One Offense, Thirty-Two Teams

Ten clubs changed head coach this year, equalling the all-time record, and seventeen have a new play-caller. Look at where the offensive hires came from and the direction of travel is unmistakable: the league is converging on a remarkably similar way of playing. Here is what that looks like, why it works, and who is refusing to join in.

Next Gen Stats has been counting condensed formations, where receivers tuck in tight to the line rather than spread to the sideline, since well before Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan were hired as head coaches in 2017. In their last season out of the league, 2016, offenses used them on 11% of snaps. Last season the figure was 38.5 per cent.

Motion has moved the same way: 46.2 per cent of plays in 2018, when the tracking began, and 63.3 per cent in 2025. Both sets of figures come from Next Gen Stats, as reported by The Ringer in August.

Those numbers describe the most complete tactical takeover in modern football. Two coaches were hired in 2017. Nine seasons later their way of playing has become the default grammar of the sport, and the ten appointments made in January and February will push it further still.

What the system actually is

If you are new to watching, the shape is easy to recognise once you know what to look for, and you will see it on more than a third of snaps.

The quarterback stands under centre, still only about a third of snaps league-wide but rising, rather than five yards back in shotgun. That single choice unlocks the rest of it: with his back to the defense as he turns to hand off, the ball is genuinely hidden.

The run game is wide zone, or outside zone: the two names describe the same thing. The offensive line moves sideways in unison rather than each man blocking the defender in front of him. The running back aims for a point outside the tackle, reads the flow, and cuts back through whichever crease opens. It asks for linemen who can move rather than linemen who are simply large.

The receivers often line up tight and the formations are heavier: two tight ends, sometimes a sixth offensive lineman, fewer three-receiver sets.

Somebody is usually moving before the snap. A receiver crossing the formation, a tight end shifting, a back sliding out wide.

And then the pass comes off the run action. The same initial movement, the same backfield picture, the same offensive-line action, except the ball never leaves the quarterback's hands, and the man who was supposed to be blocking is running a route.

The principle is a single sentence: make the same concepts look different, and different concepts look the same. Everything delays the moment a defender knows what he is looking at.

Why it beats what defenses are doing

Systems spread because they solve a problem, and this one solves the problem defenses spent the last decade building.

Faced with the spread offenses of the 2010s, defenses moved towards two-high structures, Cover 2 and quarters among them, and got very good at disguising them. A quarterback in shotgun, static, with three receivers spread wide, is looking at a picture the defense can hold until the last instant and then change.

Motion breaks the disguise. When a man moves across the formation, the defense has to respond, and how it responds tells the quarterback what he is facing. If a defender follows across, it is man coverage. If the shell simply rotates, it is zone. That information arrives before the ball is snapped, and it is worth more than any read made afterwards.

Condensed formations do something similar. They compress the field, make defenders declare their leverage earlier, and create traffic in the middle where zone defenders have to pass receivers between them.

It is, in other words, an arms race, and neither side has stopped moving. Offenses have found an answer to the disguise; defenses have responded by using more of it, not less. Sharp Football Analysis had quarters coverage at 14.4 per cent last season, the highest in any year they have measured. That is the exchange the hiring cycle was buying into.

The 2026 intake

The pattern is in the third column.

Mike LaFleur at Arizona is the purest case. Four years with Shanahan in San Francisco, two coordinating for Robert Saleh at the Jets, three more under McVay at the Rams, and a brother running the same system in Green Bay. The Cardinals offense will feature wide zone, condensed sets and heavy motion.

Klint Kubiak at Las Vegas arrives from the other branch of the same family, and from the best available advertisement for it: he called the offense for Seattle’s 14-3 season and their Super Bowl LX win before taking the Raiders job in February. The branch is less separate than it sounds: Mike Shanahan was head coach in Denver with Gary Kubiak as his coordinator for eleven years, and the wide-zone system belongs to the pair of them. Expect outside zone, play-action off it, and a quarterback asked to make fewer full-field reads.

