Why NFL offenses are going under center more often in 2026

A trend that had been a popular topic of conversation over the summer in buildings around the NFL was even more prevalent in Week 1 than I would have expected.

During the offseason, organizations that have a track record of operating out of the shotgun or pistol with mobile quarterbacks made plans to move that QB under center. The Commanders, Eagles and Ravens hired new offensive coordinators in David Blough, Sean Mannion and Declan Doyle, respectively, who come from offensive trees built around under-center play. And the Vikings signed Kyler Murray, who had spent the vast majority of his college and pro careers working in the shotgun, and spent training camp working on his ability to read the field, take drops and throw from under center.

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Some of these organizations committed more aggressively than others in Week 1, and in the Vikings’ case, the plans were thrown off by a first-quarter concussion to Murray. On a leaguewide basis, though, teams took snaps from under center at the highest rate since 2012.

Why are NFL teams shifting back toward getting under center? Who benefited the most in Week 1? And will this trend stick? Coaches will talk about their philosophies during the offseason, but now that offenses had to show their cards in Week 1, the move under center is one of the more dramatic changes we’ve seen from NFL offenses in years. Let’s cover how we got here and what might be next.

Jump to:
How did we get here?
Why the return to under center?
What’s missing from the approach?
Which teams have leaned in?
What’s next for this trend?

The path to shotgun (and back)

Let’s go back to 2007 and the 16-0 Patriots, who produced one of the best offenses in league history with a spread attack that looked little like the league’s other 31 attacks. Though the NFL had seen the “run and shoot” and K-Gun in the 1990s, those were perceived to be short-lived fads from a relatively small number of coaches.

But in ’07, more than 74% of Tom Brady’s dropbacks came from the shotgun, a figure that was nearly double the league average. The Patriots ran more than 49% of their snaps out of shotgun, a figure that would have been even higher if they hadn’t been blowing teams out in the second half and running out the clock for most of the season. Consider that in 2001, Brady’s first year as a starting quarterback, the Patriots had been in the shotgun just under 14% of the time.

The league as a whole was still primarily operating from under center in 2007. Even as the Patriots tore up the NFL, the other 31 offenses were in shotgun only about 26% of the time. Getting out from under center was more of a move for obvious passing situations like third-and-long or as part of a two-minute drill. On first-and-10 in 2007, NFL offenses were in shotgun only 15% of the time. The Patriots were there on 40% of their snaps.

Within five years, the league had shifted. During the 2012 season, NFL teams were under center just 54% of the time, down from 74% in 2007. And in 2013, the pendulum really swung. NFL teams took more snaps out of the shotgun or pistol (which had gained a foothold in the league after traveling with Colin Kaepernick from Nevada to San Francisco and being installed by Mike Shanahan and his staff of future head coaches in Washington for Robert Griffin) than they did from under center. That disparity continued to rise in the years to come, with both scoring and offensive efficiency gradually rising alongside.

By 2023, the shotgun craze peaked. Teams ran 71% of their offensive snaps from the shotgun or pistol and just 29% from under center, nearly one-third of where it had been in 2007. At the same time, though, offensive efficiency had cratered. Teams were scoring just under 22 points per game, down three points from the high-water mark of 2020. Vic Fangio-style defenses were spreading around the league, squeezing big plays away from offenses and daring them to run the ball. Teams grew more experienced dealing with some of the problems those three- and four-wideout sets presented.

And as a result, in the past few years, we’ve seen a shift back toward the football of years past. We’ve watched offenses lean into bigger personnel groupings with multiple tight ends and/or a fullback on the field, something I wrote about during the offseason in my piece on the Rams and their surprising shift to 13 personnel in the middle of the 2025 season. In part, that’s to push defenses out of nickel alignments and back to their base defense with four defensive backs, which would allow offenses to get back to tormenting linebackers with the passing game. The Seahawks exploited those base defense looks during last season’s run to the Super Bowl, and perhaps as a result, defenses were more aggressive about staying in their nickel defense against 12 and 13 personnel looks in Week 1 of the 2026 season.

We’ve also seen the league get under center more often. After a decade of heading toward the shotgun, the under-center rate took a small step forward from 29% in 2023 to 30.5% in 2024. In 2025, that rate rose more dramatically to 35%. And in Week 1 of 2026, NFL offenses were under center 42.5% of the time.

