What to expect from Kliff Kingsbury as the Commanders new offensive coordinator

Taking a closer look at what the Commanders offense might look like under new offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury

The Washington Commanders have hired Kliff Kingsbury to be their new offensive coordinator under head coach Dan Quinn. Kingsbury joins after having previously spent four years as the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals before spending last year on the USC staff helping develop projected number one pick quarterback Caleb Williams. When Kingsbury made the jump to the NFL with the Cardinals in 2019, many were skeptical of his offensive system and how it would translate from college and I’m sure many Washington fans reading this will hold those same concerns. 

The concerns around Kingsbury’s offense stem from his system in college. Kingsbury used the popular “Air Raid” system in college, which involves spreading out the defense with three and even four wide receivers and trying to attack down the field. There’s very little running game, lots of bubble screens and everything is run almost exclusively out of the shotgun. There’s also very little huddling as the offense looks to use tempo to play fast and exploit defenses that aren’t ready for the snap. 

In the NFL, however, Kingsbury’s offense was quite different. In fact the offense in his last year in the league back in 2022 was much more conventional than the system he used in college. That’s not to say he changed everything, some of the traits like heavy shotgun usage and up-tempo periods carried over, but Kingsbury was also wise enough to know he needed to add more to his system for it to be successful at the NFL level. 

One of the main concerns surrounded his run game, as there was very little running in the Air Raid system in college. The Cardinals ran the ball plenty during Kingsbury’s four years and were actually pretty efficient at it too. It certainly helped to have an athletic quarterback like Kyler Murray that could add on to the run game and create issues for the defense from a numbers perspective, but the Caridnals run game was more than just Murray. They deployed a gap scheme rushing attack with some fun twists to change things up. 

Here’s a package of clips looking at some different run schemes the Cardinals used under Kingsbury. There were of course plenty more, but this should give you an idea of the types of schemes to expect in Washington this year. The first play of the clip is a power run but with a twist. Instead of the guard pulling from the left side to the right side, the Cardinals pull the tackle. The left tackle pulls to the right side of the line and wraps around the down blocks inside to reach the linebacker. The running back takes the hand off and follows behind the pulling tackle before making a nice cut into the open field for a big gain. 

The second play of the clip shows a very similar scheme, but with another layer added on top of it. This time the right tackle pulls to the left side of the line but the edge rusher on the right side of the line is deliberately left unblocked as a read defender. Quarterback Kyler Murray can read him and either hand the ball off or pull it and keep it himself depending on how the defender plays the run. The other twist here is the use of the pistol formation. While Kingsbury rarely put the quarterback under center, he did mix in a fair amount of pistol to keep the quarterback in a familiar spot while still getting some of the benefits of being under center. The defensive end holds his spot, which tells Murray to hand the ball off and the offense gets an extra blocker to the play side as a result. 

The third play of the clip shows one of the Cardinals most frequent run schemes, known as guard-tackle counter, or GT counter. On normal counter schemes, the guard pulls to kick out the edge defender while a tight end or fullback follows to wrap around for the first linebacker. On this scheme, the tackle follows the guard. It’s a somewhat risky run as it leaves a big gap on the pulling side of the line which is tough to account for, but as you can see on this clip it can create a very effective run to the play side. 

The fourth and final play of the clip shows just how creative Kingsbury can actually get with his run scheme. On this play, we see an unbalanced formation with the left tackle shifting up outside the right tackle as a tight end, while the tight end lines up in the left tackle’s spot next to the left guard. From there, they run the same GT counter scheme we saw before, but technically the tackle part of the GT counter scheme is a tight end lined up as a tackle. All those extra layers of disguise work nicely and open up a nice lane for the running back to work with. 

This gap scheme style of running will suit Commanders running back Brian Robinson, who mainly ran gap scheme in college at Alabama. In an ideal world, the gap scheme runs would come with the quarterback under center and perhaps Kingsbury makes that adjustment depending on his quarterback in Washington, but in Arizona almost everything was out of the shotgun, which I know will upset some fans. Shotgun runs have been the preference of the previous two coordinators here, but they can be effective if schemed up properly and perhaps using more pistol looks could be a nice compromise. 

An encouraging thing when studying Kingsbury’s system is that he shows the ability to layer his concepts, but I would suggest he doesn’t do it frequently enough. I’ve spent all offseason talking about how Kyle Shanahan packages his plays together in layers, with a wide zone leading into a bootleg, which leads into a screen, which leads into a play-action pass. It was one of the things that had me most excited about the prospect of Ben Johnson being hired here as head coach, because he was excellent at it too. Kingsbury has shown he is capable of doing it, but I’d like to see more of it. 

Here’s a nice example of Kingsbury layering plays. The first play is that same GT counter run I just talked about from the previous clip, but this time run against the Saints. The Cardinals align in a run-heavy look with two tight ends to the right of the formation. The left tackle and left guard pull to the right side of the line and create a big lane for the running back who was able to pick up a nice gain. 

The second play of the clip builds on top of that. This time, Kingsbury gets very creative. He has a receiver go in motion across the formation at the snap of the ball. Quarterback Kyler Murray can either hand the ball off to that receiver or keep it himself. If the receiver gets the ball, he has a tight end and running back out in front of him as blockers. But as this play happens to go, Murray keeps the ball himself, where he runs behind his right guard and right tackle pulling to the left side of the line. From the end zone angle you can see how all the second level defenders disappear as they chase the wide receiver, leaving Murray with a free run behind his pulling lineman. 

The third layer that Kingsbury adds to this is a run-pass option (RPO). This time, Murray can either hand the ball off to the back on the exact same play that we saw on the first play of this clip, or he can pull the ball and throw a quick slant to the receiver in the slot. The Saints had been burned by this GT counter scheme a few times by this point, so they all swarmed to the right side of the line to stop it, which left space for the slant route from the slot. 

That type of layering is a very good sign that Kingsbury has plenty of potential as a play designer and most importantly a play caller. But it wasn’t frequent enough and there were a lot of times where things didn’t quite match up as they should have, which I will tough on in more detail shortly. But the last play of the clip was an RPO, which brings me nicely onto the RPO section of this post. Kingsbury will certainly involve plenty of RPOs in his offense in Washington, so get used to them. But it’s important to distinguish between different types of RPOs, because Kingsbury has a few that he’ll use.