Ryan Grubb's offense, explained by a coordinator expert

Will the Seahawks have as much success with Ryan Grubb as the Huskies did? I asked an EXPERT to find out: Seaside Joe 1991

Today’s Seaside Joe is an episode that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, ever since I discovered The Coordinator Project channel on YouTube. The creator of that channel answered some questions I had about Seahawks offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb and here is a preview of what’s to come:

• What does it mean to be a modern “pro style” offense?

• What are the strengths and weaknesses of Grubb’s “pro style” offense?

• Who would be the ideal QB for the Grubb offense?

• How does the run game factor into UW’s high-powered passing attack?

• The “cat-and-mouse” strategy that helped the Huskies punish defenses with RPO and screen routes complemented by a highly-successful downfield passing game

As most of you know, I’ve always been a fan of the NFL, I’ve long covered the NFL as a writer, but for a long time I carried shame that I still didn’t know enough about football strategy and schematic after all these years. That’s why a couple of years ago I added football Xs and Os content to my non-negotiable daily habits, which for me means that I am required to watch at least 10 minutes per day on YouTube.

That might sound like not very much to you, but I’m a believer in immersion-based learning, and 60 hours per year of Xs and Os content is better than none. I think for me the lessons sink in much more efficiently if I don’t “cram”, and I am looking forward to finding out how watching football this season compares to past years given my immersion efforts.

I’ve come across dozens of YouTube channels that do their part in explaining the game of football, many of which I’ve shared here at Seaside Joe: Channels like All_22_Film, The QB School, The O-Line Committee, Alex Rollins, Brett Kollmann, and Thinking Football to name a few. But I can confidently say that The Coordinator Project manages to separate himself from all the other channels I’ve seen by focusing on the “WHY”, not just the “HOW” and “WHAT”.

This is not to say that the other Xs and Os channels I just mentioned are worse by any means, because they’re not, they’re just different. They have a different focus and goals with what they want to explain to fans like me that want to know more about the game. J.T. O’Sullivan is often telling you, “Here’s what this QB did right, here’s what he did wrong”, whereas Rollins might explain “This is what separates this player from other players”, and Kollmann could go over, “This is the name of this play and this is what it is intended to do.”

But The Coordinator Project goes so deep on coaching (specifically coordinators) strategy, I’ve never seen anything like it before. He explains the chess behind football, how opposing coaches strategize pre-game and mid-game to attack and counter-attack the other. Not only that, but if you want to better understand the origins of plays and play callers, he does that too. Every video is fascinating and I have highlighted him several times in this newsletter, including this Seaside Streams about Kenneth Walker vs. Mike Macdonald.

(I would be remiss not to mention that one of our closest friends at Seaside Joe, All_22, posted a new Seahawks video on Monday.)

If this sounds like TCP is a relative of mine, or that I’m secretly TCP, that’s only because I get excited when I am impressed by amazing work. It’s similar to how if a movie makes me cry, it’s usually because I’m thinking “God, this is SO GOOD”, not necessarily because of the content. I teared up* the first time I saw City Lights just out of amazement that Charlie Chaplin could do so much more with the technology available to him in 1931 than what seemingly any filmmaker is able to create almost 100 years later with endless resources.

*The author says “tearing up”, the author means “bawling”

I do not know TCP at all, I had never heard of the channel until a few months ago, and because the videos are so involved and thorough, they do not come out every week like most others. They’re too good to be rushed! So I reached out to The Coordinator Project and asked if he wouldn’t mind answering a few of my questions about Ryan Grubb, a coordinator he profiled in December after the Huskies beat the Ducks in the Pac-12 Championship.

Of course, Grubb is now the offensive coordinator for the Seattle Seahawks after a very brief stop at Alabama and everyone’s asking the same question: “What does this mean for the Seahawks and how will Grubb’s passing offense success translate to the NFL?”

There’s only so much I can say about my thoughts on Grubb, including the 2 misconceptions about his offense that I posted in June, which are again, not my thoughts, but relaying of smart things I heard from a different very smart YouTuber. I needed to know more from TCP: “What did you really think of Grubb (and head coach Kalen DeBoer)’s offense at Washington?” and “How is this going to look in the NFL with the Seahawks?”

TCP was not only kind enough to get back to me and to answer my questions, he went above and beyond in giving the detailed and thorough answers that you might expect from the person who makes videos like the ones I mentioned. These are the questions I asked and the answers he gave, generously giving his time to teach me and us more about Seahawks football to come.

