The Ringer NFL Show - The Future of NFL Offense

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Ben and Steven continue their offseason deep dive into some of the biggest questions around the league.This week, they take a look at the present and future of offensive schemes in the NFL. They start by talking about the state of offense in the NFL right now and the established coaches who have gotten us here (1:37). Then, they talk about the new heads of offensive coaching, the direction they're pushing offenses, and which of them could become the new establishment (38:04). They also discuss the role of the rushing quarterback in the modern NFL and their role in the future of offense (52:34). Hosts: Ben Solak and Steven Ruiz Associate Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal and Conor Nevins Musical Elements: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome to a golf podcast, unlike any other. This is Fairway Rowland on the Ringer podcast Network. I am your starter, Joe House every week on Fairway Rowland. It is myself and our PGA tour correspondent on the ground, Nathan Hubbard, talking all things, professional golf, amateur golf, amateur betting, professional betting, amateur drinking, professional drinking, my birdie buddies. If you want to hit them straight out there,

please check out Fairway Rowland every week. Available on Spotify. Howdy. I'm Ben Solac, and this is The Ringer NFL show. I'm joined today by the magnificent Stephen Ruiz. Stephen say hi to the people. Hi, people. And today we're doing the first half of a two-parter as we start to hone our gaze into the 2023 NFL season.

We want to talk about the future of the sport, in particular what the dominant forces are on the offensive, that's today, and defensive. That's next week, sides of the ball. This is like talking about the meta in a video game or the prevailing strategy of a war for anybody who doesn't play video games. We want to talk about who's doing the stuff that works, and if that stuff can stick, not just into next season, but into the seasons to come. This is the Ringar NFL show, and today we're talking the future of NFL offenses. Steven, whenever we do NFL offense talk

or NFL defense talk, what's the league doing? League-wide perspective stuff. I always want to start with that metaphor of the imagery of the pendulum. I think that it's critical to understand that the league develops on a pendulum. Stuff goes in vogue and the pendulum starts swinging one way. It swings towards the past and it swings towards later personnel and it swings towards spread. But then inevitably, defenses

catch on to some solutions and that pendulum reaches a maximum point and starts to swing back where teams need to move to heavier personnel and they need to learn how to run the football and there's just this give and this take there's this constant cyclical nature to NFL development

and that's why like stopping in one specific moment in time like stopping in this period right now and saying okay what's the league meta and where is it going is challenging because it's not hard to figure out like where the pendulum is swinging like we can see the momentum

we can see the velocity of it okay it's headed this way but we don't know if it's going to retain that momentum and keep swinging or if there's going to be a swing back. And that's what I think the really interesting thing and also the challenging thing is to talk about is where are we in this pendulum's path? What can we expect to start swinging back?

Yeah, it's always hard to figure out where you are in that pendulum swing, like in one pendulum swing and whether things are going to continue the way they have over the last year or two or they're going to change dramatically. I think in 2017, we probably thought the league was going

in a different, direction. It's always based on who wins, right? Like, the Eagles had just won the Super Bowl. They had won it with Nick Foles, not, you know, a world beating quarterback. And they did it with RPO's. And it was, that was pretty new at the time. And that was seen as the future of the NFL, like, shotgun, spread it out, run the RPO. And the opposite happened. McVeigh and Shanahan came along and now condensed offenses from undercenter, traditional play actions, offenses that don't even think about the RPO outside of like your, you're, like, you're, like, you're, you're, like, you're, you're, like, you're, you're, like, you're, you're, running outside zone and there's a backside slant if the cornerback is playing off too much. That's not like a real RPO. That's like RPO's Brett Farr was running in the 90s. So I think right now it's really tough just because you have Shanahan kind of evolving and you have this coaching tree that we spent a lot of time talking on this podcast for the last month, just spreading out and kind of there's factions within it.

And we don't know who is going to win that little internal battle between the Shanahan family. that's going to dictate where offenses go. And because defenses are so reactionary, you can't really understand where defense is going without first understanding where offense is going, which is partly why we set up this podcast series, this two-part series, the way that we did it. Yeah, no.

And that point of like smaller families within the overall league meta and accordingly like smaller pendulums, I think is really important. Because like let's, let's continue on that Eagles RPO example. Okay. So Eagles from the Super Bowl off of the RPO. And let's make Doug Peterson like a fragment of the Andy Reid tree.

And the Eagles and the Chiefs were like leading the league in RPO's back in my 2017, 2018. And so one of the resultant swings is Matt Nagy. And he goes and takes over the Bears. And they run a ton of RPO's. And there's just nothing, right? Like it just does not work well for Andy Dalton. And it does not work well for Justin Fields. You also have Frank Reich.

Mr. Bisckey, Raycher. Oh, my God. just went right over it. And young Mitchell, of course, Mitchell, Mr. Chavisky as well. It's tricky because I don't think of Mitch as like it wasn't great for him

because I don't think anything was great for Mitch. It kind of was good for him, though. It kind of was. As close as you're going to get to being good for Mitch. I know what point you're making. So you have that, but then you also have Frank Reich who leaves Doug Peterson's coaching staff and he goes to Indianapolis and there's this like,

is you going to do a bunch of RPO stuff? That's so the Eagles won the Super Bowl. and they didn't really do that. You know what I'm saying? Like we obviously like the Colts's entire offensive plans in late 2010s got hacked and they had a carousel of guys and there was confusion.

But still, as these pendulums swing, there will be like a divergence and the two brains will start going in different directions that we'll see who meets resistance and who doesn't. Like you said, it's often predicated on who wins. I want to start by trying to define a league meta, which is not possible because too many different coaches are doing too many different things

and even among the coaches that are having a lot of offensive success, there's still huge differences. But if we go to define a league meta, like what the league is doing right now, it's interesting because my first thought is, let's go look at the coaches who've been doing this for a long time and see what they've been doing and what they're doing now.

Steven, do you know how many coaches are coaching the offensive side of the ball, either as the coordinator or as the head coach, and are on the same team. I've been running the same stuff for the last five years. How many total in the league are doing it? I would say three. it's four actually right i think that number is a lot lower than people would expect so there's so when

you do five years what you do is you get the uh kail shanahan and the shaw mc bay in there right those guys are both going to be entering year six they're hired in 2017 no so this was year six they're entering year seven were they hired in 2017 or 2018 i always get thrown off by counting the number of years once things happen 2017 yeah they're hired in 2017 so they finished six years now they're entering year seven even though this year is 2023 numbers are fake and not real Andy Reid, obviously, been doing this for a long time, 10 years now. He's done this as the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. This upcoming year will be year 11.

And then the one that I think nobody would get, Pete Carmichael, baby. Off as a coordinator of the New Orleans Saints. Just been chopping wood since 2009, brother. Just been out there hanging out, calling some plays for Sean Payton, coach of Drew Brees. Never hear nothing about Pete Carmichael, Stephen.

No flowers from my man, Pete. No, yeah. It's kind of funny because when we talked about Sean Payton last week, we were kind of saying that it's hard to explain what he does. And I think that's part of the reason why nobody knows who Pete Carmichael is. There's like nothing you can point to, but like, oh, yeah, his blank is really good. His run game is like really solid. His play action passing designs are great.

