Kliff Kingsbury and Kyler Murray Are Testing the Limits of the Offensive Revolution
As teams around the league search for innovative coaches and dynamic passers, the Cardinals have taken those trends to their logical extremes. Will hiring an Air Raid–focused head coach and drafting a 5-foot-10 QB pay off?Kliff Kingsbury and Kyler Murray Are Testing the Limits of the Offensive Revolution
As teams around the league search for innovative coaches and dynamic passers, the Cardinals have taken those trends to their logical extremes. Will hiring an Air Raid–focused head coach and drafting a 5-foot-10 QB pay off?
The NFL is valuing youth and innovation more than ever before. A year after the Rams made Sean McVay the youngest head coach in league history, Patrick Mahomes became the youngest MVP winner since Dan Marino. This offseason, an avalanche followed: The Cardinals threw caution to the wind and paired Kliff Kingsbury with Kyler Murray, the Packers ended the Mike McCarthy era, and the Bengals poached the Rams’ quarterbacks coach to be their new head coach. When did the NFL begin to resemble Silicon Valley? Welcome to Wunderkind Week, when we’ll dive deep into how the NFL became a young man’s league.
Kliff Kingsbury didn’t ask for this. He wants to be clear about that. When the Cardinals’ brass was deliberating about which player to select with the first overall pick in this spring’s draft, Kingsbury claims he never lobbied general manager Steve Keim to take Kyler Murray—despite having a well-documented affection for the 2018 Heisman Trophy winner. “What’s funny is that I purposefully tried to stay away from the topic,” Kingsbury says. “I wanted the process to play out and let evaluations be evaluations.”
The first in-depth conversation that Keim and Kingsbury had about Murray came a few days after the NFL combine in early March. Keim was sitting in his office studying game tape of Alabama tackle Quinnen Williams—one of the three players Arizona would eventually consider drafting with the no. 1 pick. As he watched Alabama’s College Football Playoff semifinal win against Oklahoma, Keim tried to focus on Williams, but he kept getting distracted by the other team’s quarterback. “I threw on that game, and I couldn’t stop watching Kyler,” Keim says. When he finally realized the Williams evaluation was a lost cause, Keim made his way to Kingsbury’s office. “He just kinda shook his head,” Kingsbury says. “And I said, ‘Yeah, he’s pretty good, huh?’ That was the start of it.”
As Keim finally solicited input on his coach’s longtime QB crush, Kingsbury—who coached both Baker Mayfield and Patrick Mahomes at Texas Tech—said that in his opinion, Murray belonged in the same elite tier as the two young passers who lit up the NFL in 2018. “I had that baseline,” Kingsbury says. “That was my conversation to start, that I felt like [Murray] fit into that group.”
Keim spent the rest of that afternoon digging through Murray’s tape. By the end of the day, he was enamored. “Every game, it was the same thing,” Keim says. “He did something multiple times that you either said, ‘Wow,’ or [I] had seen very few times in my scouting career.” As he watched Murray launch the ball from different angles, look comfortable making accurate throws both inside and outside the pocket, and rip defenses to shreds with his feet, Keim felt torn. “For a lot of reasons,” Keim says, “I didn’t want to like [him].”
A year earlier, Keim had traded the 15th pick, along with third- and fifth-round selections, to move up to draft UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen 10th overall. Taking Murray would be Keim’s second significant admission of failure in four months. The GM had already fired head coach Steve Wilks in December, following a single disastrous 3-13 season, and replaced him with Kingsbury. If Keim moved on from Rosen, he’d be conceding that each major decision the franchise had made in the past year was a mistake. Aware of the flogging he’d endure, Keim and the Cardinals rolled the dice on Murray anyway. “Taking this guy no. 1, I took a lot of grief for that,” Keim says with a sigh. “You have to make the tough decisions and avoid the outside noise— ‘Why’d you give up on this guy? Why would you trade this guy?’ … It’s unprecedented. I took [Rosen] in the top 10. I just felt that [Murray] was a generational talent that I just couldn’t pass up.”
The decision to ride with Murray (and trade Rosen to the Dolphins for the 62nd overall pick) isn’t all that’s unprecedented about the 2019 Cardinals. This season, Arizona will take the NFL’s two hippest trends—the proliferation of college’s Air Raid principles throughout the league, and teams’ searches for the next play-calling wunderkind—to their extremes. In reshaping the franchise, Arizona took a chance on the second 5-foot-10 starting quarterback since the NFL merger and a 40-year-old offensive mastermind who went 35-40 as a college head coach. A new era of the NFL has arrived, and the Cardinals are about to test its limits.
After throwing for 11,937 yards in Mike Leach’s Air Raid offense at Texas Tech, Kingsbury was drafted in the sixth round by the Patriots in 2003. He spent the next six seasons bouncing around professional football before starting his college coaching career in 2008 as an assistant at Houston. During his time in the NFL, Kingsbury watched plodding offenses that seemed like polar opposites of the fast-paced scoring machines he piloted for Leach, and he couldn’t figure out why the league rejected Leach’s ideas out of hand. “There have been some wildly successful college teams that have spread it out and gone to work,” Kingsbury says. “So that was always a question to me of ‘Why is no one doing this?’”