I would ask that if you also think his content is as valuable as I do, subscribe to his YouTube channel and follow him on Twitter. And this morning, I became a paid member of his new Patreon account, where he just posted his first video over there, titled “The Birth of Football”. I’ll get back to this topic at the end of the article, now let’s get into his answers! (Images or videos below were added by me to enhance the post with some color and visuals)

Seaside Joe: It's been said that Washington's offense was the best in the country last season, if not the best overall over the past two seasons with the combination of DeBoer, Grubb, and Penix. Would you agree that the Huskies had the best offensive gameplan in the country?

The Coordinator Project:

“Best” is really hard to quantify, but I think that it’s hard to give that title to an offense that finished 41st and 65th in yards per rush over the last two years (we’ll talk more about that run game for one of the later questions). That said, the 2023 Husky offense was heavily battle tested and put up 30+ points in four games against top-20 scoring defenses. They made the playoffs and won a game against a traditional blue-blood program and it definitely wasn’t the defense that got them there, so while they might not have been the “best” offense in the country, they were certainly elite, and their strengths were so good that it made their weaknesses tough to spot.

Setting aside stats and rankings, in film study it was clear that the scheme and play-calling were a major contributor to the success that they had. To explain that a little more, we can compare a great offense to a hit song; it’s possible to write a hit that’s totally formulaic, but that’s also really catchy and loved by lots of people. On the other hand, you can write a hit song that does some more interesting things musically. Both songs can be really popular, but it’s harder to write the song that gets popular while also doing something new.  

Tying that back to college football, when you look at the “best” offenses in the country, you see both styles.  There are some really effective offenses that just do what they do, and do it really well, but for an analyst they’re kind of boring to break down. These offenses can be successful because of talent, development, the quality of the system itself, the weakness of opposing playcallers, etc. Then there are offenses that make you stop and think a couple of times a game, or that show you something that you haven’t seen before. I’d definitely put the Washington offense in the second category.  

So, do Grubb and DeBoer run a hipster offense? Is it just there to impress analysts and other coaches? Definitely not. When you’re calling an offense at a high level of competition, the opposing DC’s are going to be really talented as well. They’re going to throw things at you that you haven’t seen before, and they’re going to create defensive puzzles that are hard to solve. When that happens, a formulaic offense has fewer tools to address those new and unique problems. An offense that develops novel, opponent-specific solutions on a weekly basis will be much more ready to handle those situations.  

Of course, having an offense that impresses coaches isn’t a bad thing either, and it’s probably not a coincidence that Mike MacDonald hired Grubb shortly after Jesse Minter, who coached with MacDonald with the Ravens for four years and is now with the Chargers, had to gameplan against Grubb as the DC at Michigan. 

Seaside Joe: What made their offense different than the rest? Like, can you summarize "Deboer offense" in a few words?

TCP: In some ways, the DeBoer/Grubb offense was a typical 2023 college spread. They overwhelmingly lineed up in 11 Personnel (1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WR’s), and their run game makes heavy use of Run/Pass Option plays, where the QB has the ability to either hand the ball off, or to pull it and throw it, with that decision being made either by reading a specific defender, or by simply counting the number of defenders in the box. It is NOT, however, a big QB run offense, and in that way a good NFL comparison might be the 2017 Eagles, who ran a lot of RPO’s with Carson Wentz and Nick Foles at QB. 

[Note: In the first pre-season game Grubb ran a little more two-TE stuff than he did in the Washington games that I broke down, but even then the spread stuff was where the offense was most complex and versatile].

As for run-blocking, they’re a big off-tackle team. They’re going to put a TE on the edge, or use tight splits by their receivers, and have those guys block back to seal off interior defenders. Once those guys have created the edge, they’re going to pull one or two linemen around those blocks to get after CB’s and Safeties on the perimeter, with the ball hitting outside behind those blocks. They have a variety of ways to get off-tackle based on how the defense is playing the edge, but they’re much more limited in the inside run game, which is by far the least interesting part of the offense.  

In the passing game, they rely on big-play WR’s on the outside to pull defenders deep and wide, and then they have a lot of ways to exploit the space that this creates in the middle of the field, including with what look like option routes from the slots and TE’s, crossing routes at various levels, and a good number of delayed releases by TE’s and Backs, where they set up to block at first and then come out late. The most interesting part of the offense is in how they use all five of their receiving threats in these ways to attack different pockets or seams in whatever structure the defense is trying to run.

Seaside Joe: It's also been said that Washington's offense was "pro style" and that DeBoer/Grubb's greatest strength could be the ability to run a little bit of everything that they do in the NFL. What would you even say is the difference between a "pro style" and "college style" offense in the modern game of football, if there even is one, and also do you see what the Huskies were doing on offense translating to the NFL and soon?

