playBill BarnwellSep 17, 2026, 06:25 AM ETCloseBill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else on the planet, writing about in-season X’s and O’s, offseason transactions and so much more. He is the host of the Bill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released weekly. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland.Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsA 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.Subscribe: ‘The Bill Barnwell Show’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 centerIf 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 rooki
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