The Washington Commanders ran 56 plays in Week 1's 37-20 loss at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday. That's far from enough to make any reasonable conclusion about the way quarterback Jayden Daniels fared in his NFL debut or how offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury’s offense will function.
However, while the rookie passer is – and will remain for the next few weeks – an unknown entity at the NFL level, Kingsbury, who was the play-caller and ran the offense during his four years as head coach in Arizona, has a longer track record from which to evaluate his performance. And, in this instance, some concerning trendlines can be identified from Week 1 that were known issues with his offense when he was hired.
The first issue: Terry McLaurin, the Commanders’ top offensive weapon, lined up on the left for 95.7 percent of Washington's snaps (87 percent of the time on the outside left). That is by far the highest rate of a WR lining up on the left side of the field.
This is reminiscent of Kingsbury having top receiver DeAndre Hopkins virtually only lined up on outside left with the Cardinals and didn’t maximize his skillset because of the rigidity of his offensive system. And in a league when matchups and creativity – and using both – to get the top play-maker the ball consistently is key, lining up McLaurin in the same spot all game doesn’t seem like the OC was doing either in Week 1.
Hopkins was pretty successful his first year in Arizona (when he lined up on the left over 80 percent of the time), the issue with Washington is that because the drop off from McLaurin to the other receivers on the roster, there isn't enough empahsis in the offense on getting him the ball constantly.
The other issue with the offense was classic Kingsbury: A lack of pre-snap motion. The Commanders used motion on just 35 percent of their plays Sunday, which ranked eighth-lowest in the league. In his last three years with the Cardinals, Kingsbury's offense ranked in the bottom five in the use of pre-snap motion, never going higher than 38 percent and 28th in the NFL.
Kingsbury’s philosophy seems to be that what is sacrificed by using motion and moving receivers around the field is outweighed by what the offense gains in pushing the tempo and keeping defenses on the back foot.
“When you have so much motion, it’s hard to get tempo going,” veteran quarterback Aaron Rodgers said in an interview in 2022. “You always have to make sure you’re set, and you have a motion, or a double motion, or a jet off of it.”
And Rodgers is the right person to ask about this, as he had been a huge critic of pre-snap motion coming from the West Coast offense and the Peyton Manning school of lining up, observing the defense and calling plays at the line of scrimmage.
The now Jets passer was asked about how his view had changed, just days after New York’s offense featured a significant uptick in pre-snap motion on Monday night compared to last year.
“It’s all the rage,” the 40-year-old said on Wednesday. “... There’s a lot of value in the pre-snap motion stuff because it creates a lot of consternation for the defense. And it tests their gap control stuff, it tests their rules, it can move multiple guys in the same play, whether it’s the nickel or backers or safeties. So it gives them lots to think about. And I think it’s an important part of the offense.”
In 2018, Mike McCarthy’s last year with the Packers, Green Bay’s offense used motion at the third-lowest rate, per The Athletic. By 2020 under Matt LeFluer when they became a Top 10 team in the use of motion.
While Rodgers was great before the ex-Washington coach’s arrival, it is to argue with the results of LeFluer's more motion-heavy offense: Rodgers won back-to-back MVPs in 2020 and 2021, completing 69.8 percent of his 1,057 passes for 8,414 yards (8.0 per attempt) with 85 touchdowns and just nine interceptions over 32 games for a 116.7 passer rating and 79.8 (out of 100) QBR.
“For us, I think it helps because everything lines up,” Rodgers said about motion in 2020. “The motions and the actions and the runs and the boots all kind of look the same to start. [You’re seeing] it with what the Rams have done and San Francisco. It really does test the gap integrity and the eye discipline of the defense.”
And, of course, the first game isn’t the finished article.
“The one major thing I try to do is make sure this was year one of the Commanders’ offense, not year five of the Arizona Cardinals,” Kingsbury said earlier this spring.
Former Washington head coach Jay Gruden addressed a potential reason why Kingsbury kept motion to a minimum in Week 1: A QB in his first game and on the road against a blitz-heavy Todd Bowels defense.
“It’s tough, though, when you have a rookie quarterback, you gotta call all these motions and change of formations, it becomes very wordy,” Gruden told Team 980's Chris Russell. "And sometimes with a rookie quarterback, you want to call basic things early in the season just to try to get him a feel for the game. And then eventually they’ll add plays where they’ll get [McLaurin] moved around [into different spots], hopefully, that’s the case.
“First game of the year, probably a bit more basic than they will be Week 2, Week 3, Week 4… etc. We’ll see what happens.”
And when asked specifically about McLaurin staying in one spot, Gruden said, "I don't see one.”
One aspect to watch when it comes to Daniels is how often teams blitz him. The Bucs sent blitzes 47 percent of snaps and motion could be a way to counter that.
“My consternation with all the motion was protection,” Rodgers said this week. “Because as a West Coast quarterback, I was raised to start with the protection, but as we’ve seen now with all these motions, teams become less aggressive to bring pressure because you can get gashed, whether its in the run game or the pass game, by voiding zones.”
The sample size is small and Daniels is still a rookie, but if Kingsbury doesn’t want Washington to be a continuation of Arizona, things will have to change.