Kubiak vs. Stefanski and the NFL's most unstoppable scheme
Kubiak vs. Stefanski and the NFL's most unstoppable scheme
The Vikings and Browns' hot offenses are running a scheme that's ever growing in popularity -- why is it so effective?
By Matthew Coller
EAGAN — Wherever Gary Kubiak is watching Sunday’s game, he’ll have a smile on his face.
Two of Gary’s disciples, Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski and Vikings offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak, will match wits at US Bank Stadium with offenses that have been rolling to start the season.
Stefanski’s Browns are No. 2 in rushing, seventh in yards per play and rank fourth in percentage of drives in which they produce points. Young Kubiak’s Vikings are fifth in total yards, third in passer rating and have the lowest turnover rate in the NFL.
Both play callers bring souped-up versions of Gary’s offensive scheme, which is now taking over the NFL. On Sunday alone, football fans will see iterations of Gary Kubiak’s offense in Los Angeles, Green Bay, Detroit, San Francisco, New York Jets, Atlanta and whiffs of Kubiak and his mentor Mike Shanahan’s stylings in every game.
Why has the Kubiak/Shanahan offense become so popular? How are Stefanski and Klint Kubiak pushing it to new levels? What challenges will the Browns’ offense create for the Vikings’ defense and vice versa? Let’s have a look…
Run and Boot
Earlier this week, Los Angeles Chargers coach Brandon Staley said that a team’s running game does not have to be effective in order for play-action passes to work. That would seem to work against the traditional “establish-the-run” thinking but statistically it was backed up by a PFF study. In fact, the Vikings in 2016 and 2018 had highly effective play-action games despite ranking toward the bottom of the league in rushing.
But saying that the play-action doesn’t need the run game to be working is different from saying that teams don’t need an effective run game or that the run and play-action pass aren’t connected. Cleveland’s rushing attack, which ranks No. 3 in the NFL in yards per carry and second in total yards, has been worth 18.1 points above expectation this year, per Pro-Football Reference’s Expected Points Added statistic.
Their success is a combination of two gifted runners, a high quality offensive line and a system that stretches out the defense.
“What it does, it’s really athletic offensive linemen that can really move, so they get you cut out of gaps, which allows the runners to start and then cut back,” Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer said. “The play might start on this hash and then the defensive players might end up past the other hash leaving those guys on the far side. It gives lanes for them to run it.”
So far this season, the NFL’s leader in runs of 10 or more yards is Dalvin Cook. Right behind him in second place is Cleveland’s Nick Chubb. Right behind them in fifth place is Cleveland’s Kareem Hunt. And backup Vikings running back Alex Mattison has three of his own, which is more than Saquon Barkley and Alvin Kamara.
“It makes you just play disciplined the whole game,” linebacker Eric Kendricks said. “If you go to sleep on one of the plays, it's the difference between a 40-yard run…It makes you play the entire 60 minutes.”
While it may be tough to quantify, there’s a boost to the offensive line that comes along with being able to run the ball well.
“If you’re an offensive linemen in the NFL…[if you rank] the plays you want called [most] to the plays you least want called, starting off is running plays. If you’re getting five yards a shot, offensive linemen will say, ‘Let’s just keep running the ball,’” former Vikings quarterback Sage Rosenfels said on the Purple Insider Podcast.
The Browns have been able to put themselves in advantageous positions with a strong rushing attack, running the ninth fewest plays from either second or third down and long this year. Avoiding those situations allows for more play-action passes in which the Browns can roll Baker Mayfield away from pressure.
“The second thing an offensive linemen loves is bootlegs,” Rosenfels said. “They literally come off the ball and try to eliminate penetration but you don’t have to block Khalil Mack or Myles Garrett for four or five seconds.”
Mayfield has run the seventh highest percentage of play-action this year (31%) and has averaged 3.4 seconds to throw on those plays (per PFF). Cleveland’s star QB is third in the NFL in yards per attempt with play-action at 12.4 and he’s completing a league-leading 88% of his passes in those spots.
“They have a lot of double moves off those because the protection is so good,” Zimmer said.
“It makes it harder for the linebackers, try to make the D-line chase a little bit and get those guys tired throughout the game,” cornerback Patrick Peterson said. “Suck up the linebackers to create those holes right behind them, move the safety from one side to open up the back side… it can manipulate the defensive line, linebackers and the safeties.”
The Vikings haven’t had as many opportunities to marry the run and pass this year. They’ve been in second/third and long 67 times, the second most in the NFL. Only 20% of Cousins’s passes have been on play-actions, which is unusual for his career, which has mostly been spent with Shanahan/Kubiak offenses.
In 2019 with Stefanski at the helm in Minnesota, Cousins had the fourth highest QB rating when running play-actions and was only sacked four times on 151 dropbacks.
The cat-and-mouse game between the Vikings and Browns’ offenses could come down to the number of times they’re able to put themselves in position to run play-action passes. Or, likewise, how they perform when they’re unable to run the boots. So far this year Cousins has the eighth best QB rating without play-action and Mayfield is 18th.
Modernizing it
Mike Shanahan and Gary Kubiak may have laid the foundation of an offense that can be traced back Bill Walsh’s days as the Cincinnati Bengals’ offensive coordinator in the 70s but in recent years the creative up-and-coming offensive minds of the NFL have taken it to the next level in recent years.
