Photo: Andy Lewis, Kevin Abele/Icon Sportswire

With the constant influx of athletic quarterbacks into the NFL, offensive coaches have slowly incorporated more QB designed runs into their schemes. We’ve seen these concepts plenty in college football with the likes of Urban Meyer, Chip Kelly, and Rich Rodriguez starting the revolution of the spread option offense. 

It is fitting that Kliff Kingsbury, who spent time in college before coaching the Cardinals and Commanders, has created an offensive scheme that utilizes plenty of Air Raid and Spread Option principles. It’s also fitting that Kingsbury has been tasked with developing two Heisman winning quarterbacks who possess the athleticism to be a successful rusher in the NFL, but who have had to manage in-season injuries that limit how much they can use that athleticism.

In this article, we are going to look at how Kingsbury has utilized the running ability of Jayden Daniels and Kyler Murray before and after lingering in-season injuries. 

Daniels and the Commanders offense were off to a roaring start before Daniels suffered a rib injury in Week 7 against the Panthers that forced him to leave the game. The Commanders were 5-2 and ended that game having scored 30 points or more in four of five games. Since Week 8, the Commanders are 3-3 and have scored 30 points just once, in their Week 13 game against the Titans.

The table below shows team rushing stats for the Commanders before and after Daniels suffered his rib injury: 

The Commanders rushing offense has been less effective since Daniels was injured. Although the EPA per Rush has decreased by a tenth of a point since the injury, the Commanders have still been successful running the football compared to the rest of the league. From Week 8 on, the Commanders are tied for third with the Giants in EPA per Rush. 

However, there is more to this story. The table below shows rushing stats for Jayden Daniels on designed QB runs. For the purpose of this article, we are not going to include QB sneaks and kneels. 

The Commanders have run Daniels less frequently since the injury. His effectiveness has also dropped off. Now, when we look at his rushing stats in the Red Zone only, a clearer picture starts to emerge:

This paints a clear picture of where the Daniels injury has impacted the Commanders rushing offense the most: in the red zone. His ability to run the Read Option in the red zone puts a lot of pressure on the defense. Kingsbury is running his quarterback less in general, but especially in key situations in tight quarters, and he’s done worse with those attempts (albeit in a small sample). 

Defenses can pick up on this trend, as well. To make a baseball analogy, using the quarterback in the option run game is like having a great changeup to complement your fastball. It is pretty much impossible to sit on a great fastball and changeup, similar to defending the option in football. If you can eliminate one of the options pre-snap or pre-pitch, you have a much greater chance of success. This is where Kingsbury has run into problems during his tenure as a playcaller not only in Washington, but Arizona as well. 

Kingsbury has caught a lot of flak for his offenses struggling in the second half of the season since his days in Arizona with Kyler Murray. There does appear to be some truth to that logic, although he has had unfortunate injury luck at quarterback dating back to the 2020 season.

The 2020 Cardinals started the season 5-3 before a Kyler Murray shoulder injury in Week 9 that lingered for the rest of the season. The 2021 Cardinals started 7-1 before Murray suffered a sprained ankle that caused him to miss 3 games and limped to the end of the season with a 11-6 record and a playoff berth. The two tables below highlight the similarities between the 2020 Cardinals and 2024 Commanders offenses pre- and post-injury for their franchise quarterback. 

The numbers are astonishingly similar, especially pre-injury for both seasons. As you can see, Kingsbury has tweaked his offense to his personnel in Washington to form one of the most potent rushing attacks in the NFL this season. 

Kingsbury’s rushing offense has not cratered like it has in the 2020 and 2021 seasons after Murray was injured. Part of that should be attributed to personnel differences, but another part of it should be attributed to schematic changes.

Kingsbury has adapted from a zone-run heavy run scheme in Arizona to a more balanced approach to gap and zone run schemes in 2024 with Washington. He is calling gap scheme running plays 47% of the time this year, compared to 28% and 38% in 2021 and 2022, respectively. In terms of running the ball, not much else has changed. He still runs an up-tempo, shotgun heavy offense that uses motions at a lower rate than most of the league, where his offenses have always ranked in the bottom 5 in motion percentage.  

Some of this is unfortunate injury luck, some of this is also just the reality of consistently running your quarterback in the NFL. In 2020 Kyler Murray had 73 designed runs and in 2024 Jayden Daniels is currently at 47 with four games left to play. 

Murray’s 68 runs are tied for 6th most for a quarterback in a season since 2020, while Daniels comes in tied for 16th. Ahead of these players on that list include the likes of Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, Josh Allen, and Cam Newton. Besides Lamar, the three other quarterbacks have a much better body composition to sustain hits throughout the season compared to Murray and Daniels. Even then, there were discussions held within each franchise to lessen the workload for their franchise quarterback to make sure they were fully healthy going into the playoffs. 

This is the conundrum that Kingsbury seems to keep getting stuck in, year in and year out. His offenses seem to peak too early in the regular season before waning off come crunch time. It could be the case of getting figured out by defensive coordinators or it could also be because of lingering injuries to his quarterbacks that affect how he calls plays. More than likely, both are true, but either way, Kingsbury needs to find an answer to this problem, especially if he is interviewing for head coaching positions in the off-season. 

Luckily for the Commanders, the bye week came much later and that might just be a blessing in disguise. In future seasons, Kingsbury will need to find the perfect balance between keeping his quarterback fresh for the playoffs and finding success during the regular season or his offenses will continue to limp into the playoffs, literally and figuratively, alongside their quarterback.