Atlanta, under Kevin Stefanski with Tommy Rees calling it, bring a Minnesota-influenced version: heavy personnel, two tight ends, quarterback under centre, deep play-action, and a screen game built for yards after the catch.

Three clubs, three coaches, one offense. Green Bay, San Francisco and the Rams were already running it, and so was Detroit until Ben Johnson took the same offense to Chicago the year before this cycle, the most prominent hire the pattern has produced, and a reminder that the tree keeps branching.

Which is where the argument concedes something. Only three of this year’s ten fit the convergence story; four are defensive coaches. The systems are converging while the hiring diverges, and the two facts fit together, because a standardised offense is one you can hand to a coordinator, which is what Saleh, Hafley and Harbaugh have all done.

Who is refusing

This is the more interesting half of the story: a league where everyone runs the same offense is a league where the advantage moves somewhere else.

Tennessee is the clearest counterweight. Robert Saleh is a defensive coach, and he has handed the offense to Brian Daboll. Daboll was sacked by the Giants in November after a 2-8 start, with Mike Kafka taking the side on as interim and the job going to John Harbaugh in January, and he is now rebuilding a quarterback in Cam Ward. His football comes from a different tradition entirely, and Ward is not a quarterback you would obviously ask to stand under centre and turn his back on the defense.

Buffalo promoted Joe Brady from within. Brady's lineage runs through the 2019 LSU offense, which is spread, quick and built on getting the ball out fast, close to the opposite of what the condensed-formation trend describes.

Miami hired Jeff Hafley, a defensive coach who gave up the head-coaching job at Boston College to become an NFL coordinator. Within two years he had Green Bay in the top ten for defense. What Miami’s offense looks like depends entirely on who calls it.

And there will always be clubs with no reason to join in. An offense with three genuinely dangerous receivers has no reason to take one of them off the field in order to add a second tight end, whatever the league-wide trend says.

Heavier, not lighter

Last season offenses used three or more receivers at the lowest rate since 2014, and put six or more offensive linemen on the field at the highest rate since 2016. Two-tight-end sets rose again, having already surged the year before.

For fifteen years the story was the same: lighter, faster, wider. The spread offense took over college football and then the NFL, and defenses answered by getting smaller and faster too: more defensive backs, fewer linebackers, nickel as the base package.

The league is now walking it back. Not because the spread stopped working, but because defenses adapted, and one increasingly effective counter to smaller, faster defensive personnel is a heavy formation that can run the ball at it. What looks like nostalgia is arithmetic.

What to watch for on a Sunday

Four things, all of them inside the first quarter of any game.

Count the receivers before the snap. Three wide used to be the default. Two wide with two tight ends is now genuinely common, and it usually means the run is live.

Watch who moves, and watch the defense's answer. That exchange, in the two seconds before the snap, is the most informative moment of most plays.

Watch the offensive line’s first step on a run. If they all move sideways together, that is zone. If one pulls across to lead, that is gap scheme, and the good offenses do both from identical formations.

And when the quarterback turns his back to fake a handoff, look at the tight end. The play-action pass in this system is usually going to the man the defense just watched pretend to block.

The question underneath

If every offense eventually runs the same offense, what separates them?

Two answers. The first is personnel: a system that asks linemen to move sideways and tight ends to do two jobs rewards very specific kinds of player, and clubs are paying for them.

The second is that a league-wide tendency is itself exploitable. When 63 per cent of snaps involve motion, defenses build for motion, and the coach who works out how to punish that will be the next Shanahan, and everyone will be hiring from his tree a decade from now.

For now, expect familiarity. Ten new coaches, most of them from two families, all arriving with a version of the same idea. If the games look increasingly alike this autumn, that is not your imagination. It is the whole league solving the same problem at the same time.

Sources: Next Gen Stats figures as reported by The Ringer, 24 Aug 2026; Sharp Football Analysis, NFL Offensive Trends, 13 Jul 2026; AP, 22 Jan 2026, on the ten coaching changes; club announcements for the appointments.

Printed in Issue 4 of The Grid and released free on 22 September 2026. The text is as it appeared in the magazine, lightly edited for the web.