Seahawks face test against Moons offense that hasn't done THIS one time all year
Kliff Kingsbury faces Seattle for first time since 2022, but has he gotten any better as a coordinator since his days with Cardinals?
This past January, Kliff Kingsbury cancelled interviews with the Bears and Saints in order to focus on Washington’s playoff run and maybe that helped the Moons pull off a shocking 45-31 upset over the Detroit Lions. But he may soon come to regret that decision, if he doesn’t already.
(People often ask me why I call that team in D.C. the “Moons” and the answer is simply that I think their team name is dumb, most people seem to avoid using it anyway, and Moons would be a good team name for a district that is already Moon-adjacent because of the landing in 1969. I’m sticking to the bit and that won’t change this week.)
After falling to the Chiefs 28-7 on Monday night, the Moons have lost three in a row and will be hosting the Seahawks on Sunday having failed to reach 230 passing yards in any of their eight games this season. Washington is the only team in the NFL without a 230-yard passing game in 2025.
Even the Browns, the Saints, and the Titans have done it.
Kingsbury was stuck between retirement and a consulting job at USC when Dan Quinn offered him a chance to be Jayden Daniels’ first NFL offensive coordinator last February. The move was met with some skepticism, but largely accepted by fans because Kingsbury was only the OC, and not the head coach like during his tumultuous tenure with the Cardinals that ended on a 4-13 record in 2022. The fans may already regret THAT.
Quinn compared the hiring to Kyle Shanahan, his OC with the Falcons from 2015-2016 who is now in his ninth season as the 49ers head coach. Regret?
The Moons can only pray that Daniels’ current injury afflictions are merely a coincidence and not more confirmation that Kingsbury is “like Kyle Shanahan”. (The NFL’s leader in players who have missed games since 2017.)
By the time Washington reached the NFC Championship, just one year after firing Ron Rivera and cleaning house following a 4-win season, people like Quinn, Daniels, and maybe especially Kingsbury were atop the NFL world. Kingsbury’s brand of offense helped Daniels win Offensive Rookie of the Year (69% completions, 25 TD, 9 INT, 891 rushing yards, 6 TD) and the Moons were a top-4 rushing team despite having no other true stars except for Terry McLaurin.
Case in point: The Moons traded away lead running back Brian Robinson and traded for Deebo Samuel, Washington’s leading receiver at the midway point.
But this has only further exposed how one-dimensional and therefore solveable Kingsbury’s offensive scheme actually is, especially when the star quarterback misses three games and Daniels is considered unlikely to return against the Seahawks in Week 9 according to Adam Schefter:
Seattle facing Marcus Mariota instead of Daniels would seem like a break, but I’m not sure about that because even if one of those quarterbacks is a lot more talented than the other, there’s something that Kingsbury won’t do regardless of who is under center:
He won’t have the quarterback go under center.
At the conclusion of Sunday’s Week 8 games, the Rams lead the NFL with 237 total snaps under center, breaking down as 140 runs and 97 pass attempts. The Rams are the only team that passes the ball more than 40% of the time they are under center, giving Sean McVay a unique weapon at quarterback with “throwback” Matthew Stafford.
You will also see that the Seahawks have the fifth-most under center plays, but because Seattle has only played seven games they actually rank as having the third-highest rate of under center plays per game:
The Seahawks have also had a lot of success with Sam Darnold under center, averaging 6.2 yards per play (2nd-highest behind Colts at 6.4) and 10.9 yards per pass (highest among any team with a not-extremely-small sample size).
It’s not that being under center is required for success, as the Eagles rank 28th in under center plays with Jalen Hurts, but then you see the Rams, Lions, Patriots, 49ers, Seahawks, and Bills making up the top-6. The Bears are ranked seventh, as new head coach Ben Johnson is going to force the issue with Caleb Williams, who has already had more under center pass attempts in 2025 as he had during his entire rookie season. Obviously this is not the type of growth in a quarterback that Kingsbury has bothered to concern himself with in regards to Daniels:
The Washington Moons have run 8 plays under center. Eight. And they have not passed the ball under center one time all year. All eight of those plays have been runs.
Although these numbers do not include MNF, the Moons (that C-word must be a typo on Next Gen Stats for the Washington team name) didn’t run any under center plays so they’re still stuck at 8:
The next most extreme example is the Falcons, another team dealing with a combination of sophomore QB struggles, a mediocre veteran backup getting starts, and an offensive coordinator who doesn’t know how to change genres mid-career. If Kingsbury is trying to emulate the Eagles offense with only 13 under center pass attempts, he’s missing the offensive line, Saquon Barkley, A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert. If he’s trying to emulate the Chiefs, he’s missing Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid.
I recently wrote that the Seahawks top-ranked defense would get an interesting test because Washington had been first in yards per carry, but Kansas City’s below-average run defense just held them to 60 yards and 3.0 YPC and half of that production was by Mariota. The Moons faced a top-5 run defense against the Packers in Week 2 and Green Bay held them to 51 rushing yards, 18 points, and 15 first downs. The Packers won easily.
This is not to say that the Seahawks will “win easily” and Mike Macdonald has proven that winning is anything but easy.
It’s just that Washington has come back down to Moon. They have already lost as many games in 2025 as they did in 2024 (5) and every week seems to be an increasingly worse chapter for Kliff Kingsbury’s life story. “Shotguns and Pistols: How I Turned Jayden Daniels into Colin Kaepernick.”
Since starting 3-2, Washington has lost three in a row, including one to the Bears team that Kingsbury didn’t want to interview with and the last two losses by at least 21 points. Last season’s team didn’t lose by 20 points until they reached the NFC Championship. Maybe that’s when Kingsbury’s offense became broken.
Because what would be a Moon without a crater?
Seaside Joe 2430
I said this list last night, and I haven't changed my mind: I don't think Washington can score against the Seahawks.
And FWIW, I kind of liked the WFT name they used a couple of years ago.
"...come back down to Moon." Take 1000 pts for that, and you probably deserve more.
Offenses and defenses need to always evolve and change. Week to week, year to year, era to era. Most coaches are too smart to simply trot out the same stuff, and expect it to keep working. Philosophically things should remain the same, or similar. Tactics can and will change. Adapt or die, or whatever the phrase is.
I'm not concerned about any remaining game on the schedule. I'm not saying we'll win every game, I'm just confident that we could beat each of those teams. Execute at a reasonably high level, and there is every reason to believe we win. Maybe even win bigly. Blowouts are so fun. We need more of them. I'm very pro-blowout.
Bobby Wagner has only a fraction of the explosiveness he used to have. He still has that brain, so he can cheat more than most. But he can get outflanked now, where that was near impossible back in the day.