No, he's just, he's Pete Carbichael or whatever his name is. If Chris Alave ends up what we hope he's going to be and Rashid Shahiq, Newton was doing, I'm willing to say Pete Carmichael is a good developer of wide receiver talent I'll give him that one They just do a good job there In New Orleans with those boys

Regardless, you have a few guys Who represent like stable schemes And they haven't necessarily Been doing it for as long At one team in one location But they've been doing it for a while, right? Zach Taylor's been calling an offense

For the last five years Brian Callahan with Cincinnati It's been for the last four years That's the offense that Zach Taylor runs though has changed a little bit Right? And so it like how stable is he, how representative is he of a meta, difficult to say. You have that Sean Payton tree, right? Payton ran an offense for a long time in New Orleans. Joe Lombardi ran an offense for a long time in Detroit. It was a quarterback's coach in New Orleans and then

ran offence for a long time with the Chargers. He's now the OC of the Broncos with Sean Payton. So you have the kind of that tree represents a pretty consistent through line of the last 10 years. Brian Dable has coached an offense for the last five years. He was the OC of the Bills for four seasons and now at this fifth year with the Giants. And then you could do Kellan Moore as well, the last, who's had the last four years with the Cowboys and his entering his fifth year,

uh, uh, now with the charges as the O.C. And so you have these, like, at least some guys who've been doing this for enough years that we can point to it and be like, okay,

we kind of know what this guy is. We kind of know what he runs. And we have a few years worth of data to understand what he achieves. But obviously they run different stuff. Payton runs demonstra different stuff than Chanahan, runs different stuff than Brian Dable, runs different stuff than Reed.

So when I drop these names to you, Stephen, if you were to use this group to describe the current offensive meta in the NFL, how would you do it? Who would you highlight as like the dominant forces? Who would you then highlight as like also successful but like more undercurrents,

more secondary forces? Are there things that link these guys? Are there important things that differentiate these guys? Using this landscape of dudes, how would you try to define an offensive meta for me? I think I start with like the easiest way to bucket in offense, or offensive play types. And I think it starts with shotgun versus

undercenter usage and then like personnel usage. I think that's the easiest way to do it. Because at the end of the day, we like to talk about these differences, but there's a lot of overlap with NFL offenses. They're generally running the same stuff. It's the presentation that changes. It's like the verbiage that changes. So I would start there like shotgun versus under center and how often you want to be in it. And I would put like the Shanahan-McVeval guys on one end and they're in the they want to be under center they want to run play action they want to have a nice run game and then i'd put like guys like Andy reed i'd put brian dable at the end of this other spectrum where it's like we want to spread things out with the passing game is the

focal point of our offense whereas i think the other guys the running game is the focal point of their offense and that's and you kind of see how they set up like going under center and having condensed formations makes for a better run game makes for a more intricate run game can do more stuff in the run game. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, you have guys spread out. You only have so many people in the box. Maybe it's a running back. Maybe it's a tight end who's not really good at blocking. You can really only run a handful of concepts from there. But you can do so much more in the passing game now. And I think that's how I would start to bucket these guys. And that makes it more convenient for us just because it's easier. It's easier for me to compare Brian Dayball's

offense to Andy Reid's offense in that way because then it is if we were actually looking at concepts and terms and in verbiage, because I don't think there's a lot of overlap there. I think they come from two different worlds, but they ended up in the same spot just because of, and I think this is a major point, especially because we're going to be talking about play calling and X's and O's and how much it matters.

I think one point we need to get across is personnel dictates everything. Personnel dictates the metas of the league, the play-calling metas, which teams are good, which teams aren't, how we think of coaches. And I really think that's what is dictating these differences, more so than even even like philosophy. I think we saw with Sean McVeigh,

he went from this guy who was very clearly on the same side of the spectrum as Kyle Shanahan and how he ran his offense, how he set up his offense. But once he got Matthew Stafford, he went as far away from that as possible while still being in the same family using the same verbiage in the same formations.

So I think personnel plays a big role in it, But if we're bucking these guys based on their personnel right now, think that's how you do it. Shotgun, what's the focal point of their offense runner pass? And then under center and the same thing. And I think that's where those two sides of the league are clearly separate. Yeah. I want to start with the personnel conversation because I think a common thing that you see when we step back and look at the league meta overall as like an NFL analyzing

community and finalizing media is this through line of logic, which is teams can run different personnel. The personnel is typically identified, like it's typically labeled by a set of numbers. Let's take 12 personnel, for example. The first digit is the number of running

backs that's on the field for the offense, and the second digit is the number of tight ends that are on the field for the offense. However many numbers remain, however many spots remain for the five eligible players, that's how many receivers is going to be. So 12 personnel is one running back, two tight ends, according it, there's only two spots left, two receivers. 11 personnel, which is the most common NFL personnel,

is one running back, one tight end, and three receivers. And 11 wasn't always the most common, right? 11 is coming to vogue with spread. It's coming to vote with three receiver sets, right? The Patriots put West Walker out there, and everybody was like, holy smoke, stop the presses! You can put a third receiver on the field! Like that, this is pendulum stuff, right?

So the pendulum massively swings towards 11 personnel since, like, the late 2000s. And now I think you see a lot of people who, Now we have great data, and we look at DVOA numbers, and we look at expect the points added numbers, and we can success rate numbers. And in a lot of instances, 12 personnel, one running back, two tight ends,

is more successful on a down-to-down basis, looking at league-wide numbers than 11 personnel is. And so you see people respond and say, the league should run more 12. And I think that's a good example of like a surface-level NFL meta discussion. And I think we're trying to have that. We're also trying to get a few layers deeper. So let me throw that at you, Stephen.

The NFL should run more 12 personnel. agree or disagree and why? Disagree because I don't think NFL teams have the personnel to run it. I remember the Baker-Mayfield stuff. This is like 2018, 2019, 2020 when we're talking about, I think it was like at that point we weren't blaming Baker Mayfield for the Brown's offense if it failed. Like there was still like the Freddie Kitchen stink on the offense.

And a lot of the talk was like, well, they need to run more 12 personnel. Like they're not doing it enough. And then Stefancy comes in and he does it. and it works, and Baker Mayfield is like a top-10 quarterback statistically. And then the next year, they run a lot of 12 personnel again, and it stinks. It doesn't work because they don't have the same personnel. It's like, Baker's not as good. And then, like, the people that were clamoring for more 12 personnel are now like,

why are they running more 11 personnel? This is so dumb. They're running too much 12. And it just changes every year to the point where it's a useless data point for me. Like, I'm more concerned over how you're deploying that. 12 personnel. And I think the Rams were, that was like the secret to the Rams success initially was like they're running 11 personnel not coming out of it, but the formations they're running are formations you would see out of a 12 personnel offense. Like Cooper Cup is basically a tight end.