We’re suddenly back where we were in 2013 (42.2%) in terms of under-center rate. And as you might have noticed, that decision came with plenty of scoring. Teams averaged 24.7 points per game in Week 1, tying with 2012 for the highest-scoring opening week since the 1970 merger. Correlation isn’t necessarily causation, but offenses went under center at the highest rate in more than a decade and didn’t exactly suffer for their choice.

OK, so now you know how we got to what we saw in Week 1. But what benefits are teams hoping to realize from moving under center? How does it fit what defenses are showing? And what are the trade-offs?

The ‘why’ of going under center

If you ask NFL coaches why offenses are going under center, one answer invariably comes up: They want a more diverse and unpredictable run game. There are advantages to operating out of the shotgun, and we’ll get to them in a minute, but one of the disadvantages comes with what teams are able (or unable) to do on the ground. In the shotgun, running backs line up to the side of the quarterback, which both limits the types of run concepts offenses can run and makes the side to which they’ll ultimately run more predictable. Offensive architects have gotten more creative with motion to try to disguise some of those concepts, with blockers motioning in one direction pre-snap before immediately turning around and attempting to kick out a defender post-snap, but there are concepts where the timing just doesn’t really work from shotgun.

Take last season’s Seahawks, for example. Under center, Seattle ran all kinds of concepts, including inside zone and outside zone, power, counter, duo and a handful of other run schemes. When the Seahawks were in the pistol or shotgun, though, their run game (and the play-action attack that resulted) was almost always built around counter. If you can nail down what a team’s going to run by where the running back lines up, you can limit some of its offensive creativity.

Under center, the RB lines up directly behind the quarterback, which allows offenses to retain the ability to run to either side without needing to realign or shift personnel. It also helps create the timing needed to run outside zone concepts consistently and effectively. When Washington drafted Griffin in 2012 and attempted to mesh a Shanahan-style zone-rushing attack around the zone-read concepts the rookie had run at Baylor, the coaches installed the pistol to keep the back — usually Alfred Morris — directly behind Griffin as opposed to lining him up alongside him. Morris and Griffin combined for 2,428 rushing yards during their shared rookie campaign, but once Shanahan started working with more traditional QBs, he moved his offense back under center and stayed there more often than most other coaches.

That Shanahan zone running game also features in here. When the Patriots beat the Rams up and kept them from running their zone concepts and their play-action game by lining up in a 6-1 front in Super Bowl LIII, the league started to get away from what had been its most popular and admired run game. The 49ers had already begun to get more multiple with their run game, but the days of plugging in a late-round pick at running back and riding the zone scheme to a great rushing attack were numbered. The Rams eventually shifted their run game from a zone-rushing attack to a gap-heavy scheme, which changed both how they ran their passing game and where they invested in players, notably spending more at guard than they had during the early days of the Sean McVay era.

Moving back under center, teams like the Eagles and Commanders have reaffirmed their commitment to that zone run scheme as part of their playcallers’ new philosophies. Those teams already ran zone concepts as part of their broader run menu, but during their 2024 lead-up to the Super Bowl, the Eagles ran zone concepts about 47% of the time. In Week 1, with Mannion and new run game coordinator Ryan Mahaffey taking over the attack from departed offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland, the zone run rate rose to 56%.

The Commanders jumped from running zone concepts 37% of the time during their impressive 2024 season to 59% in Week 1 this year. Fangio, whose defensive philosophy to slow down those Rams offenses during his time with the Bears informed what the Patriots did in their Super Bowl win, was ready. The now-Eagles defensive coordinator rolled out that 6-1 front for a handful of snaps in Week 1, including a third-and-1 stop of Rachaad White on an under-center rush attempt in the first quarter.

While you can run play-action out of the shotgun or pistol, the hide-the-ball hard play-action from under center is also the preference of most coaches. Play-action rates for the two groupings might as well be on a different planet. Just 9.5% of dropbacks out of the pistol or shotgun in Week 1 came with a play-action fake attached. Under center, meanwhile, teams used play-action on more than 75% of their pass dropbacks. While we’re seeing more of the straight dropback pass game without play-action than we had in years past, teams are almost always pairing their under-center passes with a play fake.

That hard play-action drives better efficiency on passes from under center. Pass dropbacks from under center since 2021 have generated 0.11 EPA per play, while pass snaps from shotgun or pistol have generated 0.04 EPA per play. That’s roughly the difference between average plays run by the Bills and Giants in 2025. The vast majority of that difference, though, is a product of simply running play-action more often under center. If we just look at straight pass dropbacks without any play fakes, teams are basically identically efficient throwing out of shotgun, pistol or operating from under center by EPA per snap.

