Gary Kubiak's rough Week 1 and the plight of the play caller
Gary Kubiak had two plays blow up on him but there's a lot more that goes into play calling
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One of the cruelest things about football is that games can swing on a single play. One of the most wonderful things about football is that we can spend an entire week debating those plays.
Against the Green Bay Packers in Week 1, the Minnesota Vikings were on the wrong end of two play calls that had a major impact on the 43-34 loss and the immediate second guessing that makes the social media world go ‘round ensued.
Early in the second quarter the Vikings stuffed the Packers at the goal line, giving them the ball at their own 1-yard line. Down just 7-3, the Vikings ran up the middle for three yards and then went for a game-breaking play. They dialed up a play-action pass that sent quarterback Kirk Cousins about five yards deep into the end zone. He never saw Packers cornerback Jaire Alexander blitzing off the edge and took a safety.
In the aftermath we learned that Alexander actually made a mistake biting on the play-action and the Vikings missed a blocking assignment.
Critics of the play argued that running play-action at the 4-yard line was too risky. But on the other side of the coin, last year Cousins had a 129.9 rating when throwing off play-action and was only sacked nine times with a play-fake mixed in (per PFF). Plus Adam Thielen was wide open. If the blitz had been picked up, it had explosive potential.
The Packers drove for a field goal and things went downhill from there. The Vikings followed up with a three-and-out and then Cousins threw an interception. Both times Green Bay scored touchdowns, leaving the Vikings trailing 22-10 at halftime.
While there was plenty of process vs. result conversations to be had in play caller Gary Kubiak’s favor, he wanted no part of that this week, conceding that you don’t get bonus points for calls making sense.
“When you lose, you didn’t make the right call, and that’s the way this business is,” Kubiak said. “You go there every week to find a way to get a W. I didn’t do a good enough job, we didn’t do a good enough job on offense to get that done. I’ve got to be better from that standpoint…that’s part of the game.”
The second hotly-contested play came in the third quarter with the Vikings still very much in the game. Still down 12, Kubiak sent in a deep passing play for Cousins on fourth-and-3 at the Green Bay 39-yard line. The Vikings’ QB heaved it in the direction of No. 4 receiver Tajae Sharpe and it fell incomplete. Aaron Rodgers immediately made the Vikings pay with an eight-play touchdown drive and the game was essentially on ice at that point.
Zimmer revealed that Kubiak asked if they could “take a shot” and he gave the green light. The Vikings’ head coach also noted the play was supposed to go Adam Thielen’s way. On the All-22 film, it appeared Thielen had a beat on his man.
You could make a Law and Order episode out of the arguments for each side. Had the play been executed, it could have changed the outcome. Was that the right time to make a low percentage deep throw when three yards can be picked up on a quick pass or even a handoff to recently-extended Dalvin Cook?
By Kubiak’s mentality, the play failed so the call failed. But that’s football. He said that play callers can’t hold onto the ones that went wrong. They require short memories.
“It’s like a player playing in a game, you have some bad plays, you’ve got to go on to the next one, so it’s part of it,” Kubiak said. “You’ve got to fire away. You’ve got to make a call and try to learn off the things that happen to you throughout the course of a game and throughout the course of a season, type of thing. Being a play caller is a lot like being a player. You call a two-deep play and they’re playing three-deep, and it’s not a good play, you’ve got to go on to the next one. You’re challenged from that standpoint every time.”
It’s safe to say that water cooler conversations (or pre-Zoom call G-chats these days) on Monday morning included plenty of questions about whether Kubiak can recreate the success that Kevin Stefanski had last year as a play caller.
But how should we judge a play caller? What goes into calling plays? And how do they evaluate themselves on a week-to-week basis?
To answer these questions, I reached out to one of football’s up-and-coming offensive minds, AJ Smith.
He was co-offensive coordinator for the XFL’s most impressive offensive team the Houston Roughnecks. At 31 years old, he’s spent the last decade rising through the ranks, finding himself working under head coach and offensive innovating legend June Junes in college football and the CFL before landing with the Roughnecks.
Smith said that play calling isn’t exactly like playing Madden where we have the entire playbook in front of us and select whatever strikes our fancy.
“The whole play calling thing is a little overrated in my opinion because it’s decided before you ever take the field,” Smith said. “You gameplan the defense in certain parts of the field and down situations and that whole week.”
Smith uses this example to explain: Say you have second-and-3 in the middle of the field. The play sheet will have options for that situation. Maybe you run a play-action bootleg with the opponent expecting the run. Maybe you run it to beat man coverage because your analytics say the opponent plays man coverage on 70% of their second-and-short situations.
Things happen too fast for play callers to hunt through the play sheet looking for options.
“If you need a two-point conversion, you’re not looking around going, ‘what am I going to call, what am I going to call?” Smith said. “You’re going to say: Here are our three we’ve picked for this week… Hopefully you schemed it up right.”