Robert Woods is basically a tight end. And I think that's a far more interesting question. And I also think the data when you're just looking surface level personnel usage can be very misleading because of that. Yeah. So I think that right. personnel, like you said personnel is one of the most effective ways to start to bucket these guys and start to understand where the league is meta-wise. I agree, but I think you have to go a step further and say personnel as connected to formation, right? Like I go and I look at right now, the Los Angeles Rams led the league last season in plays in 11 personnel. This is not a surprise. This is Sean McVeigh runs the whole ship out of 11.

now when the Rams ran and Sean McVey I think is a is a is a is league meta like I think we have to agree that the league meta is Sean McVey to a degree because like more so than Kyle Shanahan too

more so than Kyle because Kyle is running with unique personnel groupings with a time with a feedback on the field right right right because right now how many Kyle Shanahan OCs are there there's him like offensive play callers I should say there's him there's Mike McDaniel from his tree and then you can't even say Michael Flore

because that was the ex-o-C of the Jets because he's now the O-C of the Rams which means he belongs to Sean that he might bring some Shanahan stuff but like he's he's now like it you can't say the Rams running Shanahan stuff the running McVeigh stuff no question meanwhile McVeigh's got himself

Zach Taylor Matt LaFleur Kevin O'Connell definitely another guy I'm forgetting and the lions are running his stuff right which yeah we're going to get to Ben Johnson later Ben Johnson's the son of a gun

who I think is like the most interesting dude when it comes to this conversation. Now, so I think McVeigh is a league meta-setter. And right now, the Rams running more 11 personnel than anybody else. Second on that 11 personnel list is the Cincinnati Bengals.

Zach Taylor is from Cincinnati. Right? Or it's from the Rams. He's from under that tree. They run a ton of 11 personnel. Now, obviously for the Bengals, if you had T. Higgins, Jamar Chase, Tyler Boyd,

and you weren't running a lot of three-receivers sets. You weren't running a lot of 11 personnel. You're dumb. You're playing old stupid. Like, you just got to be running this stuff. You've got to be putting all three of these guys in the field. And that's why we then go and we look at shotgun and under center numbers. And leading the league in under center usage is the Detroit Lions,

because they run McVeigh stuff. But then second is Los Angeles Rams. The Rams had almost half of their offensive snaps this past season come from under center. That's McVeigh's way. We go into the center. We run play action. We run outside zone. We run play action stuff off of the outside zone.

The Bengals are fifth. not an under center rate, but in shotgun rate. They are on the other pole. They're on the other side of things. And that's where it's personnel as tied to formation, personnel as it relates to deployment, personnel how it is used on the field.

And it's why I don't think you can successfully say the league meta is 11 personnel. It is, but we have to be able to go a step further and say like the league meta is 11 personnel condensed. League meta is 11 personnel no longer using it as a, spread formation, but using it as heavy formations.

It goes back to your point, which is that teams are doing 12 personnel formations, but they don't have the bodies to run 12 personnel. There's not enough good tight ends, man. Like the 13th best tight end in the league right now is Dawson Knox, and the bills are drafting Dalton Cade and trying to trade them. Like, there's just not enough talent there relative to wide receiver where there's so many dudes. And so one of the beauties of McVeigh is I can get 12 formation stuff, or 12 personnel

formations, 12 personnel formation look and plays. out of 11 personnel. Whereas the Bengals, the Bengals go, okay, we got Tyler Boy, T. Higgins and Jemar Chase. We are now going to step away from this condensed world.

You're going to step away from this under center world. Step away from this. Let's run the football in a variety of ways and run play action world and just let our really good receivers beat everybody in isolation,

which is the spread, which is going back to 11 personnel spread. That's leaving the Zach Taylor stuff and moving more towards the OC, the Brian Callahan stuff that he ran with Peyton Manning when he was with the Broncos. And so when we talk personnel,

like that relationship, right there of, of, yes, three receivers, one tight end, one running back, but what does it look like on the field? How is it being deployed? It's so important to understanding where these groups diverge, where some of them converge, get conversion evolution, and that's how we start to figure out where a league meta is. And I would, to add on to that, I think the next step or the next frontier for these guys is applying that same logic, like, oh, we don't have the personnel to run 12, but we want to run those formations. We're just going to do it with wide receiver bodies.

I think the next step is finding similar answers for like schematic stuff. Like, oh, we want to get into play action concepts, but you have to invest a lot to run proper play action. And I think that's where we're starting to see some of these guys from this tree, this influential tree like Mike McDaniel and Sean are in Kyle Shanahan. I think that's where we start to see them kind of deviate from what they were even three years ago. Yeah, I want to take a break.

And when I come back, I want to talk about some of the non-McVe-Shannahan guys, because we have to, to kind of round out where we're looking at a league meta, and then we can move forward from there. But first, I want you to purchase the advertised goods and services. Okay, so we're back. Bobby Sloick is the Shanahan guy, I forgot.

He's the new OC of the Houston Texans. So he's the branch off of the Shanahan tree that I forgot about. And anybody who gets mad at me in the comments, you can't get mad at me in the comments because I went, I found him. Shane Waldron, that's the Rams guy. I forgot. Frickin Shane,

who does it a good job with Gino Smith, which we're going to talk about later. Anyway, Shanahan McVeigh, I think, right, it's all about personnel formation, how they relate. Like, that's what those guys are doing.

Shanahan's running 21 personnel, which is the extra fullback, right? That's the extra running back. That's the extra body in the box to bring this, like, high variety running games to the table. And you see that with McDaniels well,

runs a ton of 21 personnel. but they do it with Tyreek and Jalen Waddle and it looks a little bit different. So that's your Shane Han McVeigh grouping. Andy Reid. Andy's like Andy's it. Like Andy, the most successful offensive coach of the last decade is Andy Reid. Agree or disagree?

Agree. What's Andy doing? What's the situation? Last two decades. Last two decades. Give it to them. I mean, I did the last decade because of the chief and because I think like once you widen the scope of the two decades, you start to get like conflating information about like, the league meta is right now. But yeah, Andy's the man.

What's Andy up to in terms of defining league meta characteristics? Because five years ago, RPO spread, and then you and I hopped on the sticks this year of the Super Bowl, writing articles, doing podcasts, doing videos, and what was the only thing we freaking talked about for that whole Chiefs game preparing for the Eagles? Tight ends. 13 personnel tight ends, baby. When the Chiefs beat you, they're going to beat you with Noah Gray, Jody Fordson, and Isaiah up at Checo, right? Like it was, it just to imagine you and I hanging out watching like the 2019

Chiefs and then us time traveling coming four years later. I've added like 15 pounds. You've gotten hitched. It's great. And we're like, hey, guess what? In four years, you're going to be talking so much about the Chiefs, heavy personnel and them running the football. We would have thought our time traveling versions of ourselves are crazy. So what when you think about Andy Reed's contributions to league meta right now, him and then the tree that comes off him and Doug Peterson and Frank Reich and Nick Siriani, where do you land? I think he is more of a coach. Let me revisit one thing I said last, last segment.

It's good, good, good, good, good, good, this is good. I want to clear something. I didn't say that the best way to bucket those offenses was with like shotgun and understand. I said it was the easiest way to do it. I think the best way to do it. And there's actually this debate going on. It's starting to percolate on like weird corners of soccer internet is

I'm interested. There's this like conflicting ideas on either ends of the philosophical spectrum. On one end you have something that they call positionalism

and this is like who branded positionalism? I agree with the other guys. There's a lot of translation. There's a lot of translation so it kind of gets lost in translation. But on the other end of positionalism and like if I'm doing NFL

analogies, positionalism would be Kyle Shanninghan. Like we want to guys in certain spots at certain times. It could be different bodies. It could be like Kyle Eustach. It could be George Kittable. And that's like where you get the flexibility within this rigid system.