Offenses want more play-action to try and manipulate the wide amounts of zone coverage they’re seeing from opposing defenses. As recently as 2016, when ESPN’s coverage tracking data begins, teams were running more man coverage (55%) than zone (45%). Zone overtook man the following year, and perhaps owing to the influence of those Fangio-style schemes, teams are playing more and more zone each passing season. That zone coverage figure had jumped above 58% in 2025, and in Week 1 of this season, teams played zone on more than 60% of those opposing dropbacks.

The quality of that zone coverage has also improved. It’s extremely rare to see a team play static, spot-drop zone defense these days. Defenses have prioritized rangy cover linebackers over two-down run thumpers, and every team has gotten better about passing off routes and both identifying and matching to route distributions over the middle of the field. Safeties have improved in masking their responsibilities both pre- and post-snap. Defenses go out of their way to muddy the picture for quarterbacks in a way that simply wasn’t the case on a regular basis 10 or 20 years ago.

Under-center play-action is a natural response to those zone coverages. It’s much easier to move linebackers and create spaces to throw the in-breakers that Shanahan-style offenses crave to hit when you’re masking the ball and creating real uncertainty. And play-action is always going to be a bigger threat against zone coverage than man because more defenders have eyes on the quarterback. Man coverage defenders are primarily looking at their receivers, whereas zone coverage defenders are looking at the quarterback. They’re far more likely to be influenced by play fakes.

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What’s missing?

Naturally, there are disadvantages and trade-offs that come with moving under center. Some quarterbacks liked to be able to see the full field from a distance without being caught up in the chaos at the line of scrimmage. Quarterbacks can work play-action out of the pistol or shotgun while keeping their eyes downfield, which makes it harder for defenses to disguise or change their coverages. With under-center play-action, the quarterback’s back is turned as part of the play fake, and modern defenses attempt to use that small window to change the coverage picture for signal-callers.

There’s one other notable shift that has come with the move under center, though. As my colleagues on “NFL Live” noted this week, going under center is essentially taking the designed quarterback run game out of NFL playbooks. While QBs will still scramble or sneak, so many of the read concepts that players such as Lamar Jackson and Jalen Hurts have run during their time in the pros have to operate out of the shotgun or pistol. Teams are getting more reluctant about using those concepts with their quarterbacks, even if they’ve been successful in the past.

To put that in context, the peak of the designed quarterback run game in the NFL was 2022, when signal-callers around the NFL collectively averaged more than 31 designed runs per week out of the pistol or shotgun. Those plays averaged 6 yards per rush attempt. Nearly 54% of those runs were successes, and they generated 0.2 EPA per attempt. In addition to Jackson, Hurts and Murray, signal-callers such as Marcus Mariota, Josh Allen, Justin Fields, Daniel Jones and Malik Willis were all being used on designed runs multiple times per game.

In Week 1 this season, there were a grand total of 11 designed runs from quarterbacks. The vast majority of them were also designed to hit outside (with most teams running some version of what’s known as zone read escort, where a quarterback has the ability to hand the ball inside or break outside with a designed lead blocker).

While offenses were comfortable running players such as Allen, Cam Newton and Anthony Richardson Sr. on quarterback power, veer, counter bash and other read concepts that hit the interior in years past, virtually all of the limited QB run game we saw in Week 1 was designed to take a quarterback outside, away from the big bodies at the line of scrimmage. The only one who was employing designed runs hitting the interior was Cleveland’s Deshaun Watson, who led the league with a grand total of three designed runs during the opening week.

As you can imagine, teams are growing more anxious about putting the players with the most expensive contracts on the roster in harm’s way. Jackson has missed meaningful chunks of three seasons with injuries, while Hurts potentially missed out on an MVP award and was slowed by the end of past seasons by his own. Allen has somehow been able to stay on the field without missing time, but he was slowed by a broken foot at the end of the 2025 season.

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Even if those injuries didn’t necessarily come on designed runs, the extra hits those guys take is going to make any coach or front office executive concerned. Patrick Mahomes sustained a knee injury on a sneak and was knocked out of a playoff game when he was hit while running a speed option. And signal-callers who were drafted with the idea that they could be part of the quarterback run game, such as Trey Lance and Richardson, saw their development irreparably stalled by injuries. (Lance’s season-ending ankle injury in 2022 came on a counter read run concept.)

