This started with a simple question for Shanahan—
Is the idea that football has been turned upside down over the last few years a little overblown?
“I don’t think it’s changed as much as everyone thinks,” he says. “I think people are doing a better job of studying other people’s stuff. I think people have caught up to using the computers a lot better and stealing things a lot better. Some of the speed people have gotten on the field over the last few years, personally I think some of the speed we used in Atlanta got people to use a lot more speed.”
“I think it’s the fun narrative,” added Rams coach Sean McVay, about the offensive “revolution” of which he’s been positioned as a leader. “But I think a lot of the stuff is stuff that’s been successful over the course of time, whether it be going back and looking at how long Coach [Andy] Reid, how long the Patriots and the Saints have been doing it at such a high level under Bill [Belichick] and Josh [McDaniels] and then under Sean [Payton]. And for me, with Kyle and learning from his dad.”
What kind of insight could these two coaches provide on where offensive football is and where it’s going next? Let’s dive into that.
Running the ball still matters. Way back in the 1990s, Shanahan’s dad Mike married much of his run game to the pass game via the outside-zone run concepts that he and ex-line coach Alex Gibbs deployed, which had bootleg pass concepts off them. It was retrofitted in 2012 for Robert Griffin—when the elder Shanahan was head coach, the son was coordinator and McVay was tight ends coach in Washington—with the zone-read and RPOs.
Those teams ran the ball efficiently and effectively, and that changed the math for defenses—often taking defenders out of the passing game or forcing them to play tackling-deficient players a certain way. That’s why the Redskins were able to pile up 3,000 of their 2012 passing yards off of, get this, just three pass plays. The opponent was doing so much to stop the run, they’d deplete themselves of resources to combat the pass.
The analytics community has circled the effectiveness of play-action in the NFL, and that’s largely a result of what this family of offenses has done. And its foundation is having a viable run game to legitimize a quarterback’s play fakes.
“A lot of the things that have enabled us to have success have been the same,” McVay says. “And that’s being able to run or throw the football based on what a defense presents.”
The NFL’s version of file sharing. I’ve written about Matt Nagy’s affinity for
swiping concepts from all levels of football, and about how Payton and McVay
steal ideas from
each other’s tape. This, of course, is what Shanahan was referencing in saying teams “are doing a better job of studying other team’s stuff.”
McVay, for example, took a look at a play Payton ran (a 32-yard throw to Benjamin Watson) at the Rams in Week 9, reworked it, and then hit the Seahawks with it in Week 10—Cooper Kupp went for 25 yards on that one. And Payton had basically done the same thing a few weeks early, taking a shovel pass he saw the Patriots use against the Bears in Week 7 and turning it into an Alvin Kamara touchdown against the Vikings in Week 8.
Doing this takes work—McVay studies all the touchdowns and explosive plays from across the NFL every Monday morning—and the humility to know you don’t have it all figured out. And it’s also important to have good sense for when to do it, and when not to.
“If you just copy plays, you’re gonna be in trouble,” Shanahan says. “You better know why you’re putting it in, you better tell your team, ‘hey, they did this, but this is why we’re doing it, what we’re trying to attack.’ If not, you’re just hoping to get lucky.”
Motioning is one part of the “dress up” of all this, and personnel groupings are another. Let’s allow Shanahan to explain this.
“That’s why I use 21 [personnel] probably more than anyone in the NFL, we have a fullback in there, not just because that’s our offense, it’s because I believe that’s an advantage,” Shanahan says, using the jargon for two-back, one-tight end groupings. “People don’t play base defense very much, because the majority of the league doesn’t have a fullback. And so you get people on the field they’re not as used to practicing with.
“You know their menu’s smaller, and it’s, ‘Alright, I know I’m attacking these five things, instead of these 25 things.’ And you can see it better as a play-caller, as a quarterback. But also, it can be an advantage for the defense. If there’s only two receivers out, that’s a lot easier to defend than having to deal with a slot receiver. That’s why it’s important to me to have a fullback like Juice [Kyle Juszczyk] where you can do two-back, but you also can be in one-back and do one-back type stuff.”
This came into play in the Super Bowl at the most critical time. McDaniels rolled the Patriots out on their final drive in ‘22’ personnel, but with versatile, pass-catching back Rex Burkhead in, which forced the Rams to put their bigger defensive personnel in the game. Then, the Patriots threw on four straight plays to go from their own 31 to the Rams two-yard line, and set up the game-winning touchdown.
It’s just like Shanahan was saying—McDaniels used his personnel to force certain Rams personnel on the field, and had little trouble going to work from there.
Defenses do catch up, so offenses have to keep adjusting. This was apparent in the numbers last year, too.
We mentioned this in the
Game Plan column on Gary Patterson about a month ago, and it merits repeating (thanks to our buddy Warren Sharp, again, for this research): Average scoring per team exceeded 23 points in 11 of the first 12 weeks of last year, and average yardage per team topped 340 yards in all 12 of those weeks. Conversely, average scoring per team dipped below 23 points and in each of the final five weeks of the year, and average yards per team was under 340 in four of those five weeks.
“To me, there are some good quarterbacks in this league, coaches are doing well,” Shanahan said. “But, I mean, it was 3-3 in the Super Bowl. Guys can stop people. It was always gets like that towards the end of the year. It wasn’t just (the Patriots). Chicago also did that to them. Philly did that to them. We’ve got numbers and you can do stuff, but it’s very rare you can do it all year. That’s why you’ve gotta have defense to win in this league.”
So while it’s fair to guess that you’ll see a handful of offenses come flying out of the gate in Week 1, it’s far less likely that they’re maintaining that level after Thanksgiving.
What Shanahan’s saying is not overly complicated. An offense has to have an identity and a foundation on which to draw back. But, creatively, there are endless ways (through motioning, formationing, etc.) to make what’s supposed to be easy on your own players complicated on other teams. What they’re doing isn’t so different—it just needs to appear that way.
“If you really look at it, it’s a variation of something that’s already been done with a subtle tweak that’s designed to fit within the framework of how you want to operate with your personnel in your system,” McVay says. “But it still ends up being a lot of the same stuff, whether it’s how you’re distributing concepts, how you’re getting to the same distribution in the play-action game.
Which explains why when I told McVay what Shanahan said, he didn’t miss a beat in affirming its validity.
“Kyle’s been a huge influence on me,” McVay says. “I totally agree with what he’s saying.”