2024 Commanders Offense – What to Expect
July 16, 2024
By Noonefromtampa
The Commanders have a new offensive coordinator in Kliff Kingsbury, and as a result there has been a significant amount of conjecture about the offensive scheme Washington intends to run in 2024. In today’s column, I will look at the Arizona Cardinals numbers from 2019-2022 when Kingsbury was their head coach and three common questions fans have.
We’re going to throw the ball a lot with that Air Raid offense, right?
Let’s see what the Cardinals did between rush attempts and pass attempts.
| Year | Rush Att | Pass Att | Off Rank | W-L-T | % Pass Plays | League % |
| 2019 | 396 | 554 | 21 | 5-10-1 | 58.32% | 57.2% |
| 2020 | 479 | 575 | 8 | 8-8-0 | 54.55% | 56.8% |
| 2021 | 496 | 591 | 6 | 11-6-0 | 54.37% | 56.5% |
| 2022 | 434 | 664 | 22 | 4-13-0 | 60.47% | 55.1% |
During the 2020 and 2021 seasons when Arizona was not playing from behind most of the time, they averaged a reasonable 55-45 split of pass attempts to rushing attempts. Outside of 2022, the Cardinals were close to the league average for percentage of pass play attempts.
We’re going to see wide receivers catch all those passes, right?
Here is what the pass target distribution looked like for the Cardinals under Kingsbury:
| Year |
2019 |
2020 |
2021 |
2022 |
||||
| Pos | TGT | TGT% | TGT | TGT% | TGT | TGT% | TGT | TGT% |
| RB | 104 | 19.7% | 99 | 18.2% | 103 | 18.1% | 112 | 17.6% |
| TE | 46 | 8.7% | 68 | 12.5% | 108 | 18.9% | 118 | 18.6% |
| WR | 379 | 71.6% | 377 | 69.2% | 359 | 63.0% | 404 | 63.6% |
When the Cards signed Zach Ertz, the percentage of passes targeted at tight ends went up. The general rule of thumb from these stats is that the wide receivers will be targeted twice (or two-thirds of the time on pass plays) for every target to the running back/tight end position (or one-third of the time).
Well, the running backs won’t gain much yardage on the ground, right?
The Cardinals had a decent running game under Kingsbury with running backs like Kenyon Drake, James Connor and Chase Redmond. It didn’t hurt that quarterback Kyler Murray gained good yards on the ground as well (2019 – 544 yards, 2020 – 819 yards, 2021 – 423 yards, and 2022 – 418 yards).
The Cardinals’ stats versus the league stats are as follows:
| Year | Rush Yds | Yds/Att | Avg Yds/NFL Team | Per NFL Team Y/A |
| 2019 | 1,990 | 5.0 | 1,806.4 | 4.3 |
| 2020 | 2,237 | 4.7 | 1,902.1 | 4.4 |
| 2021 | 2,076 | 4.2 | 1,959.2 | 4.3 |
| 2022 | 1,873 | 4.3 | 2,059.2 | 4.5 |
Arizona was on par with the rest of the league with their rushing attack.
Conclusions
The scheme that Kingsbury brings to Washington is diverse enough to not allow opposing defenses to key in on just one or two players. The performance of the Washington Commanders offense will come down to a few major points:
- How well does the revamped offensive line play? No matter who plays quarterback, if they don’t have time to execute the offense, you will see a replay of last year.
- How soon does Jayden Daniels start at quarterback? Daniels can picks up yards on the ground with his running ability. This will help keep defenses off-balance and provide Washington’s offense an extra dimension.
- How well does Daniels play when he is put in at quarterback? Has he mastered enough of the offense to overcome what opposing defenses will throw at him?
- What kind of a game will Kingsbury play call? Last season we saw horrible sequences of play calls that doomed the offense and basically the game at times. If Kingsbury can attack the opposing defense while protecting the quarterback, that will go a long way towards offensive success.