It’s difficult to get NFL fans to agree on anything. It’s harder still to get those in the stats community and the “traditional” fans to find common ground on a given topic. But that’s about to change, and we may have new Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury to thank.

Kingsbury’s “Air Raid” offense, known for its pass-happy, aggressive approach to the game, was not (we don’t think) borne out of in-depth statistical analysis. The philosophy, created by Hal Mumme and Mike Leach and pushed forward by guys like Dana Holgorsen, Lincoln Riley and Kingsbury in recent years, was built to try and push the tempo in the college game and make exciting offense simpler for young players.

It’s also an offense that looks an awful lot like the type of offense that numbers guys — which I guess I include myself in that category — have been advocating for recently.

Whether or not Kingsbury — or any of the coaches from the Air Raid lineage — have consciously embraced the findings of the NFL’s ever-expanding analytics hive doesn’t really matter. The fact remains, Kingsbury’s offensive strategy, intentionally or not, is in lockstep with many of the theories put forth by stat nerds over the last few years.

Kingsbury has seen (some) success with the Air Raid in college. If he finds success with the Cardinals offense in the NFL, he will be making a powerful argument for the stats-based approach to offense in the NFL … whether or not he even knows it’s an argument he’s making.

* * *

We’ll start with a more and more widely-held belief in the NFL analytics community: Running the ball is a fool’s errand in almost every situation. It’s been proven that offensive efficiency is the most significant factor in deciding the outcome of an NFL game, and passing is the most efficient way to move the ball. Whether it’s DVOA or Expected Points Added (EPA) or whatever advanced metric you prefer, they all come to the same conclusion: You pass, and pass often, to win games.

I doubt Mumme, Leach or Kingsbury spent a lot of time reading Football Outsiders or FiveThirtyEight when devising their schemes but they all seem to understand that concept. Leach’s Washington State and Kingsbury’s Texas Tech ranked first and fourth, respectively, in passing percentage during the 2018 season. That’s a good way to win the hearts of the analytical community.

When Kingsbury did run the ball at Tech, an option (or several options) to pass was almost always included in the call. I’m talking, of course, about run-pass options (RPOs), which have infiltrated the NFL over the last few seasons. Study film from Kingsbury’s time in Lubbock and you won’t find very many running plays without a passing option attached. “RPO” is used as a catch-all term, but there are several different types of RPOs and Kingsbury’s Tech teams ran them all.

There are those based on a pre-snap count of defenders in the box, where the quarterback knows before the ball is snapped whether he will hand it off or pass it. There are also true RPOs where the quarterback reads a certain defender after the snap and picks the run or pass option based on his movement. The following play hinges on what the linebacker, highlight in yellow, does after the snap. If he drifts to the left of the QB, the QB keeps the ball on a designed run to the right. If the linebacker sniffs out that run — because he’ll see the pulling tackle and guards — then the QB quickly throws a swing pass to his left … into space vacated by the linebacker.

Here’s an example where the linebacker, No. 18, immediately drifts to his left. The QB reads it and throws the swing pass for a TD.

There are also RPOs that are just based on the leverage of a certain defender in coverage. If what’s known as a “free access throw” or “gift route” was available Texas Tech was going to take the easy yardage regardless of the numbers.

In this example, the cornerback appears to be playing zone, so he steps back rather than engaging the receiver. That triggers the QB to throw that route.

Some Texas Tech play designs even featured a combination of RPOs…

The aim of the RPO, and similar concepts like a zone read run, is to manipulate the numbers in the box. By reading a defender, an offense is, in essence, blocking that defender with the quarterback. On a traditional run play, the offense is playing 10-on-11 because the defense does not have to worry about the quarterback. Allowing the QB to read a player evens up the numbers. If you can use the quarterback as the runner on those RPO plays, now the offense has a numbers advantage, which explains why Kingsbury had his heart set on drafting Kyler Murray to run his offense.

Kingsbury has said that his offense in Arizona will look a lot like the one Murray ran under Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma, where the 2018 Heisman Trophy winner was a major factor in the Sooners’ expansive run game. One of Riley’s favorite tactics was using Murray as the running option on RPO calls, which presented Big XII defenses with all sorts of issues because of his equal strengths as a runner and passer.

Here Murray has the option to throw a quick screen to his wide out, but because the defensive back stays home and would be in good position to make a tackle the QB opts instead to go the other way on a well-designed counter run.