AJ Smith is an up-and-coming offensive mind who worked under Run ‘n Shoot legend June Jones. He also coached for Jackson State and played wide receiver for Doug Pederson in high school. Photo via AJ’s Twitter.
Smith, whose Roughnecks team went 5-0 and led the XFL in touchdowns, said that he can empathize with the Vikings’ two mishaps against the Packers because if either play had been executed properly we may have had a different result on Sunday.
Every play caller has their stories of brilliant X’s and O’s decisions that went awry. In June Jones’s case, when he was coaching the Falcons in the mid-90s, he had a dream the night before the game that they were going to run a play-action that would leave Michael Haynes wide open on a backside post. They ran the play, the post was wide open and quarterback Billy Joe Tolliver didn’t throw it.
“To this day June will text Billy Joe and be like, ‘how did you not throw the post?’” Smith said.
He can also relate to Kubiak’s desire to take shots down the field. Like every other situation, a play caller has an idea of what spots might dictate a shot play. But these require a little more feel for what’s going on. The opponent’s look, the personnel and the risks versus rewards.
“A general rule as a play caller is that you want to take one shot a quarter but more sophisticated offenses are going to take what the defense gives us,” Smith said. “If you’re going to be in our face and play man-free…if you’re giving us that we’re adjusting on the fly…and we’re taking six or eight shots a quarter.”
“You have your script and I put ‘greedy’ next to it,” Smith said.
The Vikings were being greedy both times. At the goal line, Kubiak knew the Packers would be looking for Dalvin Cook handoffs. He knew that the middle of the field would be wide open when Green Bay’s linebackers sold out to stop Cook. He figured they wouldn’t be expecting a play-action in that situation and that a big play could swing the momentum of the game.
On fourth-and-3, Kubiak must have figured the Packers would play a single high safety and press coverage against Thielen. He beats press coverage. Back in 2017 the Vikings iced a game against the Falcons on a similar look. Thielen smoked his man off the line and Case Keenum had an easy completion.
Smith is data-driven when it comes to these decisions. He’s aware of the percentages the opponent plays certain coverages against certain formations and he’s familiar with the data on each individual player. The Roughnecks know if the New York Gladiators have a defensive back who has allowed a 90% completion percentage into his coverage and shot plays will reflect that.
How data driven the Vikings are from a play calling perspective isn’t clear. Kubiak may use his own process based on experience and scouting to come to similar conclusions.
Smith said there’s a never-ending process for pro football’s offensive minds of trying to stay ahead. Jones’s Run ‘n Shoot for the Roughnecks wasn’t the same thing he used in Atlanta with Billy Joe Tolliver. As a staff they endlessly study NFL film looking for tweaks to the system.
Kubiak has an impressive tree of coaches who have taken his system and developed it into their own, most notably Matt LaFleur in Green Bay and Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco. The Vikings’ offensive coordinator said he’s always learning from those that have come after him.
“I learned a long time ago how smart these young coaches are,” Kubiak said. “Mike [Shanahan] used to tell me that. As an older coach, you’ve got to sit there every day and listen to them because they’ve got great ideas. They’re seeing things different than maybe you’ve seen them the last 20 or 30 years. So I’m watching Matt [LaFleur]’s film all the time, I’m watching Kyle [Shanahan]’s film, Robert Saleh, I’m very proud of him. I watch his defense all the time. We all kind of grew up somehow, some way and have many people who influenced us.”
But how does Kubiak decide whether he was on point with a call or if he should have regrets?
Smith said that process is always ongoing even during a game. When a play works, they ask why it worked. When a play fails, should it be tossed or tweaked? And then following the game, they go over which plays and formations worked against which coverages and they re-live the frustrating moments just like fans do.
“We look at everything as far as how many times we’re calling a play, if it’s a pass how many times it was completed, how many yards we’re getting in yards per play,” Smith said. “So if we have a pass play that’s only getting completed 15% of the time and we ran it 10 times in two games and we have another pass play that’s 5-for-5 and getting 10 yards a pop, we need to run the other play more.”
While there may be a never-ending process of game planning and evaluating and there’s a lot of blood and sweat that goes into it, Smith also says that sometimes play callers outthink themselves. There’s an element of Keep It Simple Stupid to this operation. When something works, do it again.
“Let’s say a team hits a slip screen and boom it goes 80 yards for a touchdown, more times than not they’ll never run the play again,” he said. “That drives me insane. Any time there’s a super explosive play, I’m always in June’s ear…if something’s working, we’re going back to it.”
That’s one area Kubiak’s play calling may have been questionable in Week 1. The Vikings only ran three play-action passes despite getting the look they wanted on the safety. Last year Cousins ran play-action the sixth most in the NFL. Kubiak explained that the game situation dictated the lack of play-action but the Vikings ran 17 times and passed 13 times through three quarters.
Based on his history, Kubiak won’t be going away from the run any time soon but he will probably use play-action a lot more. And you can bet he’ll be dialing up those shot plays. Like Kubiak said, you’ve got to fire away.
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Garrrrrrrrrrrry.... you have some splainin to do...