Yes, every football player is at risk of getting injured on any given snap, and quarterbacks can suffer serious injuries in the pocket. In years past, teams were willing to trade that increased risk for the benefits of an efficient, effective play. After that 2022 peak, though, the quarterback run game had grown less efficient. Last year, quarterbacks averaged 4.3 yards per carry on designed runs, which was comfortably the lowest figure we have going back to 2016. Their success rate (48.4%) was also at a decade low, while the EPA per play had fallen to 0.1. Those runs are still useful, but they’re nowhere near as efficient as they once were.

There are a few reasons why those runs are less effective now than they were a few years ago. One is the shift toward zone and toward adding more defensive backs on the field as part of the second level of defense. The speed those players add to the mix and the eyeballs they have on the backfield give teams a better shot at taking down quarterbacks. Edge defenders have also gotten much better at “feathering” read-option plays, where they manage to give credence to both the give or the keep without overcommitting to one or the other.

Edge defenders are also being taught to focus on the quarterback at the expense of the running back. There’s a better chance of a designed run or a scramble by a quarterback producing an explosive play than there is from a running back, especially if the quarterback is going to be in space or in position to throw as part of a play-action bootleg. We’ve seen this play out with the outside zone game and its most common play-action pass, which might be referred to as a naked, flood, sail or one of a range of different ideas that all form part of the same family of ideas.

In the Shanahan offense, they’re most commonly built off the outside zone concept and punishing the edge defender on the backside of the play, away from where the run is going to hit. That edge defender was usually unblocked or only partially blocked chasing down the line, which gave him a chance to catch the runner as they cut back and attempted to get upfield. The boot action fakes the handoff and sends the quarterback in the opposite direction from the run play, where they can scramble or hit one of three receivers flooding the other side of the field. Even when the ball is getting handed off to a running back, the threat of the play-action fake slowed down that backside edge rusher, making life easier for the offense.

At some point, defenses faced facts and adjusted. The outside zone runs were still effective, but defenses got better at dealing with them as they faced them on a weekly basis. And while those runs picked up 4 or 5 yards, the play-action fakes that came off the runs were more likely to average 8 or 9 yards per attempt. Defenses instructed their edge rushers to change their plan and ignore the run and go after the quarterback. If he handed it off, they would be down a man in run defense. If he kept the ball, well, the quarterback was going to be running for their life, which would create a sack, cause a throwaway or limit the boot game to a checkdown.

Offenses naturally adjusted back and vice versa, and Shanahan tree offenses have various solutions for how to handle that free rusher. But we’re seeing defenses make big-picture calculations about what they need to stop and build their philosophies accordingly. Every defense pays lip service to stopping the run, and it’s obviously important in key spots, but defenses would also rather allow a 5-yard run than a 15-yard completion. The threat of the play-action pass or of the quarterback scramble — the two most efficient offensive plays in football — is going to cause teams to key on the quarterback when there’s any sort of uncertainty about who’s getting the ball. That has led to more rushing efficiency from halfbacks at the expense of reduced effectiveness from QBs.

Is the quarterback run game out of the professional game for good? No. I heard that same idea about a decade ago, after Griffin and Kaepernick had peaked and declined. Newton was still running the ball during his MVP season in 2015, and while he began to break down in the subsequent seasons, Allen, Hurts and Jackson came out of college and made it a meaningful part of their offenses as they emerged as superstars. Thinking about the quarterback read run game (and majoring in operating out of shotgun) as a cycle as opposed to a short-term trend will probably age better than writing it off as a temporary fad.

Who made it work?

All right, let’s run through some prominent teams who either went under center often in Week 1 or suggested they would during the offseason. What did those moves look like? Were they effective? Or was their shift under center more talk than substance?

Under center: 43.3% of offensive snaps

I’ll start with the last team we saw win during the opening weekend of the season. The Chiefs dominated the Broncos in a 31-10 victory, but just about everything we saw from them on offense was at odds with what things looked like in years past. With a returning Mahomes struggling early, the Chiefs leaned heavily on new running back Kenneth Walker III, who racked up 173 rushing yards in his Kansas City debut. Mahomes, who was expected to be relatively immobile in his first start after tearing his left ACL, scrambled for a touchdown early and was even used on a speed option.

