The NFL’s Latest Offensive Trend Was Hiding in Plain Sight As It Swept the League in Week 1

A look around the NFL after one week, starting with which offenses saw the biggest increase in under center rate (2026 Week 1 vs. 2025 average). 🧵 pic.twitter.com/sTxAse5yIP

— SūmerSports (@SumerSports) September 15, 2026

What it all means

• First off, why? The answer, according to another longtime NFL defensive coach, is simple: It really sucks to defend. In the shotgun, there is often a “double conformation” for the front seven as to what kind of play might be coming. First, in the shotgun, there are runs on the team’s playsheet that you cannot operate with both players starting yards from the center. Second, depending on which side of the quarterback the running back lines up on, you can further eliminate certain plays and focus on the probability that the offense is running a small subsection of its run package. Third, there are more notable offensive line cues in the shotgun, like how most teams often slide their center away from the running back, which is another tendency that became commonplace. Fourth, it is easier to get a catalog of the team’s personnel as they break the huddle. All of this makes life miserable for defensive tackles who now have less of a sightline and can get less of a jump on a given play. 

Conversely, this means more realistic-looking play-action for offenses. According to statistician Neil Greenberg, passing plays over the past decade from the shotgun offered 0.05 EPA per play. Under center, it was 0.15 EPA per play. Coaches reviewing Week 1 film mentioned that even checkdown passes seemed more viable.

The other reason why we’re seeing a flood of under-center concepts? It’s hitting right now, and offensive coordinators are more shameless at plagiarizing material than an eighth-grader logging onto his ChatGPT account. During Ben Johnson’s first season with the Bears, he pushed Caleb Williams to an almost 50% under-center rate, finished the season with one of the best offenses in the NFL, and had the No. 2 explosive run game in the NFL. Johnson was one of the few play-callers who seemed to be truly thriving amid a league-wide defensive counterrevolution. Defensive coaches were figuring out how to mirror the magic tricks of their offensive counterparts by playing nearly all of their looks out of the same personnel package, as one NFL assistant told me. Houston, with Jalen Pitre and the linebacker-esque Kamari Lassiter; and Seattle, with the big nickel centerpiece Nick Emmanwori, embodied this shift. 

Offensive coaches, who were scoring 2.55 and 2.56 touchdowns per game in 2024 and 2025, respectively—which was down from a stunning 2.88 total touchdowns and an all-time high 1.7 receiving touchdowns per game in 2020—began to accept the elephant in the room: We need to force these young quarterbacks to get uncomfortable. If Williams, who took eight—eight!—snaps under center in college, can become the poster child of the under-center revolution, what is anyone else’s excuse? The flashpoint moment, and the predictor that life may never be the same again, was seeing Fernando Mendoza play more snaps under center during his preseason debut with the Raiders than he did throughout the entirety of his year as Indiana’s starting quarterback. 

• The change to under-center offenses has, as you would expect, produced some fascinating cat-and-mouse games. It is the norm now for defenses to come to the line with two play calls, depending on how a quarterback lines up. Coaches like Steelers defensive coordinator Patrick Graham utilized under-center looks to trigger calls like interior “A” gap pressures from linebackers, who rush the lanes opposite the center. In that scenario, a safety may then drop down to protect the middle of the field. A well-timed “A” gap pressure can sometimes neutralize a running back’s effectiveness in helping pass protect because, now that the quarterback is pressed up against the line and the back is yards behind him, he no longer begins the play with the posture of a personal bodyguard. 

It is widely expected that we will see more “A” gap pressures now that under-center offenses are en vogue, which also means we’ll see more plays from the offense like “crack toss.” You can view an example of that here: 

There is also a belief that five and six-man fronts, with bigger personnel forcing teams to retreat into the shotgun. 

Because sightlines are harder for defenses in an under-center offense, another fun evolution has been teams getting more creative with the idea and keeping defenses from understanding their formation before the snap. The first play call in an NFL regular season game from new Ravens OC Declan Doyle utilized a slight tempo out of the huddle and into an under-center formation (it’s far easier to grasp from the behind view angle on the television copy, with the all-22 looking more like a stroll in the park), which scrambled Indianapolis’s front and—it seemed to me—prevented the Colts from getting into a secondary play call. Jackson played his most snaps ever under center on Sunday, and perhaps the effectiveness of this particular tactic will wane over time, with defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo being the unlucky soul who had to decipher it in the moment without any tape.

The Chiefs also tinkered with this idea on Monday night—though not quite under center—by placing Patrick Mahomes in a three-point stance in a condensed shotgun. Outside of it being a gigantic middle finger to every defense on Kansas City’s schedule—Mahomes was next to another quarterback, Justin Fields, also in a three-point stance, and now poses the question to every coordinator as to what indicators would result in Fields getting the ball and throwing it—it also prevented the defense from looking into the backfield and cutting down on the possibilities at hand. While goal-line defense is always a bit of a penalty kick scenario—guess the play, guess the gap and YOLO—not putting Mahomes in a true shotgun makes it even more of a guessing game. 

• So what happens next? I call it the McVay and Shanahan question, and I wrote a little bit about that here. Before the summer ended, I talked to coaches who believed the effectiveness of the basic Shanahan and McVay offenses were waning. Not—let me be clear—Shanahan and McVay themselves, but the branches of the offense that were missing the single-most important ingredient: the brains of the actual play-callers. 

Will the trend stick?

Week 1 is notoriously strange. And having that large gap in under-center usage from the previous season to this one—all but the Falcons and Commanders, the teams that had a 10% jump in usage, won—may have contributed to defenses on their collective heels and a spike in scoring. Of course, Ben Johnson was trying to hang 60 on the Panthers. Everyone already knew he’d be under center—and, according to one former coach who observed him, he has been deploying momentary glimpses of shotgun with tight ends split out wide to help him and Caleb Williams identify what calls the defense may have and how many bodies will be on their front before returning to under center—which speaks to how uncomfortable this feels for defenses in the moment. 

But will it remain that way? The reason I bring up Johnson, McVay and Shanahan: Their offenses are beautiful and so well-thought-out. The creator can apply emergency fixes and adaptations because, in their own mind, the offense is a living, breathing entity. The borrower is less able to adjust when defenses finally put a foot down because, to them, it is a more rigid set of concepts that apply only to certain situations. 

One of the defensive coaches I mentioned earlier suggested that, ultimately, quarterbacks and coaches return to what is comfortable and what they understand. Could a rash of “A” gap pressures this weekend force quarterbacks back to the bargaining table with their play-callers, begging not to get clocked the second the ball touches their hands (I would guess that Brian Flores’s serial killer defense may give us some answers against Ben Johnson this weekend)? Or will offenses more readily anticipate the anti-under-center measures being put in place and build in more counters? It will depend, again, on how deeply thought out the shift has really become. We’ve heard about more dramatic offensive changes from established play-callers like Kevin O’Connell and Zac Taylor than ever before. Are those aesthetic changes, or are those changes now root-deep?

Maybe for those who came to love football and truly dive into its intricacies before 2010 or so, all of this is another yawn. I, on the other hand, would argue that in this case, it’s not the NFL being cyclical, since many of the next-level presnap motion concepts and space-creating route concepts are now tied to more traditional under-center runs and passes. There are new chess matches. There are new games within games. And whether you’re hearing The White Album for the first time, or maybe the 10,000th time, it can still blow your mind.

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