A lot of people say they “use AI”but depending on what they actually mean, it could make a world of difference. For example: Dorothy Ann Totenberg, a fictional 80-year-old community librarian from Powder Creek, Kans., may have been trained to “use AI” to generate book recommendations for patrons seeking similar titles to the ones they’ve already enjoyed (even though, sidenote, I bet AI sucks at this).
FBI agent Darian Martinez, a fictional member of the bureau’s deeply secret special forces team, may also “use AI” to hunt down an international criminal posing as a street vendor in Bangladesh, pinning his location to within a dime’s length of where he is standing at an exact moment and triggering the dispatch of Seal Team 31 to silently wipe that person off the face of the earth.
One version of AI is far more powerful, capable and lethal than another, even though we refer to all of it under the painfully broad umbrella of artificial intelligence.
The same can be said for NFL offenses, specifically the “Kyle Shanahan offense” and the “Sean McVay offense.” A lot of teams are now able to say that they run a version of the Sean McVay or Kyle Shanahan offense. In fact, about 50% of the NFL, not including McVay and Shanahan themselves, can claim to be part of that painfully broad umbrella. When, in actuality, folks like Shanahan and McVay are constantly changing the parameters of what their offense truly is; stretching it beyond its current form, molding it into something new, breaking it down and building it into some other animatron that is different and hopefully stronger and more relevant than the last version.
What some of the other teams are doing—again, not all—is essentially running the Microsoft Clippy version of the offense, which, until very recently, has still been shockingly effective. They are, in this very convoluted metaphor, Ms. Totenberg (she is single, having devoted her life to books).
My parting shot for this portion of the NFL offseason is this: I think part of the reason some defenses have gained such an edge over the past few years is that some versions of this offense became very predictable. This is because they were not evolved upon and tailored more to their team’s given personnel. So whatever McVay or Shanahan parlor trick the offense was working with—let’s say, for example, utilizing a heavier, more physical wide receiver as a blocker so a team could act like it was in 12-personnel when it was really in 11-personnel, conflicting a defense that is screwed either by putting a heavier personnel on the field or a lighter personnel to match—it became more like any other innovation that we now view as banal. It also became predictable, at least outside of the hands of those who made it magical in the first place. Defenses could draft better hybrid defenders to make each personnel grouping less vulnerable.
That brings me to the NFL draft and free agency, where the buzz word of the moment is 13-personnel (an offensive set with three tight ends). The Rams started as an almost exclusively 11-personnel team (one running back, one tight end, three receivers) under McVay and, over the years, the NFL became an exclusively 11-personnel league. Now that the Rams are finding an edge with tight end-heavy formations—L.A. ran the formation twice as often as the next closest team, the Steelers, and had a collective EPA of more than 77, which is three times as effective as the next-best 13-personnel team and about 15 times as effective as the average NFL team running the same formation.
So, what did a lot of teams do? They overdrafted tight ends and, while maybe not overpaying—Isaiah Likely landed about $6 million south of the high water mark set by George Kittle—did lift the positional tide for the foreseeable future with a couple of hefty contracts for some middle-tier players.
This, to try to simply install whatever the basic version of the package Sean McVay had success with the year prior and every defensive coordinator has spent the offseason brushing up on.
And while that is admirable, I will point out that the only Shanahan and McVay offenses that made it past the first round of the playoffs last year were either piloted by Shanahan, McVay or Klint Kubiak, whose father, Gary, deserves coheadline billing of the Shanahan offense as well. Most of the McVay and Shanahan–lite offenses were wiped out.
I would imagine that, barring a vast evolution in 13-personnel, what we will be seeing from a lot of NFL teams is a rushed transition toward heavier goal line-looking sets, with only about half of them actually capable of weaponizing it. And I would also predict with some degree of certainty that the Rams’ efficacy on 13-personnel dwindles, along with the collective efficacy of every NFL team. That’s not some crystal ball prophecy, that’s understanding that literally every defensive coordinator in the NFL took home a volume of Rams 13-personnel tape thicker than your library VHS copy of Titanic. (Three tapes! Three!)
This, on top of the growing mastery of the basic Shanahan and McVay book of spells (now able to be studied Year 1 at Hogwarts), would seem to foreshadow another year of defensive dominance, or at least another year where league-wide numbers are down from the highwater marks of the modern offensive revolution era, which took place in 2019 and ’20. While the NFL isn’t losing sleep over a league that is collectively gaining about 30 fewer yards per game than it was five years ago—despite having literally every mechanism in the rule book designed to aid offensive football—I’m hoping that NFL offenses are.
If your strategy is to simply copy off the smartest kids in class, you’re in for a rude awakening in 2026. Or, at the very least, you’ll feel a bit more like Dorothy, whose Microsoft Copilot search just accidentally recommended Fifty Shades of Grey to a fellow octogenarian from her church group based on a Copilot query for “love stories.”
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CONOR ORR
Conor Orr is a Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated with more than 15 years of experience covering the NFL. His work has been cited in Best American Sportswriting and has won a PFWAA award. Prior to Sports Illustrated, he covered both the Giants and Jets for The Star-Ledger. Conor lives in New Jersey with his amazing wife and three children.
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