There are several features of the NFL game, such as the closer hash marks and abundance of game-wrecking defenders, that would prevent a team from ever implementing a spread Air Raid scheme wholesale. But what confused Kingsbury most during his playing days were the lazy arguments coaches would use to avoid adopting some of the system’s simpler tenets. Fifteen years ago, the idea of using shotgun on a majority of plays would have seemed ridiculous. “Then you watch Kansas City, I think it was 85 percent [shotgun] last year,” Kingsbury says. “And they scored the most points in the history of the game.”
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Coaches like Andy Reid, Doug Pederson, and Freddie Kitchens have all helped encourage the flow of more Air Raid play designs into the NFL. But the Air Raid has always been more about a mind-set than a playbook. It emphasizes an openness to new ideas and execution over complicated schematics. And after decades of resisting innovation, NFL teams are finally embracing Air Raid philosophies like simplifying quarterback reads and spreading defenses out to find and exploit open grass. “It’s no secret that college offenses are—I’m not saying they are the NFL, but they’re morphing into the NFL more and more,” Keim says.
While other coaches are dipping their toes in the Air Raid waters, Kingsbury is about to become the first modern play-caller to dive in headfirst. After getting the job, he started to plan what his scheme would look like in the NFL and realized he wouldn’t have to throw out any of his core concepts. “We won’t throw it 88 times [a game] the way we did with Mahomes,” Kingsbury says. “But I don’t think there’s a staple that jumped out to me” that the team couldn’t use.
Kingsbury’s challenge will be filtering those Air Raid principles through an NFL- and Cardinals-specific lens. Luckily, one benefit of this system is that it’s easily tailored to different rosters and personnel packages. Kingsbury primarily used four wide receivers and no tight ends at Texas Tech, but Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley uses the same basic system with two tight ends on the field.
Many of the Air Raid’s passing concepts should be easily translatable to the current NFL, but the chasm between college and professional running games is much wider. To ease this part of the transition, the Cardinals brought in former Broncos offensive line coach Sean Kugler to help Kingsbury shape his rushing attack to the restrictions of the NFL. Tweaks to some of the protection schemes have also been necessary. In the Big 12, Kingsbury was free to leave offensive linemen in precarious positions because few college defenders were talented enough to sabotage a play on their own. That isn’t an option when facing Aaron Donald twice a year. “There was a lot of experimentation in the spring, and there still will be,” Kingsbury says. “There are gonna be a lot of ups and downs as we figure out what we can do and what we can’t do offensively. But when you have a guy who can run it and throw it, you can turn a bad play into a good play really quick.”
A lot of people point to the record. But when you really break down the bare bones of the offensive success and the players who’ve been associated with that, it just is what it is.Kliff Kingsbury
There will likely be some fits and starts as Kingsbury learns how to properly configure his scheme, but Murray could be the great equalizer. He has a history with this system after playing under Riley at Oklahoma and Kevin Sumlin at Texas A&M, and he’s shown a strong grasp of Kingsbury’s version since OTAs this spring. During the team’s first practice, Murray stepped to the line, saw a coverage that Kingsbury had merely glossed over in meetings that morning, and executed a check that the team hadn’t even learned. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know if anyone else on the field knows that,’” Kingsbury says. “And I said, all right, this kid sees it, and on the level I want him to see it. And that means [having] an attacking mentality where if you see something better than what we’ve got called, get into it, and let’s go.” More than specific route concepts or play designs, Murray’s familiarity with the ethos and the mechanics of Kingsbury’s system has accelerated the Cardinals’ overall mastery of it. “To be able to process so many things at once and look at the defense and execute the play, it’s a lot,” Kingsbury says. “All he’s done his entire life is no-huddle spread stuff. So he feels really confident in that.”
Keim insists that in 21 years of scouting players, he’s never studied one with Murray’s combined running and throwing abilities. He pulls out his phone and scrolls to a video he saved early in training camp that shows Murray completing a perfectly lofted fade about 40 yards down the right sideline. That sort of stunning moment has become a daily occurrence. “I guess time will tell,” Keim says about whether Murray will be able to transfer his college prowess to the NFL. “But I certainly like the early returns.”
Kingsbury first heard there was interest in him as an NFL head coach in December. Even a few weeks earlier, that notion would have seemed absurd: He’d recently been fired from Texas Tech after a 5-7 season (the program’s third consecutive sub-.500 year).
The sought-after offensive mind wasn’t out of work long: USC tapped him as its next offensive coordinator just 10 days later. For a renowned play-caller who struggled to build a complete team in Lubbock, the move made sense. He could focus on the aspect of the game where he’s most valuable and ignore the rest. But despite his losing record over six seasons as a Big 12 head coach, NFL teams came calling around the New Year. Just 34 days after taking the gig at USC, Kingsbury was announced as the Cardinals’ next head coach.