Option runs and RPOs are a great way to run the ball more efficiently, but they aren’t the only ways to do so, as the stat nerds discovered in their ongoing campaign to convince the football world that Running Backs Don’t Matter™.

Josh Hermsmeyer of FiveThirtyEight found that, regardless of the talent level of the offense, the two most important factors in determining the result of a run attempt are field position and the number of defenders in the box.

Via FiveThirtyEight:

“[I]f all you know about a running play in the NFL is the approximate field position of a team and the number of defenders near the line of scrimmage, you’re able to predict the leaguewide yards per carry with an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy: 96 percent of yards-per-carry totals are explained by the offense’s field position and the number of men the opponent has in the box. How many defenders are in the box is almost certainly the most important factor in determining rushing success in football.”

He also found that the increased usage of three-receiver sets in recent years coincided with the increase in plays in which the defense deployed six or fewer defenders in the box. That makes sense: If the offense takes a tight end or running back off the field and replaces him with a receiver outside, the defense would have to walk a defender out there to cover him.

In other words, the offense can largely dictate how many defenders are in the box based on the personnel it puts out on the field. Taking it a logical step forward, by playing more receivers and forcing the defense to take players out of the run box, the offense can run the ball more efficiently.

What does that have to do with Kingsbury? Well, only one Power 5 team ran out of 10 personnel — 1 RB, 0 TEs, 4 WRs — more than his Red Raiders, and that was Leach’s Washington State. According to Sports Info Solutions, Texas Tech ran the ball out of 10 personnel 199 times (NFL teams ran out of 10p only 79 times in 2018) for an average of 4.6 yards-per-carry, which ranked fourth among Power 5 schools. And that was without a major run threat at quarterback for a majority of the season.

Based on Hermsmeyer’s findings, if NFL teams want to run the ball efficiently, the best way to do that is to take their tight ends off the field and employ more 10 personnel, which Kingsbury is already doing.

(Quick tangent: If you have one of the few tight ends who truly impact a game — I’m talking a player like Gronk — then, by all means, never take him off the field. If you don’t, then you’re better off playing another receiver. I’ll let 10 personnel enthusiast Mike Leach take it from there:

“Tight ends are a blast if you have them,” Leach said in 2017. “If you have a true tight end – and I mean a true tight end – then life is good. God didn’t make very many true tight ends. Just go to the mall and the big long-armed guys you see at the mall – you’ll see a couple, but most of them can’t run fast and those that can probably can’t catch. So there’s not very many of them. You desperately want that big-body guy that can block but also catch balls and is big enough that he’s a mismatch on the strong safety but nifty enough that he’s a better athlete than the linebacker. So you’re constantly looking for those guys and the trouble is, as you’re sitting there pushing it too far, pretty soon you end up playing the third-team guard that can sort of catch, but all he is the third-team guard.”)

To test that hypothesis, I compared the Expected Points Added (EPA) for all plays during the 2018 season with no tight ends on the field, one tight end on the field and two tight ends on the field. It turns out that teams are generally more efficient when there are fewer tight ends on the field (the spike in pass EPA with 2 TEs is likely attributable to the fact that defenses matched that set with base defense, leaving exploitable matchups for throws; defenses are starting to adjust to that trend by deploying nickel in those situations more often.)

Since 2016, NFL teams have run out of 10 personnel and produced an EPA of 0.1 per attempt while producing an average EPA of -0.028 on all runs during the 2018 season. If a team is going to run, it should do so out of spread formations that force the defense to put more defensive backs on the field.

The numbers bode well for Kingsbury if he plans on continuing to base out of 10 personnel. It’s important to note that his personnel usage evolved over his time in Lubbock and, by 2018, the Red Raiders were employing sets featuring multiple backs and/or tight ends. But Kingsbury wasn’t trotting out traditional tight ends and fullbacks onto the field. Instead, he used hybrid players who blurred the lines between personnel groupings, making it difficult for defenses to match those sets. His “fullback,” or B-back in his terminology, was FB/TE hybrid Tyler Carr. His “tight end” was Donta Thompson, who’s listed on Texas Tech’s website as a wide receiver/tight end.

The Cardinals likely brought Charles Clay in to play the “B-back” role. The former Bill was drafted as a fullback and enjoyed his best season as an H-back with the Dolphins before moving to tight end full time in 2014. Kingsbury mentioned Clay’s positional versatility when discussing his role in the offense.

