Steve Smith gave Brian Fleury an unexpected kind of endorsement: not for what he has already called, but for what he has learned before getting the chance. Smith praised the Seattle Seahawks’ new offensive coordinator while previewing Seattle’s wide receiver room heading into 2026, saying Fleury fits a coaching lane he trusts.
That matters because Fleury has never called plays before. He did not even move to the offensive side until 2020, yet he is now being asked to run the offense for the Seattle Seahawks. Smith’s point was that the résumé does not look empty so much as different. In his view, coaches who have worked as run game coordinators and tight ends coaches often arrive with a deeper grasp of how an offense actually fits together.
Smith said he is more interested in that background than in the more common pass-game path. He pointed to coaches from the Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay tree, saying those who specialize in run coordination and tight ends tend to be the ones who become strong coordinators. In his words, those coaches learn the offense inside and out, not just the passing concepts that get the most attention on Sundays.
He tied Fleury to that pattern directly. Smith said Fleury worked as a run game coordinator in San Francisco and then traced the rest of his path: assistant linebackers coach, linebackers coach, quality control on defense, quality control on offense, and then a switch to the offensive side. That kind of climb, Smith argued, can produce coaches who understand how every part of a play call depends on the others. The names he used to make the point were Mike McDaniel, Bobby Slowik and Sean McVay.
Smith went even further, saying that the best football minds are often found in the rooms closest to the line of scrimmage. He compared the way tight ends coaches and fullbacks see the game to the way broadcasters like Greg Olsen and Moose Johnson explain it, because those jobs force people to absorb blocking schemes, the running game, the pass game and the structure around them. That, he said, is why he believes Fleury belongs in the category of coaches worth betting on.
The praise is also where the risk sits. Fleury is being elevated into a first-time play-calling job, and that is the part nobody can shortcut. A coach can know the structure of an offense, understand leverage and still face a different test when he has to choose the next call, series after series, with the game moving faster than the whiteboard. Smith’s argument is that Fleury’s background gives him a better foundation than the usual first-timer. The question is whether it also gives him enough decisiveness once the headset is live.
That is why the next stage matters more than the label. The Seahawks are no longer asking whether Fleury has the right pedigree. They are asking whether a coach who spent years learning the game from the run game up can turn that education into a working offense, now that the job is his for the first time.
