Field Gulls
If you watched just the first half of the Seattle Seahawks’ preseason opener against the Las Vegas Raiders, there was a marked difference in how Klint Kubiak’s offense looked compared to the lone season under Ryan Grubb. I’m not talking about performance, efficiency, or run-pass splits, but style.
More specifically, this style.
That almost looked like a trick play last season.
When Drew Lock was in the game, the Seahawks ran 26 plays from under center and just 14 from shotgun. No NFL offense dares run UC at a 65% clip so we are not going to be witnessing that type of split in the regular season, but it hammers home the point that we’ll be seeing a vastly different offense in 2025.
Kubiak did, however, use Jalen Milroe out of shotgun almost exclusively through the first couple of series before spamming UC looks on Milroe’s touchdown drive.
This is not to beat up on Grubb’s OC abilities as much as highlight a key difference between him and Kubiak. Last year, the Seahawks were tied for 7th in shotgun rate with Grubb, who was a shotgun-heavy offensive coordinator with Washington and Fresno State in the college ranks. Seattle’s shotgun usage went up 10 percentage points from the final year under 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 31st and 27th respectively in shotgun rate (per FTN Fantasy).
It shouldn’t be surprising that Kubiak operates this way. Klint is the son of longtime offensive coordinator and Super Bowl champion head coach Gary Kubiak, who was a former player and eventual coaching assistant under Mike Shanahan. The Shanahan coaching tree includes the San Francisco 49ers’ Kyle Shanahan and the Los Angeles Rams’ Sean McVay, two tormentors of Seahawks defenses for years. Neither man runs an exact replica of the late 1990s Denver Broncos offenses, but there are enough familiar concepts that can be directly tied to Mike. The 49ers and Rams have been below the league average in shotgun rate 100 percent of the time since Shanahan and McVay were hired in 2017.
While preseason is hardly the whole playbook and play-calling for backups isn’t going to be identical for the starters (or even backups who play in the regular season), we can glean some valuable information off of certain tendencies.
For context, I’ve pulled up the gamebook data from Grubb’s preseason debut against the Los Angeles Chargers. Including plays with penalties, Grubb called a whopping 35 shotgun plays to just 8 under center just in the first half. One of those UC plays was a kneeldown so it’s essentially an 83% shotgun rate, which almost identically mirrored what he’d do with the first-team in the regular season.
In Geno Smith’s only series of that preseason, four of the five plays came out of shotgun and Seattle didn’t run the ball one time. As small...