Where the offense operated from was also something new for Mahomes & Co. The Chiefs were under center on more than 43% of Mahomes’ dropbacks against the Broncos, a single-game high for the team in a Mahomes start. The Chiefs had averaged 21% under center in Mahomes’ starts since the beginning of the 2018 season, so they were under center more than twice as often as typical in years past.

That decision might be informed, at least in part, by how Walker prefers to operate. As I mentioned during the offseason, Walker averaged 4.5 yards per carry and had a 40% success rate on runs from under center with the Seahawks, figures that fell to 4.1 and 37%, respectively, when Walker got the ball out of the pistol or shotgun.

The early returns, at least on the ground, are phenomenal. As my colleague Ben Solak noted during the game, Walker finished with more rushing yards from under center than any other Chiefs back has produced in any other game over the past decade.

On the other hand, Mahomes wasn’t great as a passer under center, going 0-for-4 with an interception on a play where it looked like Xavier Worthy ran a different route than the one Mahomes was expecting. Over his career, Mahomes’ 74.3 Total QBR operating from under center is third in the NFL, trailing only Jackson (81.3) and Brock Purdy (75.5). If he adjusts and the Chiefs are willing to live from under center on a more regular basis, a more effective run game with Walker and the subsequent play-action attack could be deadly for the Chiefs.

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Under center: 34% of offensive snaps

The Eagles didn’t morph into an offense from the 1980s overnight, but this 34% under-center rate was the seventh highest of any Hurts start. And the quarterback run game that faded out of the offense during the 2025 season completely evaporated. Hurts had seven carries in this game against Washington — five scrambles and two kneel-downs. There wasn’t even a tush push, as the Eagles ran Saquon Barkley, threw the ball or punted on various third- or fourth-and-2 opportunities.

Barkley produced 42 yards on a third-and-2 attempt, running away from Leo Chenal, through the second level and into the open field on outside zone. His other 14 carries produced 41 yards and just five successful runs. That’s a solid performance, but it’s not the sort of 2024 Barkley the Eagles were hoping to unlock by moving toward an outside zone-heavy scheme.

The same held in the passing game from under center. Hurts dropped back five times from under center. Those plays produced three incompletions, a sack and a 64-yard completion to Dontayvion Wicks on a pretty deep ball where cornerback Mike Sainristil lost track of the throw and nearly came to a complete stop in coverage. Averaging 12.8 yards per play from under center looks great in the aggregate, but the Eagles weren’t consistent in their first game under Mannion.

And as the game wore on, the offense felt more like the tired, disappointing one we saw for most of 2025 than the dynamic 2024 attack. The Eagles picked up one first down in the third quarter, and it took great individual efforts to get the offense going, notably from Hurts converting a third-and-18 with his legs. It’s Week 1, and we’ll see how the offense operates in the games to come. Will we see more big plays, or will the offense struggle to move the ball consistently?

Under center: 26.9% of offensive snaps

With newly promoted coordinator Blough, the Commanders were one of the more publicly insistent teams about their philosophy of getting under center. They really weren’t there all that often in their debut against the Eagles, though. The threat of Fangio’s 6-1 fronts might have given Blough pause, but the Commanders were actually under center at the league’s sixth-lowest rate during Week 1. Trailing for most of the second half, their under-center rate also dropped to 21% after halftime.

What the Commanders ran wasn’t particularly impressive, either. The under-center run game turned 14 carries into 52 yards, good for 3.7 yards per pop. And there wasn’t much of a play-action game off those runs. Jayden Daniels dropped back five times under center. Those snaps produced 21 yards, including a 2-yard scramble and a 14-yard completion to Antonio Williams on a play where Daniels was forced to scramble out of the pocket under pressure.

The Commanders ran a slip screen and a flea-flicker from under center, but Week 1 wasn’t a great advertisement for the new offense. Blough’s unit generated 0.01 EPA per play, which ranks 19th among Daniels’ 25 regular-season starts.

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Under center: 34% of offensive snaps

The Ravens were always portrayed as a bit of a softer transition than some of the other teams making this move. They were still going to spend plenty of time in the shotgun, and Jackson’s time as a pro-style quarterback at Louisville would make the switch easier than it would be for other passers. The move to more zone runs would also benefit Derrick Henry, who majored as an outside zone runner during his most dominant stretch with the Titans.

