Commanders Film Room - Kliff Kingsbury's offense hasn't been "solved"

My live show breakdown of Kliff Kingsbury's offense and why the criticism to this point is unfair.

With the Commanders losing two games in a row, fans have started to question if this is the start of the Kliff Kingsbury drop off. For those that don’t know, there’s a statistical trend with Kingsbury’s offenses historically that says they tend to start very fast early in the season and then drop off significantly late in the season. It was one of the biggest criticisms of Kingsbury when he was hired, though there were quite a few. At the start of the season, I broke down a lot of the other criticisms, including things like stationary alignments that see Terry McLaurin always aligning to the left and a lack of motion within the offense, and explained why Kingsbury does those things and why they aren’t necessarily bad things. 

But the one criticism I didn’t get to in that piece at the start of the season was the criticism that his offense tends to fade as the season progresses. There’s a lot of different theories out there as to why it tends to fall off, but the most common reason I see is that defenses figure out his system by the middle of the year and learn how to shut it down. With the Commanders now having lost to the Steelers and Eagles in back to back games, that criticism is one of the hot topics surrounding the Commanders. 

So in this week’s Commanders Film Room show that I do every week with Nick Akridge on The Big Doug & Carmi Show, I spent some time breaking down why these narratives are false. I put together some clips showing that the offense hasn’t just gone stale and that Kingsbury is still adding new layers to various packages, including his 21 personnel package, his 12 personnel package, his unbalanced line package and more. After that, I broke down how the Steelers and Eagles came with entirely different game plans, which wouldn’t be the case if the Kingsbury system had been “solved”, as teams would just use the same plan that worked before. I also show some examples of missed opportunities from Jayden Daniels in both the Steelers and Eagles game that prove that the offense hasn’t just been completely solved, but rather the Commanders haven’t executed as efficiently as they did earlier in the season.

The whole show is an hour long, but we started with Nick breaking down some of Jayden Daniels misses against the Eagles first. If you just want to skip to my breakdown of Kingsbury’s offense, you can jump to the 26-minute mark in the video below. Hope you all enjoy!