“Even the last two years, he's really evolved his offense,” co-defensive coordinator Adam Zimmer said. “That's a sign of a good coach."
No longer are run games solely committed to running the wide zone scheme. In fact, the Browns have run more “gap” scheme with pulling linemen than they have zone runs by a 55-25 margin, per PFF.
“I think Kevin has evolved with some of the run game things he's done, they're doing a little bit more gap scheme than we have here in the past,” Adam Zimmer said. “I do think he does a really good job of mixing up the play calls and keeping a defense off-balance.”
The Vikings have stayed with their wide zone, running the traditional version 63 times and mixing in 16 gap runs.
The foundational piece of the Kubiak offense has always been making run and pass plays look the same from the outset of the play.
“What the offense does is they give you a lot of the same looks and you get a lot of different plays from the same looks,” Adam Zimmer explained. “One time they’re running power and the next time it’s power pass. And so you can’t just say, ‘Hey every time you get in this look you’re going to do a certain play,’ or something like that. So I really think that the offense also has evolved over the years.”
When Sean McVay joined the Los Angeles Rams — after working underneath Shanahan in Washington — he brought a new level of pre-snap movement to confuse defenses. Since then, teams have adopted things like motion and faking end-around plays that force quick adjustments of defensive assignments.
“They’re incorporating more of the jet sweeps and things like that,” Adam Zimmer said of Stefanski’s offense. “I do think it puts a lot of stress on the defense with the blocking scheme and then the play-actions off of it. All those things make a defense have to have their eyes in the right spot all the time and make sure you’re fitting in the correct location. Otherwise, it’s going to be a big play.’’
The Vikings have incorporated more of these types of concepts into their game following Irv Smith Jr.’s season-ending injury. That forced them to put receiver KJ Osborn on the field more often, giving them the option to flash a sweep or send him in motion to give an indicator of the defense’s coverage. Klint Kubiak has also mixed in other elements like using Dalvin Cook and Alexander Mattison on the field at the same time. He’s also used fullback CJ Ham to disorient linebackers.
Another recent addition to the traditional bootleg play-action plays has been a concerted effort to make the back-side receiver more of a threat. Usually when the quarterback rolls out, he’ll have options on the same side he’s rolling. But teams have added more opportunities, whether it’s through deep routes to the middle of the field or underneath receivers, for the quarterback to throw back against the grain. One example from 2019 was Kirk Cousins’s touchdown to Adam Thielen in the back of the end zone against the Detroit Lions.
“When it’s a boot you can manipulate the safety to try to get him off one spot, to get him rolling over to the quarterback and try to leave that corner by himself to make that backside corner run even farther from one side of the field to the opposite side of the field so, that’s definitely one of the things that, every year something new is going to come up,” cornerback Patrick Peterson said. “Everything is going to be pretty much the same but they try to find new nuances to manipulate the safety to force mismatches, to force one-on-one coverages. That is definitely something that has shown up over the last couple of years.”
What new creative elements Stefanski and Kubiak have in store for each other is one of the most compelling parts of Sunday’s matchup.
Defending it
The reason Mike Zimmer cited for switching to Stefanski/Kubiak in 2019 was that he believed their system is the hardest to defend. Co-defensive coordinator Andre Patterson said this week, they are also super familiar with the solutions to the problems it creates, so it’s more about beating the Browns’ talented personnel than being intimidated by the scheme.
“We’ve seen it every day, when he was here,” Patterson said. “So to me, that’s the thing – you look at it, and it’s like I told the guys today – offensively, we practiced against this every day. But now what we’ve got to do is defeat the guys he has there. It’s not that it’s unusual for us to see all this….we have to play against their five offensive linemen. Their two good tight ends. Beckham, the receiver. They’ve got two great running backs. Their quarterback’s a good player. So it’s about those guys.”
Of course, if there was an obvious way to stop one of the masters of the Shanahan/Kubiak offense, it would have been done by now.
“It's kind of impossible to gameplan for,” Patrick Peterson said. “You just have to make sure some of the keys they may give us, some of the formations they may give us that they may have ran a couple weeks ago they run into now, just get a beat on certain formations but when a team has pretty much everything in their arsenal, it's tough to prepare for them.”
But there are ways to avoid getting roasted by the clever elements of Stefanski’s offense. The solution to dealing with pre-snap motion, for example, is not getting caught up on who’s moving and focusing on what it looks like when everyone’s done moving.
“I call it ‘eye candy,’” Patterson said. “You line up with three guys over here, and then one guy will move, and then another guy will move. Well before they snap the ball, they have to end up in a finished formation. So you can’t worry about all the eye candy. You have to play what the finished formation is. And then from there, you’ve got to play your keys and targets from that point on.”
There’s lots of other factors that matter to both teams’ chances. Baker Mayfield has never played in US Bank Stadium. Kirk Cousins has been on a hot streak getting rid of the ball quickly. Anthony Barr, Michael Pierce and Dalvin Cook are questionable for the Vikings. On Cleveland’s side, tackle Jedrick Wills is questionable and cornerback Greg Newsome is out. Stefanski is known for being more pragmatic when it comes to his fourth down decisions. Zimmer’s third down mastery is nearly unmatched in the NFL.
So maybe the Kubiak vs. Stefanski battle will even out and all the other factors will determine which Gary Kubiak pupil will come on top. Either way, we should be getting a 60-minute master class on how to run the NFL’s best offensive scheme.
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