Late in the Washington Commanders’ Week 1 loss to the Buccaneers, Kliff Kingsbury dialed up what he’d go on to describe as “one of the worst plays I’ve ever called in my entire career.” The Washington offensive coordinator had rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels line up in shotgun with running back Brian Robinson Jr. to his right. The call was a classic speed option. The idea was to leave one Buccaneers defender unblocked and to let Daniels decide to either keep the ball or pitch it to Robinson based on that defender’s actions. But the play didn’t work as intended, and Tampa Bay ended up with three unblocked defenders: one to cover the pitch man, another to account for Daniels, and then an extra tackler just for good measure. The play was dead on arrival.
But Daniels didn’t let it die. He lowered his shoulder and fought his way into the end zone—and in turn perfectly illustrated the kind of season it’s been for Kingsbury and the Commanders offense: Even the plays that shouldn’t work are working out. The Commanders lost that game in Tampa to open the season, but since then they have reeled off three straight wins and lead the NFL in nearly every advanced offensive metric, including expected points added and success rate. They’re also putting points on the board. The Commanders rank just third in scoring, behind Buffalo and New Orleans, but they lead the league in points per drive by a healthy margin. And if you combine the total EPA generated by the Bills and Saints, the second- and third-ranked teams by EPA, it wouldn’t match Washington’s output. Based on the advanced metrics, the Commanders don’t just own the best offense in the NFL; they’re lapping the damn field.
Even in a league that’s obsessed with promoting parity, and where worst-to-first turnarounds are an expectation, Washington’s renaissance has been truly shocking. And not just because the offense is being led by a rookie quarterback. Just last year in Houston, we witnessed how quickly a promising signal-caller could revitalize a franchise. Like C.J. Stroud, Daniels was the second pick in the draft, and he’s already stolen the spotlight from the quarterback who went no. 1. But Daniels isn’t just putting up numbers that make him the favorite to win Offensive Rookie of the Year. He leads the NFL in EPA per dropback and success rate. He’s fourth in QBR and yards per attempt. Those are numbers that put quarterbacks in the MVP discussion. And the offense he’s leading, which ranks first in both run and pass EPA, is producing numbers we typically see out of Super Bowl contenders.
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With Daniels on board and already playing like a superstar, it’s easy to get excited about Washington’s future. And the Commanders also have an offensive coordinator in Kingsbury who’s running a highly inventive scheme and who seems to be a changed coach after his year away from pro football—which started with him purchasing a one-way ticket to Thailand and ended with a job as a “senior offensive assistant” at USC. Kingsbury says the Commanders are getting “the best version of myself” after he finally got some time to stop and think about how he was approaching the job. “I was just in that cycle just going, going, going,” he told The Washington Post in September. “Even when I got fired the first time, [I was the] first college coach to ever get fired and become an NFL head coach. So I never even had to stop and think about it—like, I would’ve done this differently—or even examine why I’m doing it. So I needed [that] break, I think.”
The early results suggest that he’s right, and that the break helped him refine his scheme. But skepticism about the long-term viability of this offense is also warranted. This is, after all, a Kingsbury unit that we’re talking about. And the former Cardinals head coach has had a habit of getting off to hot starts only to see things fall apart later in the season.
In each of his four seasons in Arizona, for example, Kingsbury’s offenses were more efficient in September and October than they were in November and December.
Arizona’s EPA per Play, by Month (TruMedia)
It’s a concerning trend, for sure, but it doesn’t necessarily mean Washington’s offense is headed for a cliff. This new version of Kingsbury has been on a play-calling heater to start the season, and he appears to be nailing every step of Daniels’s development. So how is he doing it? And more importantly, can the Commanders, who are led by a rookie quarterback and a coach who’s trying to repair his reputation as a top offensive mind, keep it up all season?
The most significant touchdown play of Washington’s season to date didn’t go according to plan, either. Shortly before Daniels lofted a perfect deep ball to Terry McClaurin for the game-sealing score in a Week 3 win over the Bengals, he and McClaurin huddled with Kingsbury to draw up the play for the make-or-break fourth down. The idea, based on the assumption that Cincinnati would play press coverage, was for McClaurin to run a go route. But after the snap, the Bengals played their corners off and sent an all-out blitz. McClaurin adjusted his route on the fly, converting it to a double move, and Daniels made a perfect throw to the back corner of the end zone.