TCP: The term “pro style” has always been a moving target. Twenty years ago in the college game it was almost defined as the opposite of “spread.” The term pro style was mostly used at the college level to talk about an offense that used either a TE and a FB, or two TE’s, on neutral downs and distances.  Pro style offenses were also seen as having 50/50 run/pass balance, using a physical rushing attack to set up a play-action passing game, and so on.  

A more lasting definition, though, might have been that a pro style offense was one that used multiple personnel groupings and formations, with a heavy emphasis on situational and matchup football. Pro style offenses have traditionally had a lot of tools in the toolkit because they’re trying to deal with their opponents’ tendencies in incredibly granular ways: What do they run on 2nd and medium in their own end of the field? What are they going to do if we use two TE’s on 1st and 10? When the ball’s on a hashmark, how do they defend the part of the field closest to the sideline? 

College offenses get those same tendency reports, but the pros generally have more answers for each of those situations, and they change them more frequently based on the matchups that they have at individual positions every week. The pros have more time, and their players are both more experienced and more physically gifted, and so they can be expected to master a lot more. Over the last 10+ years, spread concepts have made major inroads into the NFL, but it’s really that sophistication in gameplanning and play-calling that continues to separate the two levels.

As I’ve set it up with some earlier answers, DeBoer and Grubb definitely fit into that category. Their basic approach to the game is gameplan-specific and you don’t get a lot of repeat snaps, where they’re running the same play out of the same formation/action on a bunch of different plays. Stylistically, I think that they’re right at home with an NFL way of doing things, and so the question of how well the offense transfers is really about knowledge and ability. Grubb is coming into a league where every opponent is going to approach the game with a similar level of detail and creativity, and so from there it just becomes a question of who does it better. That’ll be hard to project without seeing the offense against a few good regular-season opponents.

SJ note here, Don’t Forget to Subscribe: The Coordinator Project YouTube

One thing that I would disagree with a little bit, though, is that Grubb and DeBoer did a little bit of everything that you’ll see in the NFL. While they did have some two- and three-TE sets that looked a little more like the traditional definition of a “pro style” offense, at Washington those were almost exclusively for short yardage situations, and so they didn’t have all of the versatility and complexity that you’d need, say, to develop a full gameplan around them if that happened to be the thing that gave them the biggest advantage in any given week. The pro style nature of their attack was most seen in their passing game, and in their use of formations, shifts, and motions to create different looks, manipulate defenses, and create favorable matchups.

Seaside Joe: One of the concerns that some people have with regards to these Huskies having future success is how Washington crushed bad-to-good teams and then got flattened by Jim Harbaugh's Michigan defense. How much of Washington's offensive success do you think was predicated on having a massive talent advantage in most games vs. having the best gameplan and best strategists with DeBoer and Grubb out-foxing their opponents?

TCP: Washington’s recruiting has been perfectly good over the last five years, but on the field they’ve out-performed their recruiting rankings, they’ve consistently beaten teams that recruited better than them, and they’ve scored 30+ in a lot of games against good defenses. In the last two years, the Michigan game is the only loss where they’ve scored less than 30 points.  When you see all of those guys getting drafted, I think that a lot of that is related to how good the passing game was as a whole. If you have a great QB and a diversified passing game then there’s room for lots of guys to shine and show out. That’s not to take anything away from players like McMillan and Polk, but plenty of teams have three guys with the talent to put up a 1,000-yard season. Very few teams have actually produced 1,000-yard seasons for three different players in two years, though, especially with all three of them on the roster at the same time.

(SJ note: Wow, that’s such a good point!)

It’s really the Michigan game that opens Grubb up to this kind of concern, but even in that game there are plenty of good playcalls that worked from a schematic standpoint but lost on execution (I’ll go over a bunch of those in my next Patreon video). Saying that things broke down in execution isn’t meant to criticize the players, it’s just to acknowledge that it’s harder to do your job when your opponents are really good. Michigan recruits better than Washington, and they’re another team that develops and schemes incredibly well. They went 15-0 and had the best defense in the country. Grubb didn’t dominate the playcalling matchup, but it was at least a fair fight. As I said earlier, Michigan’s DC Jesse Minter was a colleague of MacDonald’s for four years with the Ravens, and you know that they talked to each other before Mac made the hire.  

Seaside Joe: What would you say are the 'non-negotiable must-have qualities' in a quarterback if he was tasked with successfully running Grubb's offense?