“Clay is such a versatile player,” Kingsbury said at the NFL combine. “I was at the University of Houston and we played against him in Tulsa and I’ve always been enamored with the different ways he can be used, whether it’s in the backfield blocking or you can hand him the ball. He can be a matchup at wide receiver. He can just do a lot of things.”

The tight end role will likely be played by Ricky Seal-Jones, a converted receiver with Air Raid experience. But if Kingsbury really wants to stress out defenses trying to match his personnel, he could use Larry Fitzgerald, one of the better blockers at the receiver position, in the tight end role or groom rookie Hakeem Butler for it. Butler actually trained some as a tight end at Iowa State before the 2018 season and at least one NFL team asked him to work out at the position during the NFL combine.

Butler would likely have to bulk up if he’s going to play that role full-time but he and Thompson have nearly identical body proportions, and the Iowa State product was a willing and physical blocker during his time in Ames.

Imagine this: The Cardinals put Fitzgerald, Butler, Clay, Christian Kirk and David Johnson out on the field. How do you match up with that? Do you treat Clay as a fullback or tight end? Is Butler a tight end or receiver? What happens if Johnson lines up wide, where he’s been one of the most effective receiving backs in the league? There’s going to be a bad matchup somewhere if you’re not in dime (which most defenses aren’t equipped for extended stretches) and if you do put seven defensive backs on the field, you could have Clay, Fitzgerald and Butler as capable blockers in the box going up against cornerbacks who aren’t paid to take on blocks and make tackles.

Combine Kingsbury’s preference for four-receiver sets and his use of hybrid players, and the Cardinals will be running the ball in optimal situations almost exclusively. If the defense isn’t willing to give up those inviting run looks, Kingsbury will gladly take advantage of the space outside and throw the ball 50 times a game.

He might just do that anyway. Kingsbury isn’t the type of coach who is only looking to stay “on schedule” and get into “third-and-manageable” situations, as so many pro coaches mistakenly do. And that’s backed by the numbers: Among Power 5 teams, only Michigan State passed the ball more often on second-and-long (eight or more yards to go) than Texas Tech did in 2018, according to Sports Info Solutions. You won’t be seeing very many “run-run-pass” sequences from the Cardinals in 2019, which will appease the nerds who have proven how futile such a strategy is.

If you’re having flashbacks to 2013, when the hype surrounding Chip Kelly’s arrival at the pro level was unbearable, I don’t blame you. But Kelly didn’t fail because of his new ideas, which old school fans dismissed as gimmicks before they dramatically transformed the league; he failed because he wasn’t capable of adapting and evolving his simplistic scheme. Take Kelly’s run game, for instance. It essentially consisted of three plays: Inside zone, outside zone and the pin-and-pull sweep. Defenses caught on to his formational tendencies and Kelly couldn’t adjust. Before long, opposing players were calling out his plays before the ball was snapped, which is less than ideal.

That won’t be a problem for Kingsbury, whose offense is as multiple as any as you’ll find in the NFL. Kingsbury will pull guards from all angles. He’ll send his blockers one way and toss it the other way in order get his back into space, which ought to make David Johnson happy after he spent all of 2018 running up the gut against stacked boxes.

Kingsbury is not your traditional Air Raid coach who’s running only inside and outside zone. While he’ll still run his fair share of zone concepts, his run designs are more choreographed. According to Sports Info Solutions, only Oklahoma ran more plays with pulling guards among Power 5 teams. At the bottom of the list? Mike Leach and Washington State. Kingsbury is an Air Raid coach, but his version of the system is built for the pros.

The same goes for the passing game. You’ll find all of the Air Raid staples in Kingsbury’s playbook — Mesh, Y-Cross, 4-Verts, etc. — but he adds different elements to them on a week-to-week basis in order to exploit his opponent’s defense. Those gameplan-based tweaks are what separate a successful college offense and a successful pro offense. It’s also the kind of stuff that gets the “I’ll wait until I see the all-22” crowd all hot and bothered.

Scheme and play-calling alone won’t guarantee success for Kingsbury. Roster management, his ability to lead a locker room full of adults and other factors will be equally important, so who knows if Kingsbury will win in Arizona. But winning may not be his greatest achievement.

Kingsbury has the scheme and philosophical approach to pull off a far more impressive feat: Bringing the nerds and football guys together.

Other apps just deliver sports. The USA TODAY Sportswire app lets you pick specific team sites to get only the news that you want to know.

newsletter Get 10 hot stories each day Thanks for signing up.

Please check your email for a confirmation. Thanks for signing up.

Please check your email for a confirmation.