Unlike the Eagles and Commanders, the Ravens dominated in the opener. Henry was great against the Colts, producing 130 rushing yards on 19 carries when Jackson was operating from under center. And on an excellent day for the two-time MVP, Jackson showed that he would have no trouble operating from under center, going 6-of-8 for 114 yards. One of his two incompletions was a spike to stop the clock. And while Declan Doyle dialed up only one designed run for his star quarterback, it produced a 5-yard touchdown, with Jackson reading edge defender Arden Key and waltzing untouched into the end zone.

Under center: 51.5% of offensive snaps

Giants fans who were trepidatious about the additions of Matt Nagy and Greg Roman as offensive architects have to feel great about what they saw in Week 1. The Giants were the league’s second-best offense during the opening week of the season by EPA per play, trailing only the Bears. Their 58% success rate was second behind the Jaguars. The only reason they didn’t score more points was time; the Giants used more time per play than anybody else in the league and had only seven possessions in their 28-20 victory over Dallas.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given Roman’s experience as a run-game designer, the Giants leaned heavily into the ground game and bigger personnel groupings in their win. They had a combination of at least two tight ends and/or fullbacks on the field for 67.6% of their snaps in Week 1, the third-highest rate in the NFL. They were in 22 personnel (two running backs, two tight ends, one wide receiver) 23.5% of the time. Unsurprisingly, the team that operated out of 22 personnel most often over the past five years was the Ravens, who used it 14.4% of the time, nearly twice as often as any other franchise.

The Giants ran the ball 25 times for a respectable 104 yards from under center in Harbaugh’s first game as a head coach. Nagy and Roman were thoughtful about how they used Jaxson Dart on designed runs, which Brian Daboll had relied on heavily as he integrated Dart into the offense last season. Dart had only two designed runs all game, and they were both on zone read escort concepts, where he was running to the outside with a lead blocker.

As a passer, Dart didn’t have a huge game working from under center, going 5-of-7 for 39 yards with a 2-yard touchdown pass to Isaiah Likely. In all, though, the Giants looked comfortable majoring under center, something they ran only 20% of the time while Dart was on the field a year ago. It’s a positive sign for their offensive progress, although the Rams might offer a more imposing defense to Dart this week on “Monday Night Football.”

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Under center: 64.2% of offensive snaps

Given that Klint Kubiak is a direct descendant of the Shanahan tree and had his offense under center at the second-highest rate in the league with Sam Darnold in Seattle a year ago, it should be no surprise that the Raiders were one of the most under-center-heavy offenses in Week 1.

Kirk Cousins was excellent as an under-center play-action passer during his time with Kevin Stefanski and Kevin O’Connell, and he was 9-of-14 for 76 yards with a touchdown under center in his Raiders debut, a win over the Dolphins. The move didn’t directly unlock second-year back Ashton Jeanty, who had 17 carries for 62 yards (3.6 yards per attempt) on under-center snaps, though Jeanty was more effective out of shotgun and as a pass catcher. The offense should also take another step forward when Brock Bowers returns from his torn meniscus.

I’m optimistic about what the Raiders can do in 2026, especially if one of their young wide receivers can step up and be something resembling a lead target when Bowers is out of the lineup.

Will it stick?

Are we going to see teams lean further into getting under center as 2026 goes along and into 2027 and beyond? I’m reminded of what I wrote about the Rams and their shift to 13 personnel, a move that had worked for them and a couple of other great offenses while also being a disaster for just about every other team running out three tight ends as a base offensive attack on a regular basis. Any organization that just added a bunch of tight ends and dialed up a bunch of 13 personnel snaps for the sake of getting bigger was likely to be disappointed in the big picture.

Going under center in itself might prove to generally be a positive thing for offenses on the whole, even if it’s not likely to produce record-setting point totals each week. It won’t single-handedly make offenses that would be bad operating from the shotgun or pistol suddenly good. It won’t make a mediocre quarterback into a world-beater, although Ryan Tannehill did go from struggling with the Dolphins to producing one of the more efficient stretches in league history as an under-center play-action passer with Henry and the Titans.

As 2026 goes on, I suspect that teams that have some success going under center will lean into it more often, while the ones who struggle early or don’t fully adopt it as a tenet of their offense will see it fall by the wayside by midseason. Even the teams that lean heavily into getting under center will still want to go to shotgun or pistol looks or — if they have a quarterback capable of moving the ball with his legs — pull the QB run game out of mothballs in a key spot. Nothing’s new under the sun in football, but what’s old certainly felt new in Week 1.