And on the other end of that, and this is like a growing trend, especially in South America because there's like this debate in Brazil right now where the national team isn't doing as well because there's too much European influence. And positional play is like that European influence. The Europeans just out here ruining our Brazilian football. They're like, this let our players cook. Just let them hoop. And like, that's called relationism.

And it's like how players relate on the pitch and how they express themselves. I love the way that like soccer analysts talk about their sport. It's like so much more, it's like more poetic. They're like, players don't play. They express themselves. It's beautiful. Positionalism versus relationism sounds like a like Lutheran era European philosophical debate that like I didn't understand in college.

You know what I'm saying? No, that's how they talk about the sport. insane and they'll like reference like old philosophers. No more you and I making dumb jokes, throwing little barbs and like her cousins. Let's start talking about the beauty of how Jimmy Grombo expresses himself. No, because these guys like back of the day when like soccer punditry became a thing, like these guys were having debates in like coffee houses in Austria. They weren't like at the bar getting drunk being like, you know what?

Fucking Damarino can't win a ring. He's a loser. He's a fucking beta loser. They weren't doing that. And they actually appreciate like players even if they don't. We got to get, we got to get. Spotify to fly us out to Sweden and then we'll hang out in some coffee shops

and we'll see how that elevates our discourse. It would be perfect. It would be good. But anyway, I think Andy Reid falls on that relationism end of the spectrum where he's just like, I have Patrick Mahomes and Patrick Mahomes does cool shit and him and Kelsey have this weird relationship together where they're just like

on the same wavelength at all times. Like who cares if Kelsey decides to break off a route at this depth and do this instead? And I think that's where you're really seeing this tension between these schemes and in either end of these spectrums, I think you saw the Rams offense take a step when they went away from the positionalism end of the spectrum

towards Matthew Stafford throwing fucking no-look passes with the Super Bowl on the line. Kyle Shan doesn't want his quarterback doing that. He does not. He wants his quarterback to be on time, on target in this spot, and I think that's where you're seeing the pendulum swing, and that happens in every single sport. Like I think a lot of these big,

schematic X's and those, whatever you want to call it, these lessons apply to every single sport. And like the goal is always the same and it's the fine space. And I think these coaches across sports are dealing with similar issues. And I think you can learn a lot

from that framework. Yeah, this, I love this. I fully did not understand the soccer metaphor for like the first 40% of it. And then once you got like the Mahomes and relationism, I was there. I'm with you now. Here's the perfect anecdote for this.

Eric, think about Aaron Rogers. first year with Matt LaFleur. And Matt LaFleur is like, hey, man, we run this offense. It's sequence. We have to run plays in a proper order. And like, we can't call audibles. Like, we can't because that play sets up this play. And if we don't run it, then we can't run it later.

And then Aaron Rogers like, you know what? I like being in control the offense. And I want Randall Cobb to be on my team and do this because he runs the route the way I like it and not the way you like it. So I think like that's like the perfect encapsulation of this friction. And I think Aaron Rogers and Matt before were able to kind of balance it out and find an answer. Right. And this is so much so, I think this dividing line of like on my time, on my schedule as an offense, running my plays with my timing versus you guys can express it on the field the way that you think it needs to work. You guys are on the same page enough. You guys have enough talent that you're going to get it done is so much so parallel to the line of who has. the elite quarterbacks and who doesn't.

Like, it just simply is. Like, it's just, you either have the guy or you don't. And I, I always hesitate to argue that things in football are new because I'm four years old. And so it's just a hard sell

for me to be like, this is new. And everybody's like, do you remember Y2K? And I'm like, no. Like I just don't have a lot of perspective. But the, the incredible thing,

the beauty of the Shanehan-McBay system exploding is that it raised the floor of quarterbacking. Whenever we talk about, I was always say, it raises the floor of quarterbacking. It allows you to get really effective passing offenses out of mid-tier quarterbacks. And when you look back over the history of football,

when offenses succeeded without like elite to near elite level quarterbacks, it was often because of things they had on the periphery of the passing game, really, really good running game, really, really good defense. Those were the alternative builds. You don't have an elite quarterback sucks. You're not a member of the haves. You have to find a way to wiggle through as a member of the have-nots, and that requires a really good defense, a really good running game.

Shanahan and McVeigh, in that they raised the floor of quarterback, in that they created this avenue in which you can have a really good passing game without having an elite quarterback, really, I think, have created a relatively new friction in the NFL where you have offenses who have elite quarterbacks, who are doing the elite quarterback stuff, and then people are like, why aren't you more like these other offenses that throw the ball this way without an elite quarterback? And it's like astonishing that that's a conversation. It's never been that way before, right? So it's always been, you've a league quarterback, then whatever you're doing with that guy is right. Whatever you're doing that guy is correct, right?

Like people ask the Bengals why they aren't running more motion. You got Joe Burrow. You're brass of the ball incredibly. We're talking about motion. Kyle Shanahan for it. This is Joe Burrow. Like he doesn't need this, right? And so that,

that relationship, I think, is new. That friction, I do think is, is quite new to the NFL. And so when we look at, like, Andy rerunning more 13 personnel, as we discussed a ton, like the chiefs led a league in 13 personnel, and they led a league in EPA on 13 personnel,

they run in so much three tight-end stuff, he's not running that to create run-past conflicts and to create play action looks and to create certain formations that lead to easier throws on the middle of the field and create different angles for the timing of this.

He's running that because if he puts 13 personnel on the field and he has Patrick Mahomes back there, if you put two linebackers on the field to stop the run, like it's just slower guys for Mahomes to pick on. Like he's just there slower.

Right. Mahomes is not concerned with Cody Barton being on the field. And if you put a fifth defensive back on the field against 13 personnel, he goes, okay. I'm going to hand it off. And, like, what has worked for forever, big guys being up on small guys in the trenches,

is going to work for me now. And Isaiah Pacheco is going to rumble for 80 yards on a score. I'm going to eat the clock, and I'm going to make this a hell of a game for you, right? And so, like, it is, I think, reductive to say that Andy Reid's contribution to the league meta is, like, Mahomes is elite. Because Andy brings so much from, like, a West Coast perspective. And I think that there's, like, a really interesting through line of, like, the classic West Coast in terms of, like, Reed and in terms of like Kellan Moore who like he doesn't use West

West Coast terminology but a lot of like the lineup and play two by two timing stuff like a lot of that's still familiar like marry this half field concept with that half field concept a lot of that's still like kind of West Coasty. So there's like an undercurrent of the traditional West Coast offense that still exists underneath this huge new West Coast offense coming out of Shannon and McVay. So Reed brings that but I agree.