Kingsbury gets why people might think that he skipped the line and that his results in college didn’t warrant his failing upward. But he wasn’t surprised at the NFL interest, either. He feels that his strengths perfectly align with the ones that teams have started to value most. “A lot of people point to the record, and I understand that completely,” Kingsbury says. “But when you really break down the bare bones of the offensive success and the players who’ve been associated with that, it just is what it is.”
In its worst season under Kingsbury, Texas Tech averaged 30.5 points per game. Twice, the Red Raiders topped 40 per game and finished as a top-five scoring team in FBS. In 2016, Texas Tech’s Patrick Mahomes–led offense averaged 566.6 yards per game. “When you look at the production the offense had when he was calling it, it was mind-blowing,” Keim says. “And more than that, when you take a deeper dive, he was doing it at Texas Tech with less talent against schools who could way out-recruit him. They were getting five-star, four-star players at Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, and he’s still scoring 48 points per game and putting up over 500 yards per game.” With eight years of experience, Kingsbury had significantly more play-calling reps than each candidate that Arizona interviewed—all of them offensive coaches who intended to be the team’s play-caller.
He’s like a grandpa. He gets in at 4 o’clock in the morning, and every time I walk down to his office, all he does is watch film and draw plays up.Steve Keim
The loudest criticism of Kingsbury as a head coach was that he was too focused on his offense at Texas Tech to build a competent defense. Keim, for his part, felt that concern was overstated as it related to the NFL. Arizona could pair him with a seasoned defensive coordinator (the franchise landed on former Broncos head coach Vance Joseph), and after talking to several defensive players from Texas Tech, Keim felt comfortable in Kingsbury’s ability to lead an entire locker room. “They thought he was a guy that had enough of a swag to him that the players respected him,” Keim says. “They looked to him for advice. He didn’t just concentrate on the offensive side of the ball.”
Most important to Keim, though, was Kingsbury’s track record with grooming quarterbacks. Mahomes threw for 5,052 yards and 41 touchdowns in his final college season under Kingsbury in 2016. Before Baker Mayfield transferred to Oklahoma in late 2013, he played one season for Kingsbury and threw for 2,315 yards in just eight games, despite an occasionally adversarial relationship with his head coach. The two most exciting young quarterbacks in the NFL were players that Kingsbury sought out and taught. “Our mind-set was to hire a guy who was a play-caller and someone who could develop the quarterback position, regardless of who the quarterback was,” Keim says.
Among all the potential coaches Arizona interviewed, Kingsbury was the only one to ask Keim for film of last year’s Cardinals. When he arrived in the desert for his meeting with team brass, Kingsbury brought reams of handwritten notes about topics that ranged from Rosen’s footwork to how he’d improve certain concepts within the Cardinals offense to the ways he’d mold his system around the team’s personnel. The initial plan was crafted for Rosen, but with Murray now in place, Kingsbury’s history with quarterbacks and schematic background have become even more useful.
Keim understands what an outsider’s perspective of Kingsbury might be. With his perfectly coiffed hair, permanent stubble, and chiseled jaw, he looks more like an A-list actor than an NFL coach. During a Q&A session at an event for season-ticket holders this offseason, a woman stood up and asked Keim if he’d hired Kingsbury because he was good-looking. “I told her no,” Keim says, “but that I did look a hell of a lot better standing next to Bruce Arians.” Kingsbury can wear the heck out of a pair of designer shades and could easily be mistaken for Ryan Gosling in the right light, but Keim says that the person he’s gotten to know couldn’t be less Hollywood. “I don’t know whether people thought he was a playboy and likes to have fun or whatever,” Keim says. “But he’s like a grandpa. He gets in at 4 o’clock in the morning, and every time I walk down to his office, all he does is watch film and draw plays up.” He says that Kingsbury’s cave at the Cardinals’ facility is littered with hand-drawn play designs, the Pepe Silvia obsession in football form.
Nearly half the teams in the NFL seemed to be searching for their own version of Sean McVay this offseason, and Kingsbury may be the most shameless example. The two have been friends for years, and McVay even tried to lure Kingsbury to the Rams as an offensive consultant after he was let go by Texas Tech—a point that the Cardinals were sure to mention in their initial announcement after Kingsbury was hired. The NFL is a reactionary league, and right now the Cardinals are chasing trends harder than any other team in football. A year after Mayfield proved that an undersize Air Raid QB from Oklahoma could be a viable option at the game’s highest level, Arizona drafted one with the first overall pick. Nine days after McVay’s team capped off a 13-3 regular season, the Cardinals hired their own play-calling head coach—a coach that happens to run an offense that’s never been more popular among the NFL ranks.
Pivoting hard to the hot new fad carries inherent risk, and Keim understands that. “Who wants to have the no. 1 pick?” Keim says. “I know I never want to have it again. And if we do, I’m not gonna be here.” The Cardinals are about to try a formula that no team in the NFL has ever attempted. In Keim’s mind, it was the bet they had to make.