TCP: In spite of this being a spread offense, the QB really doesn’t need much that’s different from a typical NFL pocket passer. You’d like him to have some mobility, but if the OL can give him good protection then you don’t need a ton of it. The system really runs through the QB’s mind, pocket presence, and downfield accuracy. A nice, underrated secondary trait would be good ball-faking, since there are a number of delayed routes and different types of backfield action that open up a lot more with good mis-direction. These are often sequenced with bread-and-butter plays, so the more wily a guy is, and the more able to make everything look the same, the more you’re going to get from the whole package.  

Seaside Joe: We always focus on Penix and the passing game for obvious reasons, but what role does the run game play in Washington's offense and how important is it?

TCP: The run game was supplemental in some ways the last two years, but I have to qualify that a little bit. Earlier I mentioned that Washington’s run game relied on a lot of RPO (Run/Pass Option) plays, where the RB and OL execute a run play, and the WR’s and/or a TE run a screen or quick route. The QB reads the defense and decides whether to hand off or throw based on how they line up and react. That way, if the defense puts a bunch of guys in the box to stop the run, you can throw to the perimeter instead, or vice versa.

A consequence of being an RPO-heavy team, though, is that some number of your “run” plays will end up as passes, and that makes typical measurements of run/pass ratio a little misleading. For example, in the PAC-12 championship game, which I broke down on my Youtube channel, Washington had seven RPO’s convert to throws. If the defense had lined up differently, then those exact same plays would’ve been hand-offs, and Washington would’ve had more runs than passes in the box score. Does that account for the fact that Washington threw the ball almost 60% of the time last year? It probably doesn’t account for all of it, but it is a factor.  

As for the role of the run game in this offense, that’s very much tied to the RPO attack, because what an RPO really lets you do is force the defense to defend the whole field from sideline to sideline on running downs; when the defense is expecting you to run they can’t just put a bunch of guys in the box, because they have to worry about the pass/screen options as well.  

The difficulty in defending Washington’s offense, or any great, versatile offense, was that the defense can only put eleven guys on the field. The RPO game pulls those defenders toward the line of scrimmage and stretches them from sideline to sideline, with the running game serving as the anchor in the middle to punish defenses for playing too wide to take away the pass options. The dropback passing game then does a really effective job of attacking those same defenders at the intermediate and deep levels down the sidelines, and a lot of passes get completed to those routes. Where the defense will often run out of resources trying to defend all of this stuff, then, is over the intermediate middle, where crossing routes put receivers into open passing lanes versus zone coverages, and allow speedy slot receivers to run away from their defenders against man. 

To a degree this is what every offense wants to do; everybody has a plan to attack the defense at every area of the field. To be more specific about Washington, then, here’s how I’d evaluate the different zones that they’re trying to attack: The RPO game was fine. It wasn’t overly basic, but it also didn’t push the envelope as much as other college offenses. If we’re strictly looking at the run component, it’s not as complex as a lot of true pro style run games, and it gives up a lot between the tackles. It is a little unique in its reliance on quick pulling linemen to overload the off-tackle area in the run game, which was a strength that I definitely appreciated.

The real strength of the offense was its ability to throw deep and to the outside, and here’s where having three strong receivers really helped, because they could threaten that area both with go balls from the outside receivers, as well as with routes working from the inside-out from the slot.  Their threats in those deep outside areas often forced defenses to play their CB’s deeper, and that opened things up for the passing options underneath in the RPO and screen games, so there’s a real cat-and-mouse game going on to the outside between their downfield passing attack and their shorter screen/RPO game.

Their second strength was in their use of crossing routes to burn teams that pulled their coverage too wide to defend those outside areas. A nice change-up off of those crossing routes came from delayed TE and RB routes out of the backfield, which they used to throw underneath and punish LB’s for dropping to take away the deeper crossers.

The biggest threat to this kind of offense will come from defenses that can figure out how to defend the crossing routes without giving up the deep sidelines, and there is some stuff that Michigan did in this area that foreshadows what some NFL teams are going to try to do. Whatever defenses do in this area will come with new weaknesses to exploit, though, and so this isn’t so much a problem with the offense, as it is a fact that will force Grubb to build successful counters into his gameplans. Also, as is true for every offense dominated by dropback passing, teams that can figure out how to beat your protection will always be a problem, because the routes in this offense hit deeper down the field, and so take longer to develop. 

Because this is a spread offense, you have to solve this problem with a lot of 5- and 6-man protections. Washington had some good stuff with 7-man protections when needed, but the offense was most effective with at least four guys out in the pattern. Seaside Joe final word: THANK YOU, TCP!

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