In the event you watched simply the primary half of the Seattle Seahawks’ preseason opener towards the Las Vegas Raiders, there was a marked distinction in how Klint Kubiak’s offense seemed in comparison with the lone season below Ryan Grubb. I’m not speaking about efficiency, effectivity, or run-pass splits, however model.
Extra particularly, this model.
That just about seemed like a trick play final season.
When Drew Lock was within the sport, the Seahawks ran 26 performs from below heart and simply 14 from shotgun. No NFL offense dares run UC at a 65% clip so we aren’t going to be witnessing that kind of break up within the common season, but it surely hammers residence the purpose that we’ll be seeing a vastly completely different offense in 2025.
Kubiak did, nonetheless, use Jalen Milroe out of shotgun virtually solely by way of the primary couple of collection earlier than spamming UC seems to be on Milroe’s landing drive.
How Klint Kubiak compares to Ryan Grubb
This isn’t to beat up on Grubb’s OC skills as a lot as spotlight a key distinction between him and Kubiak. Final 12 months, the Seahawks have been tied for seventh in shotgun price with Grubb, who was a shotgun-heavy offensive coordinator with Washington and Fresno State within the faculty ranks. Seattle’s shotgun utilization went up 10 proportion factors from the ultimate 12 months below Shane Waldron to the Grubb season. In Kubiak’s two seasons as a play-caller with the 2021 Minnesota Vikings and 2024 New Orleans Saints, his offenses ranked thirty first and twenty seventh respectively in shotgun price (per FTN Fantasy).
It shouldn’t be shocking that Kubiak operates this manner. Klint is the son of longtime offensive coordinator and Tremendous Bowl champion head coach Gary Kubiak, who was a former participant and eventual teaching assistant below Mike Shanahan. The Shanahan teaching tree consists of the San Francisco 49ers’ Kyle Shanahan and the Los Angeles Rams’ Sean McVay, two tormentors of Seahawks defenses for years. Neither man runs an actual reproduction of the late Nineteen Nineties Denver Broncos offenses, however there are sufficient acquainted ideas that may be immediately tied to Mike. The 49ers and Rams have been under the league common in shotgun price 100% of the time since Shanahan and McVay have been employed in 2017.
Whereas preseason is hardly the entire playbook and play-calling for backups isn’t going to be equivalent for the starters (and even backups who play within the common season), we will glean some invaluable info off of sure tendencies.
For context, I’ve pulled up the gamebook information from Grubb’s preseason debut towards the Los Angeles Chargers. Together with performs with penalties, Grubb known as a whopping 35 shotgun performs to simply 8 below heart simply within the first half. A type of UC performs was a kneeldown so it’s primarily an 83% shotgun price, which nearly identically mirrored what he’d do with the first-team within the common season.
In Geno Smith’s solely collection of that preseason, 4 of the 5 performs got here out of shotgun and Seattle didn’t run the ball one time. As small because the pattern dimension was, this was a usually correct preview of what was to come back within the common season.
Once more, not “higher” than the Grubb offense (though that’s the expectation), however completely different. It’s even completely different from the Waldron offenses, which have been usually middle-of-the-pack in shotgun price and constantly above the 49ers and Rams in all three seasons he was Seahawks OC. Sam Darnold must also be snug on this state of affairs, having had his profession 12 months in a Minnesota Vikings offense that ranked thirty first in shotgun price.
The extent to which Seattle runs the ball extra and makes use of play-action passing stays to be seen, however probably the most drastic distinction will undoubtedly be the heavy discount in shotgun from the Grubb offense. Don’t be shocked if the Seahawks discover themselves at or near the underside of the NFL on this statistic in 2025.