I think like from a schematic perspective it's the more like air raid sensibility right which I use that term kind of kind of carefully. Air raid gets misrepresented in terms of like what it is in college, what is in the NFL. I say air raid. Everybody thinks Cliff Kingsbury and that's not good. Cliff was bad. Cliff was not good at offense. I'm not talking about that stuff. But in terms of that run to grass, find space, operate outside of perfect timing, operate outside of perfect like 15 yards and break back at a 45 degree angle. Let's loosen these bonds a little bit and let the really talented players who've been doing this for a long time feel the space, feel the defender's

drops and just deliver the ball where he needs to be delivered. Like that Andy brings freedom and fluidity in a way that he didn't really like 10, 15 years ago when he was running stuff with the Eagles, but over his time with like Vic and now over his time with Mahomes and even like Alex Smith, I think starting to learn where like loosen those bonds and where to where to give a little more wiggle room. I do agree. Like I think that's a big part of Andy's contribution right now where the league's at. And I feel like Shanahan is kind of headed towards that in his own way.

Like I feel like Brock Purdy, the reason. why Brock Purdy seems to be the 49ers guy for the future, and they seem to be all in on Brock Purdy for some reason, is the fact that he kind of brings that ability to play ball a little, to hoop. When things break down, he can go get you a bucket. Sometimes he throws it out of bounds or he airballs it, but he's more willing to do that. And then on top of that, you have Christian McCaffrey come over, and what did they start running? I mean, they were already running a bunch of option routes, but they're really spamming them now with Christian McCaffrey. And that's another thing where you are giving some ownership.

I mean, there are rules that dictate which way you break on an option route, but you are giving some ownership to the quarterback and the receiver to kind of work on that. And who is the king of that, that option mentality? That was Payton when he's with Breeze,

and that was even Lombardi when he was with the charges, right? Like, they're running a ton of, like, way too much underneath stuff, way too much curl stuff, way too much flat stuff. But a lot of that is stuff that like, okay, if you're reading out the corner,

you're reading out the nickel, and if he stays here, you curl here. And if he goes that way, then you break this way. Right. Like, there's that, I think, like, the idea of working option routes, like planned spontaneity, intentional looseness into an offense.

That's very much so, like, where Payton in Lombardi and, and, and, and, Kellen Moore to a degree, like, that's a lot of where those guys, I think, have made that, like, a successful brand of offense for the last five years.

I am interested to see, like, where Kyle's offense goes from here, because, one thing that we always talk about how he props up quarterbacks, right? I don't think we ever talk and we talk about how like the quarterback kind of

sets the floor and ceiling for his offenses and we use Matt Ryan as a perfect example of that we never talk about like the supporting cast and he's while he's only had like great quarterbacks for that one year, I guess you could say two years with Matt Ryan. He's had like varying levels

of supporting cast talent. Like in Washington it was pretty good. In Cleveland it was terrible. At the beginning of the 49ers era, like we were talking ourselves into Trent Taylor being a guy. And then now this is like the best, the best supporting cast, best skill player group in the NFL,

maybe is certainly the most versatile. Who's this second best running back that Kyle Shannon has coached on offense four? He had Devonta Freeman in Atlanta. It's Aaron Foster. It's Aaron Foster. It's Aaron Foster. Yeah, yeah.

So it was Aaron Foster because he had Steve Slayton in Houston. Do you have Slayton for a year? I don't think so. No? Maybe he did. I don't know. I don't know if I'm in 2012 or not. But anyway, Foster.

But, like, Foster, Devonte Freeman, who, like, Foster was good. But Foster was also, like, the first of the, like, press outside zone button back forever. You know what I'm saying?

Foster in this modern NFL. That's how we know you're four years old because you just had Aaron Foster. Like, the Broncos weren't just churning out a thousand yard rushers every single year under Mike Chenehanan. Like, that was the thing. Yes.

But in terms of, like, where was Foster drafted again? Like, Foster drafted super duper late. Like, it was undrafted, I think it was undrafted. That model. But yeah, like Devonta

Freeman, not Daonta Foreman, which still always trips me up. I can't remember who he had in Cleveland. Yeah, Kevin Coleman. Rahim Moster, like, Jeff Wilson. Like, Christian McCaffrey is

a bananas change in terms of what Cheney can do, running game and passing game. And I agree. Like, I think in a minute here, we're going to take a break. And when we take the break, we're going to come back and we're talking by the guys who are pushing the league meta, the guys who are redefining the league meta.

I think the dude who is still the number one leader in that, who like if you if you made me pick a guy to watch to understand like where should the lead be going, I still think it would be Shanahan, even though he's kind of become establishment. It's just there's nobody who's more creative. There's nobody who's more experimental but also successful. Like he just has got it. Like I think overall, like league fans, like guys are just like fans of

football and like fans of other teams can get frustrated with how NFL media people talk about Shanahan and especially like NFL analysts and film guys talk about Shanahan and deservedly so because like win a big game champ like develop a quarterback like come on like there's absolutely big stroke stuff that Shane Han needs to do that he hasn't done but the reason why like it's hard not to talk about him with the romance of the the soccer writers in Austria the reason why it's not like talk about the beauty that he brings to the game is because he just gets it it it feels like he has a crystal ball he feels like he just always knows both from like a next drive perspective to next game perspective to next month perspective to next year perspective,

just knows what to do next in terms of how to stay on top of NFL defenses in a way to like I can't, I cannot think of another play caller who sequentially and developmentally is that dynamic. He's just a rocket ship. And so Shane and to me, like, thinking about how that offense changes is a big part of where I think league meta is going. I want to talk about more of those people next. You know who else, Stephen is who deserves to be talked about. the beauty of the Austrian sports writers. Who's that?

These, these product sellers. Okay. Chanahan, McVeigh, Reed, Payton, being around, we know about these cats. It's time to talk to a little Mike McDaniel, brother. It's time to talk about the guys who recently started calling offenses, who are doing some cool stuff. And I like, this can go a trillion different ways, right? I brought up the fact that there's only four guys who have been coaching offenses, their offenses for the last like five years.

You go and you look at the list of current offensive coordinators, and you have like Bill O'Brien, who's like establishment hired last year, Nate Hackett, establishment hired last year, Todd Munkin, establishment hired last year. Jim Bob Cooter, who's the Colts O.C., didn't know that one, by the way. Establishment hired last year. Brian Schontheimer, establishment hired last year.

But all of these guys bring new iterations to what they do. like Todd Monkin's going to push the league meta. Brill O'Brien's going to push the league meta. Absolutely they are because they're good offensive coaches. And then you get your Eric B. Enemies outside of Kansas City, who knows what this is going to look like? You have your Mike Kafka's and your Adam Stenevich's and your Lou Geese's and your Ben Johnson's, all of whom were hired last season,

all of whom did really cool stuff at their respective team. Shane Waldron with the Seahawks who did cool stuff with his team. And then Mike McDaniel, who like, I think we're going to talk about Mike in five years, the way we just talked about McVeigh and Shanahan now. So same question as I gave you before, but now changing our eyes to a conversation that you and I are having in 2026 and 2027 and 28,

when we look at these new names and some of the new stuff that they're doing and the way that Ben Johnson is pushing the McBay stuff and Kevin O'Connell with the Vikings pushing the McBeystaff, the way that Mike McDaniel is pushing the Shanahan stuff, the way that Shane Steichen pushed and changed the Nick Siriani and the Frank Reich stuff, who do you identify and what trends do you identify

as being the factors as being the identifiers of the league meta for the next five years? What are going to be the things that we write about the way we wrote about those RPO's that the Chiefs and the Eagles were running about, the way that we wrote about those play action passes from McVeigh and Chanahan. Who's your guys?

