For the first time in his life, Sean Payton had no film. This was an issue, albeit small-scale. He has established a tradition in Denver of introducing coaching staff additions to their peers by sharing a collection of lowlights from their playing days. But in spring 2025, he had absolutely nothing to pull on Evan Rothstein, a 5-foot-something assistant he’d given the title of director of game management.
So Payton got creative, as multiple people who saw or heard about the meeting recalled, and instead played a clip from the movie “Rudy” as Rothstein’s introduction.
“Ppl (sic) loved it,” one person in the building texted The Post.
Rothstein had no old tape, indeed, because his playing days ended back in Section VIII high school football in Bellmore, N.Y. He pivoted immediately to something different. In 2009, while studying at the State University of New York at Cortland, he asked new offensive line coach Eric Jendryaszek if he could help out as a student assistant. At the same time, SUNY Cortland’s football program was implementing a new technology called
Then-head coach Dan MacNeill told Jendryaszek that he’d learned one of his assistants had already learned the software before even arriving on campus.
“It was frickin’ Evan,” Jendryaszek recalled.
“Frickin’ Evan,” nearly two decades later, exists as a near-invisible public figure around Dove Valley and Empower Field since advancing from Detroit to New England to Denver. He did not want to be interviewed for this story. He has no biography on the Broncos‘ . And yet his mind, as one Broncos source told The Post, was “very impactful” in the team’s sterling 11-2 record in one-score wins in 2025.
Second-year receiver Pat Bryant echoed the sentiment, asked how important Rothstein was in Denver’s close-game run.
“Very, bro,” Bryant told The Post. “When we do two-minute drills, situational, Sean (Payton) kinda steps to the side and lets Evan go to work. He’ll turn around, ask Evan questions. We come in here, we watch film on it, (Evan) will tell us what we did wrong.
“So, he’s basically like another offensive coordinator, for our situational football.”
Three coaches on Denver’s staff spoke to the entire team consistently in 2025. One, of course, was Payton. One was senior defensive assistant Joe Vitt, who speaks on Saturday nights before game day. And the other was Rothstein, who goes in-depth each week on situational and late-game mechanics.
“He’s been a tremendous asset, and almost like an air traffic controller on gameday where — his mind, itap racing with timeouts, and clock and situation,” Payton said in late July.
In Denver, Rothstein is indirectly part of a growing fraternity across the NFL, as the league has gradually come to recognize the value of analytically minded coaches who operate in “game-management roles” on game days. Every head coach across the NFL, as Ravens game-management coordinator Charlie Gelman told The Post, has some right-hand resource they trust in such a role. Some are in front-office research departments; most are buried on coaching staffs. All, though, are generally tasked with spitting out algorithmic data that help inform a head coach’s decision-making around fourth downs, two-point conversions, timeouts and beyond.
Rothstein is a unique case in a unique field, a coach who has worked hands-on under Jim Caldwell, Bill Belichick and Payton and who is also a “math wizard,” as Caldwell put it.
“He’s an extremely bright individual,” Jendryaszek said. “If it wasn’t for his passion for football, he could be building rocket ships.”
And before long, Rothstein — or one of these fraternity members across the NFL — could take the analytics revolution from their play-caller’s ear to their own call-sheet.
“I don’t want to speak for Evan, but guys who – I’m assuming like, Evan and myself, and some of these guys that are more on the coaching side, we’d all love to get to that point where we’re calling plays one day,” one NFL game-management specialist, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Post. “I think it’s trending that way. I think we’re getting more and more coaching responsibilities every year. I think itap either going to take a special head coach to give that opportunity, or a special ownership.”
“I think one of us just has to find a way to prove it, and get that first job.”
Gelman, who was hired as Baltimore’s game-management coordinator this offseason after spending three years in a similar role in Indianapolis, began experimenting with football analytics in the seventh grade. As a student assistant at Duke from 2018 to 2021, he built a win-probability model that the football program eventually adopted as its own. And after spending a year in Baltimore interfacing with then-Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, Colts head coach Shane Steichen called about a job opening.
The problem, of sorts: Gelman was a not-so-grizzled 24-year-old at the time.
“I was scared that they would think I was too young,” Gelman said. “So I grew out a full goatee, just to look older.”
