Shane Waldron and the Bears' Offensive Philosophy

Shane Waldron has roots in the Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay coaching trees. He served on the Washington staff in 2016 before following McVay to the Los Angeles Rams in 2017. He spent four years in Los Angeles with McVay before heading to Seattle to be the Seahawks offensive coordinator, where he installed some McVay staples but didn't lean on them to the same extent some expected.

Waldron's first coaching job was as a graduate assistant at Notre Dame. He spent three years working for Charlie Weiss, who modernized the Erhardt-Perkins offense in his time with the New England Patriots from 2000 to 2004. After leaving Notre Dame, Waldron spent the next two years coaching for the Patriots under offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels. At that time, the Patriots still utilized core concepts from Weiss' modified Erhardt Perkins system.

“With the help of his assistants, [Bill] Belichick’s primary innovation was to go from an Erhardt-Perkins offense to an Erhardt-Perkins system, built on its method of organizing and naming plays. The offense itself would be philosophically neutral. This is how, using the terminology and framework of what was once thought to be the league’s least progressive offensive system, [Tom] Brady and Belichick built one of the most consistently dynamic and explosive offenses in NFL history. From conservative to spread to blistering no-huddle, the tactics — and players — have changed while the underlying approach has not.”

- Chris Brown, Smart Football Editor 

With how the Bears offense is being run and how active everything is at the line of scrimmage, it feels closer to an Erhardt-Perkins offense than an outside-zone West Coast offense.

What Is the Erhardt-Perkins Offense?

From what I've gathered, the basis of the Erhardt-Perkins offense is rooted in the idea of play concepts over individual roles. Nate Tice was kind enough to inform me that in a West Coast offense, every route combination is said in the play call. The quarterback spits out terms like "Y-Seam, Z-Under, X-Dig." But in a different formation, that same play call could be communicated as "Z-Seam, Y-Under, F-Dig." Despite being the same play, the call is different because of each player's alignment.

In the Erhardt-Perkins offense, there's much less terminology. It's simplified down to a formation, and a single word that outlines the route concepts for the play. Tice used the example of "Sword" to explain this. No matter the formation, "Sword" could mean the same combination of a seam, under, and dig route, and it's on the other position players to know their role based on where they align in the formation. Those players need to know the entire picture of the concept when it's called as opposed to just their role. The X thread from Tice is worth checking out for more detail.

This goes a long way toward explaining the miscommunication taking place within the Bears' offense this season. But if it's so complicated for everyone else, why use it? The beauty of this, when it's working efficiently, is that it offers flexibility to the offense to quickly get into whatever look it sees fit for what the defense is showing pre-snap.

"The biggest advantage of the concept-based system is that it operates from the perspective of the most critical player on offense: the quarterback. In other systems, even if the underlying principles are the exact same, the play and its name might be very different. Rather than juggling all this information in real time, an Erhardt-Perkins quarterback only has to read a given arrangement of receivers.”

- Chris Brown

With a quarterback making many checks and changes at the line of scrimmage, the ability to check into various options with a single word is a big advantage. However, that advantage forces more weight on each player to know entire concepts and sight adjustments within those concepts.

Takeaways for the Chicago Bears and Caleb Williams

From what I've gathered, the Bears are running a quarterback-centric offense that depends heavily on communication, chemistry, and repetition through different defensive looks. Moreover, this matches what we have seen the Bears run with Caleb Williams at the helm more closely than what we see from true McVay disciples. Both Tom Brady and Peyton Manning excelled in systems like this, and Shane Waldron seems to think that Williams should be in a similar offense, conceptually.

Now, does that mean the Bears' offensive execution will get better with time? I don't have that answer. As an impatient Bears fan, I simply want results. But this realization makes more sense of how jumbled and frustrating the Bears offense has looked through the first eight games of the 2024 season.