Ben Johnson's at the top of my list. I think, like Mike McDaniel, I'm already sold. But when I think about the new guys, it's the three that I focus on, more so than like even O'Connell or even Waldron. I like both of those guys, but I think, I don't think it's different enough from what they've run under other coaches for me to get too interested in it.

They definitely bring their own flavor to it, but I don't think it's necessarily like changing the meta. I think with Ben Johnson and obviously Mike McDaniel, I think that's different. And then the other name I'll throw in there is Shane Steichen. And I think the thing that binds all these guys, not so much McDaniel last year, but based on what you've heard about,

him as an assistant is that they find answers in the run game and they find unique answers in the run game like that one of my favorite things about about watching philly last year was them trying to figure out how best to run against the fronts they were seeing early in the game and you can like see that process play out from the first quarter to the second quarter to the second half in every eagles game almost there was like this one drive that I remember where they found this play that worked against the Giants front that they were playing and they just ran it like eight times in a row. Yep. They ran it three times in a row in one drive and eight times overall in the second half. It was power. And then I think about the Super Bowl, we think about how good the Eagles

offense was, but like the production of the offense was based on Jalen Hertz and those receivers just making bonkers plays in the passing game. The running game at first, like the chiefs sold out to stop the running game, and they did. But eventually Stuyken found an answer. And he started pulling, he started going empty, he started pulling Jason Kelsey and having Jaylen Hertz keep the ball and just run behind them. And it worked and you found an answer eventually. I think the same of Ben Johnson. Like I think that's the secret to the line

success last year was, and even the year before that, was having this run game that had so many buttons it could push that the defense had to account for it. And like the defensive answer was we're just going to rush five. We're going to have five guys on the line of scrimmage. We're going to have a bunch of guys dedicated to the run fit. So we have an answer or a body in the right spot for every run concept you can run. And Johnson was able to not only keep defenses guessing on that front, but also take advantage of those defensive looks.

Like they didn't run a lot of play action last year. They were like 20th in play action rate, but they were able to create the same coverage structures because the defense had to play the run a certain way. So you were seeing like a lot of, they were getting a lot of fire zone. And what a fire zone is, is a five-man rush. So technically, like, you might call it a blitz. It would get charted as blitz, but it's not really a blitz. But it's a five-man rush with three deep, three-under coverage, like zone coverage on the back end.

And those were the coverages that were giving Jared Gough a lot of problems at the end of his time in L.A. Because he was turning his back to the defense, the picture would change because they rotate because it was a blitz and you can do all this funky stuff in coverage. He would turn his head, and there would be a completely different thing that he saw before he did the play-action fake.

now the lions aren't really running play action still getting like six guys in in coverage still getting those same holes that you get against play action but now Jared Goff doesn't have to turn his back to the defense now the picture is staying the same for him and it's easier for him to avoid those mistakes that he was making at the end of his time in L.A.

And that was the big reason why McVeigh moved on from was the turnovers. Like that game against Miami when he turned it over like five times that was like one of the last straws. So I think like Ben Johnson has something cooking here that isn't, he's not the product of some great supporting cast. The offensive line is very good and he takes advantage of it.

Like, Jared Goff is a mid-quarterback, and they're getting top five results with a defense that doesn't really, like, help them at all. It doesn't make their job any easier. So, like, Ben Johnson, for me, is a guy who has figured something out without the benefit of this, like, extreme personnel. Whereas Mike McDaniel, he did a bunch of cool stuff, and I'm in the fan club,

but you can't overlook the fact that he had Jalen Waddle and Tyrant Kill. And then like a unique quarterback who could do like crazy things with getting rid of the ball quickly. Yeah. And it's funny because like to a processing speed, Mike McDaniel goes, okay,

we're going to run play action, we're going to run RPO, you're going to be able to turn your back to the defense, flip your head around, and really, really quickly be able to identify, that's where my receiver is, that's where he's open and go, right? Like, it's not processing speed

so much as it is like, the speed of his process, right? Like he just has like fast feet. Yeah. He's a very fast release. It's not that he's like thinking it through very fast, but he's just able to like get a foot in the ground, dig it out and go, right?

Throw that ball very, very quickly. Goff, slower process. Again, like the speed of his process is not fast. It's slow. Long, lanky guy, longer release. Eyes aren't as fast. And so McDaniel runs the stuff that works for Tua and Ben Johnson runs the stuff that works for Jared Gough.

There's quarterback orientation, right? There's running it through it and maximizing your guy. That's always going to be like league medal. League medal is always going to be like doing what your quarterback does well. That's going to be for forever. I definitely think. So there are two things that are interesting with Ben Johnson. And you can choose which direction we go for the rest of this conversation.

One is that diversity of that running game. Two is running McVeigh stuff without paying the cost that McVeigh has paid over the course of his career. Dealer's choice. What do you like? That second one. Yeah. So, watch these lines. Put the Lions past concepts and put the Vikings past concepts out on the field together. You can even kind of throw the Seahawks and Shane Waldron in here a little bit. I want to get to them in a second.

But yeah, throw them in there. Why not? They're running arches. They're running drift. They're running throwback, whatever the freaking deep post that changes and isn't actually a post. I can't remember what it's called. Play is. They're running the stuff, man. They're running the goods. They're running the hits. Like everybody who had Kyle Shanahan's 2018 playbooks posted clips up on Twitter in the 2019 era being like that's what this is. That's what that is, right?

Matt, it's always the freaking it's the Stafford throw to Cooper Cup against the Bears in like week one of the like when Stafford first arrived with the Rams and he hits it and everybody knew what what the play was. I can't remember what it was. Everybody knew the name of the play and everybody had the design. I was like,

this is a classic Chavez concept and they're running it from the gun. And like, and And it was just, it was everybody on Twitter on week one trying to rush to show how much they knew about football. But that moment of like, oh, snap, McVeigh is getting to his buckets. He's getting to his spots on the court in terms of passing game and passing concepts and shot plays without having to go under center, without having to run the ball three times and fake it first.

Like this is the evolution. This is the next iteration. When Kevin O'Connell took over the Vikings, I 100% thought we were going to get old McVeigh stuff. And we got new McVeigh stuff. got McVeigh-Stafford stuff. We got, hey, I'm going to run these passing concepts without paying the cost, without paying the toll to get on the bridge, without running the three run plays and going on the center

and having my quarterback turns back to the defense. Ben Johnson's running all the Stafford stuff, which is hilarious because he's the OC of the Detroit Lions, who had Matthew Stafford for a decade and couldn't get this done. How were these guys doing this? How were they leapfrogging over the cost? How are they stepping aside? They're basically taking the McVeigh offense, so meticulously built, so carefully constructed, and just stripping it down for parts

and saying, I want that, I want that, I want that, I don't want any of this anymore, and it's successful. And in my head, when I think of the McVeigh offense, I think about you have to run to set this up. Like you said, it's a run-oriented offense, and I agree. But somehow they're pulling this off.