It worked well enough to land him the gig as Steichen’s game-manager in Indianapolis, where Gelman came to understand his job in simple terms: maximize win probability. Utilizing the programming language R, he has built models that use decades of data from NFL games, take commands and output tangible recommendations for late-game situations. On gamedays, Gelman’s program spits out 116 individual sheets of recommended decisions — game managers still need analog charts given the — depending on specific down, yardage and distance.
“I think around the league, we all think very similarly,” Gelman said. “The question is just — how do each of us go about our businesses in our different, unique ways?”
Caldwell, the former and head coach, learned from four years overseeing Rothstein that the game manager has algorithmic processes for late-game decisions that “no one else does,” as Caldwell said. He would not reveal state secrets. But Rothstein’s process dates back to his time at SUNY Cortland, where he used the DVSport film program to create “logic statements” to predict and analyze opponents’ play-calling tendencies based on formation, down and distance.
Jendryaszek explained that Rothstein would present a team’s usage of a “Trips” formation, with three receivers aligned on the same side of the field. Rothstein could explain their tendencies for strong-side runs. Or weak-side runs. Or five-step drops. Or quick-game looks. Or categorize those tendencies by down and distance. And he built this all, Jendryaszek marveled, from scratch.
“He just kinda built that out as an 18-, 19-year-old, which was crazy,” Jendryaszek said. “No one was asking him to do it. He just loved that aspect of it. And he even started to work on his own playbook, back in the day.”
Once Caldwell arrived in Detroit in January 2014, he began to sit down with Rothstein, who had been with the Lions for two previous seasons as a special-teams quality control coach. Every single night, through that winter, spring and summer, Caldwell and Rothstein kicked around potential game situations and ideas for how to approach them. “Go find out why we should make this decision,” Caldwell told him, “instead of this.”
Rothstein would take 10 to 15 years of recent NFL data, Caldwell said, and analyze the correct answer. And he would communicate clearly, in Caldwell’s ear, on Sundays.
“Let me put it this way,” Caldwell said, speaking on Rothstein’s impact. “All you need to do is look at — I think Denver had, how many one-score games they won … a bunch, right? Take a look at us in Detroit.”
The Lions had a .563 win percentage in Caldwell’s tenure with Rothstein from 2014-17 — and a .595 win percentage in one-score games, according to The Post’s research.
“Besides our quarterback, who was great, obviously, Matthew Stafford, it was because of the conserving time, or eating up the clock,” Caldwell said.
According to The Post’s research of available NFL staff data, 17 of 32 franchises currently have some sort of front-office or coaching staffer in a specific “game-management” role; plenty more employ staffers who handle such responsibilities without an official title. The profession has expanded in the last decade, as Buccaneers director of football research Zach Beistline told The Post. And the effect is plain in 2-point and fourth-down utilization: the number of total league-wide fourth-down tries has nearly doubled from 2016 to 2025, according to The Post’s research.
The “really good game-management teams,” as one NFL game-manager told The Post, have even begun to start throwing challenge flags on previous plays in situations where they’d instead use a timeout — to capitalize on even a minuscule chance that an official might overturn a call.
“I think itap definitely shifted to like — every coach has someone they trust with this situation,” Gelman said. “Because itap a lot to think about. They need someone to be thinking one step ahead at all times.”
In Denver, Payton has Rothstein, who the Broncos head coach tried to hire in New Orleans in 2021 before Rothstein picked New England. And Rothstein, too, is widely respected across the league’s game-management community — within his own silo in Denver.
On Wednesday nights, a group of game-management coordinators across the NFL holds an informal Zoom call to discuss some of the league’s replay decisions from the previous week. It is done, as multiple game-management staffers told The Post, to help analyze officiating decisions and therefore inform individual challenge-flag decisions. No privileged information is shared. Except sometimes it is, and one NFL game-manager told The Post he likes to log on to “see what people let slip by.”
“Evan,” that game-manager told The Post, “does not make an appearance on those.”
Another smart decision, it seems, in a string of them in Denver.
“There’s probably not anything he can’t do,” Caldwell said of Rothstein. “I mean, I wouldn’t (be surprised) if he becomes a head coach one day. Thatap a possibility. And he’s capable. There’s no question about it.”