Daniels has completed a lot of passes this season. His 82.1 percent completion rate leads the NFL and would be a league record if he can maintain it throughout the season. That ability to hit throw after throw (at one point, he had a streak of 35 straight completions on passes under 15 air yards, per Next Gen Stats) and avoid turnovers (his first interception of the year was thrown on Sunday) has been the key to Washington’s historically efficient start. Daniels isn’t throwing the ball very far downfield, but even when accounting for that, we’re seeing unprecedented precision from the rookie.
And that dime in Cincinnati certainly wasn’t a short pass. It was a jaw-dropping throw by Daniels and easily the best of his season so far. But his most impressive work on the play may have come before the snap. He got the Commanders, who were scrambling just to get 11 players out on the field, lined up in a legal formation. And his calm leadership in a chaotic situation had the Washington locker room buzzing after the game. From The Post’s Sam Fortier:
“The guys were all confused. He put them in the right formation—” [guard Sam] Cosmi said.
“—and snapped it with one second left and delivered a fucking corner pylon toss,” [tackle Andrew] Wylie continued. “I mean, it was fucking nuts.”
But the fact that Daniels took command of the offense probably didn’t come as a surprise to his teammates, who have been raving about his preparation since the summer. McClaurin said Daniels was the first young quarterback he’s had who asked to work on routes after practice. Center Nick Allegretti, who referred to himself as an “early guy,” said he had yet to beat the rookie to the facility. Daniels was practicing and preparing like an NFL veteran in minicamp, and now he’s playing like one in crunch time of regular-season games.
Daniels’s command of the offense was visible on the practice field in the summer. When I visited Commanders training camp, the team was mostly working on playing with tempo. They didn’t huddle much, and Daniels had no problem getting the offense lined up in a timely manner. The operation would have been impressive even if you didn’t know that it was a first-year player leading it. At the time, I assumed Washington was working on its two-minute offense, but it’s now clear that wasn’t the case. The Commanders go no huddle on 50 percent of their plays, excluding garbage time and two-minute situations. That leads the league by a wide margin, per TruMedia.
Kingsbury’s use of no huddle is less about tempo and more about control. While the Commanders lead the league in no-huddle rate, their average time left on the play clock at the snap ranks 13th, per TruMedia. Washington isn’t playing fast, but it’s forcing defenses to speed up their communication, which typically results in more basic fronts and coverages. It’s difficult to disguise a defensive look when you’re scrambling just to line up. Those tricky coverage disguises and designer blitzes defensive coordinators like to deploy are a big reason for the offensive regression we’ve seen across the league in the past few seasons. So Kingsbury’s offense is designed, in part, to protect the quarterback from seeing a lot of those advanced looks.
Plus, when the offense gets to the line without huddling or subbing in new personnel, the defense is stuck keeping its existing personnel on the field, providing Kingsbury with another measure of control. He’s exploited that hack more than a few times this season, including in Washington’s 42-14 win over the Cardinals last Sunday, when Kingsbury used a combination of three-tight-end sets and no huddle to gash Arizona’s defense.
In the win over the Bengals, Washington started in an odd two-back set—featuring Austin Ekeler and Brian Robinson Jr. instead of a traditional fullback—and marched into Cincinnati territory without huddling and allowing the defense to adjust.
It’s a sequence-based approach to play-calling that can be effective in spurts—but it can also be hard to maintain. Stuffed runs and incomplete passes can stifle the offense’s momentum, and teams without elite talent have a hard time playing behind the chains when that happens. Fortunately for the Commanders, they have Daniels, who has shown elite short-game accuracy, smart decision-making, and an otherworldly ability to scramble out of sticky situations. Because of that, Kingsbury has so far been able to avoid those maintenance problems.
“[Daniels] knows when the party’s over,” Kingsbury said last week. “He knows when to throw it away or when to scramble and not force it in harm’s way. And we’re not built right now to overcome a lot of turnovers, and he knows that. And so we’re trying to stay on schedule, be efficient, stay ahead of the chains, and he’s really done a nice job so far of doing that.”