How are they doing it? I don't really like, like, beyond lions have elite offensive line and very good receiver in a Monroix St. Brown, and Vikings have quite solid offensive line and very elite receiver in Jefferson, so they just have the talent to get away with it, I really don't have, like, a clean answer. But these guys have found a way to kind of leap,

like turbo-charge the McVeigh offense and leapfrog it in a way that I think is really important. And then for the Seahawks and Shane Waldron and for Gino, what they do, like, really quickly, is they keep a diverse running game. They keep the ability to go play action and get shot plays going off, but they do it from the pistol.

And the pistol is so important to this. We talk about honor center versus shotgun, but there's a third quarterback alignment, which is pistol, which are the quarterback's in a shotgun position, right? He's not directly under the center, but the running back is still behind him. And the pistol is a huge part of where the league meta is heading.

When you look at pistol rates right now, you see the leading team last year was the Atlanta Falcons at 38%. 38%. That's freaking huge. They ran an insane amount of pistol. That is Arthur Smith, and that's the development of that insanely diverse running game. You see the Ravens at 32%.

Greg Roman, insanely diverse running game. And then round out of the top five, you see the Seahawks. You see the Eagles and you see the Cardinals, right? Chuck the Cardinals away. Air Ray, Donson's Cliff, we hate him. That's your Shane Stuyken, that's your Shane Waldron. Or is Stuyckin's first name, Shane? Am I getting that wrong?

They're both Shane. No, that's right. They're Shane. They're Shane. The Shane, Stiking, and Waldron. And it's the way these guys get diverse running games and then play action concepts off of it. And so, like, this, the new iteration of the McVeigh offense

and the way that Waldron particularly has integrated the pistol into changing that running game and still getting juice out of it without going fully under center and turning his back to me these are like these are huge examples

of how these names in particular are kind of pushing these envelope I mean and Sean McVeigh basically told us that this was going to be the case after that 2018 year after the Super Bowl when the blueprint was laid out

for stopping his offense what's the first thing he started to change it wasn't the passing concepts it was the running concepts which is kind of funny like one front just blew up the whole offense. There's like, oh, man, we only have two plays on offense. We run outside zone and we run duo, and they found a play that stops both.

Now, and it was a crisis. But eventually, like, his answer was doing more, like, traps and having guards pool. And you saw Shanahan kind of undergo the same evolution during that same time. Like, they're not running outside zone as much as they used to, even the 49ers who are like, that's what you think of when you think of the Shanahan offense. So I think that's where the league is going, just more intricate run games and how to get into that. And then throwing motion on top of that is how you kind of get to the plays without paying the cost, like you said.

Like you don't have to be under center. You don't have to do a play action fake that asks the quarterback to turn us back to the defense. I think that's where the league is going. That's where we're seeing the changes to the meta is figuring out ways to get the same plays, get to the same plays without that buy-in. and every move these guys have made over the last three years, like the top offensive minds, especially on that side of the spectrum, like in the McVe-Shannahan side of things,

it's been how do we do this without running play action? Yeah, basically. And it's crazy, but like, if there's a one-liner for this episode, it's the McVeigh-Shanhan offense and all of its iterations and all of its children have been trying to figure out how to do this, without play action most effectively for the last five years.

And the guy who probably does it best was the offensive quality control coach for the Detroit Lions four years ago. Like Ben Johnson. Right. And just with golf, with the guy who couldn't hack it. He did what McVeigh couldn't do. And to his credit, he does,

to McVeigh's credit, McVeigh was dealing with a terrible offensive line after 2018. Right. And he's dealing with a very good offensive line. But like, schematically, he found the answers that McVeigh really couldn't find until he got staff. And McVeigh was finding other solutions and doing other stuff. And like, it's more than one way to skin a cat.

There's no like, you know, arc of the covenant of offense where it's like, this is the one way. But still, like, it's crazy. And right, if again, like in the get a guy drunk and ask him a question world, asking Ben Johnson, like, hey, how'd you do it? McVeigh didn't. I would love to ask him absolutely toasted Ben Johnson that question. I will not get the opportunity to.

An important thing to talk about, I think it's be close. Like, I don't think you can talk about future league meta without talking about quarterback run. Oh, wow, he's already shaking his head. He knew. He's the last part of my notes. Lockstep, baby. All right, this is good.

You and I, we're Mahomes and Kelsey, all right? Just give us room. Give us a little bit of space. Wait, am I, Mahomes or Kelsey? Who you want to be? I'll be Kelsey. Wow. Kelsey's cooler.

I guess I'll be in the Hone. He did. He did. He's got a podcast. Mahomes is a family man. puts ketchup on his steak. Sounds like Kermit the Frog. He's on a show with Marcus Marriota

and Kirk Cousins. That's the company you're keeping. It's Mahomes not cool. Now that I'm listing it out loud and just like his characteristics, sounds like Kermit, ketchup on steak, family man,

lame. And right, show with Kirk and Mariotta. I'm worried Mahomes is it cool? No, he's definitely not cool. Next week on the Regan NFL show. I'm Ben Solac. The big question we're answering is, Is Momew's cool?

Can Mhombs hang? Is he cool enough? Is Mohom's a fucking dork? Man, in terms of a pot call in the kettle, black man, Ben Solac asking if Mhombs is a dork, it's just not, it's just you can't be throwing stones

from glass houses like this. Like, we're literally having an hour-long podcast talking about how cool, cool Ben Johnson is. Okay, so Mahomes is probably cool, upon review. This is not the important thing.

The important thing is, The quarterbacks running the ball. We did a whole pod in quarterback mobility. We talked about how the quarterbacks are generally running the ball more and also the quarterbacks

who run the ball most are also running the ball more. Running's going up, maybe. I think this is a good like case in point example of a water's edge of like a limit of the pendulum of how the meta

kind of narrows and defines itself, right? We talked about how RPO's like, oh, this is going to be the new thing and then it just wasn't. And there's a lot of reasons for that, but like when like we've seen over the last few years, like, ARPOs are pretty simple. They kind of limit your offense. It's better just have like a true dropback passing game and be able to do a wider variety of stuff. The costs of RPO

were so great that it really couldn't become like the actual defining part of the league meta. It could become a little part, but not a big part. Quarterback Mobility. I think that if I were starting a team, I would go to find a quarterback that can run. I'm also not sure I would build the team such that the quarterback had to run to move the football. I want to be able to do it, I don't want to have to live with it. This is the Mahomes versus Josh Allen conversation. Mahomes scrambles when he needs to. Josh Allen scrambles when he thinks he needs to,

but it's probably a little bit more than he should. It takes a few extra hits and you worry about that for your $45, $50 million man. Quarterback run is going to be part of the league meta. But I think it's probably going to be a smaller part than we hope than we think, certainly than we probably sounded like when we were talking on that podcast. and I think then just like the NFL fan base expects at large because I think that you don't want to have it be your ship.

