mumme running a deep snag concept at Iowa Wesleyan in 1990.
The original Mike Leach + Hal Mumme Air Raid in 1990 at Iowa Wesleyan.
Running a Deep Snag out of Nub Trips pic.twitter.com/d5XQG0sWxP
— Coach Dan Casey (@CoachDanCasey) January 20, 2023
“My mind works randomly unless I’m putting something together,” Casey said. “I just find rabbit trails and try to draw the web of connections between things that I think people would be interested in.”
As part of his regular film routine, Casey makes a point to watch the NFL offenses of Moore, Andy Reid, Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan, Mike McDaniel and Shane Steichen. He’ll zip through to find any new formation, motion, shift, play structure or pass concept, getting everything Monday and going through most of it that night before finishing the rest on Tuesday.
“I think he’s invaluable to all the high school coaches across the country,” SMU coach Rhett Lashlee said. “I think it’s great to have someone that is knowledgable and dedicated to putting out things consistently on social and also his books. It helps grow the game and helps us as coaches grow.
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“What it does for someone like me, is you may come across a few things that he may post, it may jog your mind to thinking about things differently than you do, ‘Hey, maybe we could do it this way.’”
“I am always looking to learn,” current Arizona State University head coach Dillingham said, “and here is a guy that is putting together every single type of mesh that has been run in college football last year. That’s the same project that I’d have one of my GAs make, and he already did it and wrote a book on it. It’s perfect.”
Casey became my favorite follow a little more than two years ago. I had just began coaching my son’s football team. Like Moore, I have no idea how I came across Casey. But as someone who follows thousands of football coaches online, Casey’s work kept showing up on my feed. Thankfully.
If you’re looking to get your child the ball in space, Casey has all sorts of brilliant options for you. More than you could possibly imagine. Of course, not everything fit, or worked for my team, but I realized that was the really fun part that I’d never saw coming of my new favorite passion. Coaching football is a wonderful exercise in problem solving on so many different levels depending on the age, experience and ability of the players you have.
“It’s a chess match,” Dillingham said. “Everybody says football is different. Yeah, schemes are different, but the chess match is not always the X’s and O’s. But it’s combining, do you create numbers, leverage and grass with, is your best player the one creating the numbers, leverage and grass combined with all your players remembering all these schemes you’re doing to create all this stuff? The fun part of coaching is at every level with every team, it’s a different formula.
“At your level, you’d better not have 75 plays in coaching youth ball. So how do you create the same advantages with less plays in? That’s a challenge and that’s what’s so fun about coaching.”
That is what has drawn Casey so deep into the game, but he said he didn’t see it that way at first. Initially, he would have said it was all about the relationships, the impact coaches can have on the athletes, and the transformations they can make. All of that is still true, but things didn’t click in his head until he had Bob Ladouceur, the legendary former coach at powerhouse De La Salle High School in Concord, Calif., on his podcast three years ago.
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Ladouceur took over a program that never had a winning season and turned it into one that had 12 consecutive undefeated seasons, going from 1992 to 2004 on a national record 151-game winning streak. Casey expected Ladouceur was going to share culture gems about how to run his program.
“I asked him what led to all of De La Salle’s success, and he said it was specific football knowledge,” Casey said. “I was like, ‘What? It’s not culture?’ I was expecting him to hit on all the buzzwords.”
Catering to a like-minded audience, Casey released his latest book last month, “Trends in Offensive Football,” detailing the most important things that happened on offense in 2023, ranging from McDaniel fundamentally changing the way coaches looked at motion to the return of ancient formations like the single wing and the Notre Dame Box.
It took six months to put together, and the audience continues to grow and expand its reach in the sport.
“Look at Dan Lanning’s support staff at Oregon,” Casey said. “It’s all internet nerds — Dante Bartee, Kyle Cogan — all these guys. His defensive analyst room is just internet nerds.”
And Casey has interacted with all of them.
“Twitter, it’s like its own little ecosystem,” Casey said. “I don’t want to overstate it and say it’s like Florence for artists, but we’ve bounced so many ideas off each other and learned so much in such a short period of time, all these guys are going on and doing really interesting things. You have Silicon Valley for tech and all these clusters of knowledge, and in a weird, bizarre way, I think football coaches Twitter is kinda that way.”
Having one of your plays make it “on Dan Casey,” for some coaches is a badge of honor much like it is for a player to make it on the “SportsCenter” Top 10 or for a receiver to show up on “You Got Mossed!”
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“Obviously, you want to win the games first and foremost, but we joke within our offensive staff, ‘Man, we might make Dan Casey with this one,” Oregon offensive coordinator Will Stein said. “We had a direct snap to Bucky Irving against WAZZU on a third-and-2. We had a little acting job where Bo (Nix) acted like he was checking a play, and we direct-snapped it to Bucky. That was one that Dan put up.”
The direct snap to Irving was a play Stein picked up from studying old film of the New England Patriots. Moore saw Oregon’s version of it that Stein ran last year and texted the Ducks’ 34-year-old offensive coordinator about it.
“I think Dan is extremely influential,” Stein said. “He’s really smart. He’s not just some guy that posts cool plays. He actually studies it, knows it and knows the why behind it. He is always searching for information. He’s a great resource for me and coaches everywhere. He’s posted a few of ours. He did our same-side counter.
“The first one he posted of mine was when I was at UTSA, and we did a quick kick with our running back on a fouth-and-1. He was like, ‘I’m sorry the first thing I’ve ever posted of yours was a punt.’ I was like, ‘That’s OK, dude. It was a play that I got from Kansas.’ We all steal stuff and use it in different ways.”
Oregon running a “Check with Me” Direct Snap pic.twitter.com/xOZPiuCgGH
— Coach Dan Casey (@CoachDanCasey) October 24, 2023
The main way Casey has monetized his online efforts in addition to his books has been “a drip here and there with ad revenue.” Last winter, he stepped down as the offensive coordinator at Episcopal High School after helping it win the Texas Southwest Preparatory Conference 4A.
He transitioned into full-time consulting for some high schools and college programs with hopes of coaching in the NFL. His time around the Chargers last year convinced him that is the world he wants to be in.
“For the coaches, the NFL is like 98 percent football and maximizing what you do on the field,” he said. “For me, it really comes down to providing value for people. With information being so readily accessible, you either sit down and learn it or you don’t.”
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These days, Casey receives dozens, if not hundreds, of messages each day from junior high school and youth football coaches. He’d love to have the time to respond to all of them, he said. The most gratifying ones are from coaches reporting back to tell him they used a play that he shared.
One note came from a coach whose team won a state title after using a two-point double-pass play off orbit motion that James Madison had used.
“It’s like these ideas are awesome, but until they get put into practice and help a team achieve their goals, they are just lines on the paper,” Casey said. “But when they actually come to life, like it’s the best feeling in the world for coaches. And to be even just a part of that even by proxy, it’s just a really cool experience.”
(Top photo courtesy of Dan Casey)
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Bruce Feldman is the National College Football Insider for The Athletic. One of the sport’s leading voices, he also is a sideline reporter for FOX College Football. Bruce has covered college football nationally for more than 20 years and is the author of numerous books on the topic, including “Swing Your Sword: Leading The Charge in Football and Life” with Mike Leach and most recently “The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks.” Follow Bruce on Twitter @BruceFeldmanCFB
