Mike LaFleur introduced this season's study topic

The 2026 season kicked off with the Hall of Fame Game, and fortunately for us, that included an offense from the Shanahan-McVay tree — though admittedly, there was roughly a 50% chance of that happening given how widespread the system has become. Mike LaFleur, the new offensive coordinator for the Arizona Cardinals, was running the show last Thursday night.

With that, I’m excited to announce our theme of study for the season. In past years we’ve looked at explosive plays, and last year we looked at “one play, many ways” — the same scheme tagged differently, run from multiple personnel groupings, or presented from a different formation. This year we’re looking at how offenses package plays together, in alignment with what Sean McVay calls the illusion of complexity. Specifically, we’re looking for when an offense uses the same formation-and-motion combination to run complementary plays off of it. “One play, many ways” is a great framework for keeping scheme limited, but a real offense still needs multiple plays that complement each other within that structure.

Even in the very first preseason game, we saw an example of that in Mike LaFleur’s offense last week.

Before we get into it, I want to invite you to join me on Tuesday nights throughout the season. I’m always tagging plays on film for these studies, and this year I’ve decided to livestream while I do it — talking through what I’m seeing, why I’m calling something one thing versus another, key notes on scheme, and getting to interact with you. Those will run on Tuesday nights, starting somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00 PM Central most weeks, streaming to X and YouTube. I actually started this past Tuesday while tagging the Cardinals’ offense from this game. If you want to see the replay, you can find it here!

Watch All-22 Breakdown of ARI Offense

Here’s why the illusion of complexity matters: good offenses have complementary plays. Great offenses never let you know which one is coming. That distinction means more to me now that I have a year of defensive coordinator experience under my belt. I’m calling defense again this year and am more and more applying things I used to think about defenses from the offensive side.

The number one thing I look for when scouting is what plays get run out of what formation. I love pairing Wide Zone with GT Counter, especially with a mobile quarterback. The counter can turn into BASH Counter, where the defense still sees the Wide Zone action from the running back, but the quarterback comes back the other way behind the pulling linemen.

I believed this when I was calling offense and am even more firm in that belief having experienced the other side of the ball: I can pair Wide Zone with GT Counter all I want, but if it doesn’t look the same to the defense, I can’t expect the same response. If the stimulus isn’t the same, the response won’t be the same.

If the defense is flowing hard and fast to stop Wide Zone, and I want to run GT Counter off of it, getting into a different formation to do so can tip them off that Wide Zone isn’t coming. Once that happens, their run reads stop flowing fast — even on a BASH Counter — because they already know it isn’t wide zone.

This, to me, is Sean McVay’s true genius. The goal is to make as many plays look as similar as possible for as long as possible, hence the illusion that the offense is complex. Even though it was only a preseason game, we saw an example of exactly that in Mike LaFleur’s offense in the Hall of Fame Game last week.