Even so, this is a delicate setup in Washington, much like Kingsbury’s offenses were in Arizona. And while the overall results this season have been markedly better than they were with the Cardinals, there are some similar (and concerning) splits in the numbers. The Commanders rank first in offensive DVOA on third down and second on second down. But on first down, they rank 25th in the efficiency metric, per FTN. First-down performance tends to be more predictive of future success compared to third down, which can be volatile—especially when you’re dealing with a four-game sample size. The 2021 Cardinals got off to a 7-0 start under Kingsbury, and that offense had an almost identical down-to-down split. That led some to worry they would regress over the second half of the season—and that eventually happened when Kyler Murray was slowed by an ankle injury and their third-down luck turned. I wrote about those concerns before Arizona stumbled to a 4-6 finish, and I included this table in the piece:
Cardinals Offensive DVOA by Down (Data via Football Outsiders)
It’s happening again! This is exactly how the 2021 Cardinals offense worked. Kingsbury went out of his way to keep the team ahead of the chains—often with the same RPO plays Washington is using in 2024—to set up second- and third-and-manageable against regulated defensive looks. But while Kingsbury’s playbook is filled with creative designs for early downs, it seems a little sparse when it comes to plays that work in obvious passing situations. Pass protection has been a major issue for Kingsbury’s offenses in those situations. When the offense fell behind the chains in Arizona, it relied on the mobility of its quarterback to bail the team out. Then it was Murray. Now, it’s Daniels.
Murray ran a lot just to keep the Cardinals offense afloat, and it took its toll on the quarterback in the form of seemingly annual injuries. And now Daniels, who, like Murray, doesn’t have a frame that can sustain a full season of hits, is running even more than the Cardinals quarterback did. Daniels’s scramble rate is unsustainably high. He leads the league at 16.7 percent, which is 5 percentage points higher than Lamar Jackson in second place, per TruMedia. And those scrambles, along with the designed touches he’s getting in the run game, have been ridiculously efficient. Daniels leads the NFL in total EPA on all runs despite ranking 21st in overall attempts, per NFL Pro.
Those scrambles have also been the team’s only steady supply of explosive plays. Because Washington is running so many RPOs, Daniels isn’t throwing the ball downfield too often. He connected on two deep balls against the Bengals but hasn’t completed a pass of more than 20 air yards outside of that. Dual-threat quarterbacks generally produce a lot of downfield throws out of structure after the coverage has broken down, but that’s one of the few skills Daniels has not yet mastered. Only 35 percent of his dropbacks that ended outside the pocket have resulted in a pass attempt. Brock Purdy (53 percent) and Murray (54 percent) are the only full-time starters within 20 percentage points of him, per TruMedia. Daniels isn’t looking to throw when he leaves the pocket; he’s looking to scramble. It’s hard to say that isn’t a smart strategy. The numbers speak for themselves, and Daniels’s scrambles have extended several Washington drives. This offense wouldn’t be nearly as difficult to defend if Daniels weren’t a threat to leave the pocket at any time, which slows down the opposing pass rush and limits what defenses can do in coverage. But he is exposing himself to extra hits and has already left a game (for only a play, granted) after taking a shot at the end of a scramble against the Giants in Week 2.
Daniels is a unique quarterback who’s playing in a unique offense. In many ways, he is the perfect quarterback for Kingsbury’s system. He simply doesn’t miss on short and intermediate throws, and his mobility can serve as the foundation of the run game and enhance a lackluster pass game. We’ve seen this offense work for similarly talented quarterbacks going back to Kingsbury’s time as a college coach, but we’ve never seen it work quite this well—and that’s largely thanks to how freaking good Daniels has been to start his career. He’s got a skill set that would work in any offensive setup—as long as he stays healthy.
But with games against two tough defenses in Cleveland and Baltimore up next on Washington’s schedule, we’re about to find out how good this offense really is and how much Kingsbury has actually grown as a coach. The Ravens, in particular, will offer the best litmus test. Baltimore owns the NFL’s best run defense and isn’t afraid to throw complex coverages at opponents on early downs. We just saw the Ravens cool off a red-hot Bills team that is taking an approach that’s almost identical to what Washington’s running. If any defense can expose the cracks in Kingsbury’s scheme and give us a peek at what regression would look like for this offense, it’s the crosstown rivals.
Even if there is an expiration date on this offensive scheme, though, it may not matter with the way Daniels is playing. The Commanders have a quarterback who’s capable of making any system look good. And in the NFL, that’s the only thing that seems to matter.
