I must admit: when the Arizona Cardinals hired Kliff Kingsbury to be their new head coach, I got a little giddy.

Kingsbury, an innovative offensive mind, spent the past six seasons as the head coach at his alma mater, Texas Tech. Over his tenure with the Red Raiders, Kingsbury’s offenses were top 25 in the country in scoring for all but his second season in 2014 when they ranked 55th. In 2015 and 2016, Texas Tech was in the top 5 during now NFL star Patrick Mahomes’s final two seasons at the school.

Kingsbury’s time in Lubbock eventually ended after Texas Tech’s 2018 season ended with 5 straight losses, finishing 5-7, the school’s third straight losing season. Texas Tech’s defenses were largely to blame, only finishing inside the top 100 in the country three times during Kingsbury’s tenure.

Kingsbury was notorious for not being fond of the recruiting process, but was competitive in homes, especially when it came to the recruits’ moms. In 2014, he leaned into his own good looks saying, “You’ve got to play to your strengths… It’s part of the deal.”

Being at Texas Tech, rather than other nearby powers like Oklahoma or Texas, Kingsbury always struggled in the recruiting landscape, especially defensively which led to his teams having a hard time competing despite their prolonged offensive success. Interestingly enough, Texas Tech finished their 2018 season with a +75-scoring margin over their opponents, despite a sub-.500 record.

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Arizona clearly dialed in on Kingsbury for a few standout reasons. Probably the biggest one wears a big number 3 across his chest and that’s Josh Rosen. After a pretty rocky debut season, there’s a lot of question marks around Rosen, but I think he did enough to show that in a Kingsbury system, he has the ability to excel.

Rosen was at his best when he wasn’t responsible for making long, drawn out, surveying-the-field decisions. He was at his best when there was a pre-snap plan, and he knew where the receiver would be, and he knew he could let go of the ball within the first few seconds that the ball is in his hands – because everyone knows how much time the line in front of him was allowing.

Rosen, in his rookie year, showed the ability to place the ball into tight windows in tight coverage. There are going to be very few times within Kingsbury’s offense that Rosen ever even needs to do that. His offense revolves around quick throws, pre-snap plans, and backup plans having backup plans.

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It sounds rudimentary for an offense to play to the quarterback’s strengths the way Kingsbury would play to his good looks on his recruiting trail, but that rudimentary element is something Rosen didn’t have under Mike McCoy and Byron Leftwich, his offensive coordinators in his rookie season.

I spent a good portion of the Tuesday night before Kingsbury was officially introduced to local media in Phoenix watching as much tape of the Kingsbury-Texas Tech experience as I could. What I found was not in the slightest bit surprising when the term “offensive genius” was thrown around.

On nearly every single offensive snap, the entire team knew exactly what the plan was and exactly what their job was and the exact timing of what’s happening at each moment. The beautiful thing about this no-brainer thing is that even when the offense seemed deliberate and very focused to the point of the defense being able to say “yeah, this is where this play is going,” they still wouldn’t be able to do anything about it just because of the play design.

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Kingsbury’s offensive prowess was another major reason he stood out from the other candidates for Arizona. The way he uses pre-snap motion is exactly the way it’s meant to be used. When the motion man isn’t the target touch of the play, he’s a conscious decoy of the play-call meant to drag a certain defender a couple of feet one way or another simply to allow just enough room to open for a play to develop and turn into a significant gain.

In the last few years, the NFL has trended towards a more offensive-based game. It started with quarterbacks who could throw it all over the yard like late-stage Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, and Tom Brady who were given the keys to the field and the allowance to operate.

The movement was further pushed by coaches like Sean McVay with the Los Angeles Rams, who Kingsbury has gotten many comparisons to for better or for worse, and Doug Pedersen with the Philadelphia Eagles, who just won a Super Bowl and is in contention for another. Pedersen won his Super Bowl by perfectly exploiting the spacing on the field and using decoys to occupy space to pull out defenders to make room for what’s really the emphasis of the play.

Control of spacing is exactly what Kingsbury will use to get the most out of weapons like David Johnson and Christian Kirk while making Josh Rosen’s life as easy as possible. Which is especially helpful since in his rookie season, Rosen threw into tight coverage 21.6% of the time, which is more than any other quarterback in the NFL. While he shoulders part of that blame, along with a receiving group that was near the bottom of the league, it will certainly help to have a guy like Kingsbury designing the offense from this point forward.

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Don’t get me wrong. I know there are some drawbacks to the type of system Kingsbury is planning on running in the NFL with Arizona. The Big 12 is certainly not known for defense whereas the NFL has the best defenses the game has to offer and facing them week in and week out will certainly pose a problem for Kingsbury and his staff.

For example, a staple of the Kingsbury offense is the single-step drop-back wide receiver screen, which when done right, takes about a second or two to execute. If the defensive back playing across from the target receiver is playing press man (meaning right at the line of scrimmage), there’s a decent chance that ball is coming back the other way for a touchdown just because of how smart, quick, and reactionary today’s defensive backs can be.

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To me, Kingsbury’s biggest challenge, however, will be this first offseason he has with the team. Arizona has found their guy at head coach, but there is still much work to be done. Next on the priority list is finding a man who can coach the defense as brilliantly as Kingsbury has the potential to coach the offense.

Although no names have been circulating among the verified rumor mill, I have my eyes on current Dallas Cowboys defensive backs coach Kris Richard, though there’s a good chance he could have a head coaching job by the end of the week. Richard has really turned the Cowboys defense into a force to be reckoned with that completely shut down the New Orleans Saints offense a few weeks ago when it seemed like no one else could, while helping the defense to be the driving force that pushed Dallas into the playoffs, as well as get them a win in the first round and the potential to go further.

I also really like the idea of bringing in Gregg Williams, who was just relieved of his duties in Cleveland after leading the Browns to a 5-3 record as the interim head coach. Williams was let go in favor of the offensive play-caller, Freddie Kitchens, for his relationship with their quarterback of the future, Baker Mayfield. Williams is the same coach who nearly a decade ago was let go from the New Orleans Saints defensive coordinator job and blacklisted from the league for a short time for fostering a bounty hunting system against opposing quarterbacks. Williams has head coaching experience and, after the showing in Cleveland the last eight weeks of the season, would be a good fit in the “total control of a defense” role that Kingsbury needs out of his defensive coordinator.

After finding a defensive coordinator, Arizona has an important draft to focus on. They were bad enough this past season to earn the top overall pick, which, obviously, comes with a lot of power. The presumption is that if they were to keep the pick, they would take defensive lineman, pass rushing force Nick Bosa, who is also the younger brother of Los Angeles Chargers star at the same position Joey Bosa. Arizona should seriously think about trading the pick, though, in favor of more draft picks to re-tool for the future by moving to a position to acquire offensive linemen, like Alabama’s Jonah Williams, or skill players, like Arizona State’s N’Keal Harry, and stockpiling extra picks.

After the draft, Arizona has a lot of cap space to work with in free agency, which should be mostly spent on offensive linemen, and overpaying as needed. Rosen has got to be protected and given enough this year and beyond if they want any chance at competing for playoff participation and success.

If all goes well this summer, I see a quick turnaround for Arizona being very realistic and very possible behind Kliff Kingsbury’s leadership.