You don't want to have it to be the thing that drives you. You don't want to live in a world where every single Sunday you need your quarterback taking hit after hit, after hit, after hit, in order to succeed. If you're going to live that way, you have to start... I was about to say you have to start cycling quarterbacks like you cycle running backs. That's too far.

You can't cycle quarterbacks like you cycle running backs. But you're going to be in a world where you're never going to want to pay a quarterback a lot of money, and that's just not where ownership's going to want to be. That's not where general managers are going to want to be. So I feel almost as if, like, quarterback mobility can be part of your meta

as a team for like a few years, but then you need to transition out of it. You need to have an opportunity to get away from it. Just not rely on it as much. Part of the ship, not the whole ship. And the team to watch here is the Colts. Jim Ursay speaks unbelievably glowingly about quarterback mobility. He did when he benched Matt

Ryan, he did at the end of last season. All the other day was talking about how important is to have mobility the quarterback. They hire Shane Steichen, they draft Anthony Richardson. It's very clear. This team wants to build the ship out of quarterback mobility. And for as long as Richardson is an unproven and underdeveloped passer, which you and I both liked Richardson, but he does have a lot of roughness around his edges as a thrower. Then building the ship out of quarterback mobility is a great idea. The moment that they can transition and get out of a trap door where like, Richardson becomes experienced enough and successful enough as a passer to maybe like not do that as much, it's going

be fascinating to see what they do. They're kind of like a couple years behind Justin Fields and the Bears where it's great. Fields can clearly run and it's amazing, but we need to figure out how to get a passing offense under this guy or it's never going to work long term. So quarterback mobility, again, I don't think you're going to be able to talk about the league meta

over the next few years without talking about quarterback mobility, but I think it's going to be more of a fraction of it, a part of it. Not so much like the Cardinal thing, the way that like two weeks ago, I might have hoped it would have been. I don't know. I think this is one area where the league is outsmarting itself.

And the idea that of a franchise quarterback is kind of preventing teams from going all in on running quarterbacks. What if I can guarantee you a play type where if you get to third and three, you have an 80% chance of succeeding? Like, that's what a quarterback runs give you third and three, 80% success rate over the last five years. that's an insane stat. It's like the Jalen Hertz QB-80% success rate in last five years in terms like for what, for whom? For just offensive

Oh, for just quarterback runs period? Wow. On third and three and less, 80%. They averaged 0.04 EPA per play. Read option plays. And that's success rate, which means that even if you're getting a fourth and one, that's not included as a success,

but that absolutely is a success because you're just running out of a sneak and you're getting it. Yeah. It's like the Jalen Hertz. QB sneak thing, though, like just extrapolate it. Like, if the Eagles got to fourth and one, if they got three or nine yards on those first three plays, it was an auto first down. And it's almost like that.

If you just get to 30, just get to third and three, you're going to get a first down, basically. And then read option plays. So just any play, zone read, any play where the quarterback has an option to hand it off or keep it, 0.04 EPA per play. That is better than your standard dropback pass. Your standard drop back pass averages negative EPA. like you don't need to be a good quarterback to even get a functioning offense out of it, as evidenced by Justin Fields, who was one of the, like in terms of just passing production,

one of the worst seasons we've ever seen. Like it was Josh Rosenbad if you take away his scrambles and his runs. But with the scrambles and the runs, they had a viable offense. Like the offense wasn't the problem with Chicago last year. It was the defense. And I think Justin Fields is like the perfect example of how, high of a floor you have on offense if your guy can just run. And I don't understand.

Like, I feel like we're comparing. You're like, oh, I don't want a quarterback if he has to run. I'd rather have a guy that like, if he needs to run, he can do it. But like, why is that the standard? Why are we comparing this to like the top level quarterbacks? The alternative to like a Justin Fields type quarterback isn't Patrick Holmes. The alternative is like having Ryan Fitzpatrick instead. having to send out an Andy Dalton QB1 tweet in 2020 in August.

That's the thing you're trying to avoid by having Justin Fields. Yeah, so I don't know. I think NFL teams are kind of like just so focused on finding that franchise quarterback that maybe they should look at the position as more replaceable than it is. That's definitely the case in college because it's it should be harder in theory to find a good quarterback in college. But it's not. It's easier because they just put a running back back there and the offense works.

If you could cycle quarterback, if you had a way to- Why can't you? Right, exactly. If you had a way to consistently cycle through quarterbacks and deliver consistent quality offense year and over a year with different QBs, if you had that secret on a hard drive,

Jerry Jones would pay you $3 billion for it. That's not true because, that hard drive exists and it wears a flat brim cap in San Francisco. That's fair. Okay, he would pay you whatever Kyle Shanehan's salary is. But like that, that I... No, he would hire Mike McCarthy, actually. The idea that like, like, if you could really pull it off from like a politics

perspective and from like a team locker room perspective and whatever perspective, where you're just like, we draft a quarterback with great mobility, who's kind of functional as a passer, we play him for four or five years, and then we draft another one and we go, you would be what we think about the things you and I would say about that coach we would love him yeah he'd be one of the greatest and like there's a chance we do know how to do that and it is quarterback run and just nobody's going to have the stones to do it but like yeah I go back to what I said when I opened this segment which was I I would I need to have a quarterback

who can run I'm not sure from all the way there where I like I'm hesitant around a quarterback who needs to run right like kind of like the the verbs really matter in terms of what style of guy you have. Right. Yeah. That's definitely the case. But I don't know. I just feel like we're not starting enough running quarterback. We're not giving them enough. Like the fact that we're, we've already given up on Tray Lance is just insane to me. Yeah, that's bananas. We should do, we should do a segment with, let's do a pond in August about that. Because he's just got to get healthy. Yeah, it's so irritating.

He's played four games. He's just a big fast boy with a broken ankle. Give him a chance. But also, like, if any team should do the quarterback rotation thing, like 49ers, please do it. Like. Right. This is where Kyle Shanan's interpersonal skills enter the conversation. And that's where what buddies are our view of the great God in the flat-brimmed cap. Yeah.

The other guy that this conversation makes me think of is Lamar. Lamar is it. Lamar is the quarterback who can run. And when he runs, he's unbelievable. But he doesn't need to because he's an unreal passer. And this is the year that we are, finally, maybe, hopefully. Going to get to see it the way we've long deserved to see it. Todd Munkin, our saving grace, I'm so freaking excited for the Ravens, dude.

Okay, that was, hey, good potting. Good pot in there, Kelsey. That was good stuff. It was good, good, what is it? Relationism? Me and you, Stephen. Just look at us, just look at us for Layton out here on these airwaves. All right.

This was the future of NFL offense. next week will be the future of NFL defense. And we're going to take everything we talked about and try to figure out how the defensive minds and the league are going to respond to it. If you enjoyed this show, make sure you listen to that one. Make sure you review.

Make sure you subscribe. Make sure you say nice things to me and Steven so we can feel good about ourselves, even though we're kind of feeling ourselves right now because of the whole Kelsey Mahomes things. Thank you to producer Carlos Chari Boga, who is stepping in for Eduardo Ocampo today and next week. Appreciate you, Carlos,

as well as the additional production supervision offered by Arjuna Ramgapol and Connor Nevins. We will talk to you next week.