How Klint Kubiak Made the Saints

When we spent this offseason hyping up the New Orleans Saints, we weren’t expecting them to be this good.

The most optimistic Saints backer in the world couldn’t have seen a start of this magnitude coming. In a year where the slower pace of offense has been a running theme, the Saints already have 91 points – the fourth-most points through two games in NFL history, and the second-highest mark in the 21st century. One of the teams ahead of them were the 1920 Rock Island Independents, who were thrashing teams like the St. Paul Ideals and the Muncie Flyers. Well, the Saints have made Carolina and Dallas look like those 1920s ramshackle teams; they’ve had two of the least four competitive games according to our Post-Game Win Expectancy model.

The Saints are at or near the top of nearly every offensive category you can think of, advanced or otherwise. First in offensive DVOA at 47.7%. First in rushing DVOA at 35.4%. First in yards per play (6.9), first in net yards per passing attempt (10.5), first in rushing, passing and total touchdowns (11). Derek Carr leads the league in passing DYAR (218) and DVOA (71.2%); Alvin Kamara leads it in rushing DYAR (102) and running back rushing DVOA (55.8%).

Some of what’s going on here is lack of opponent adjustments – we strongly suspect that the Panthers’ defense will not be a world-beater this season, and New Orleans’ advanced stats will trickle down as they both play tougher opponents and get appropriately dinged for playing Carolina. Some of it is also the sort of flukes you get in small sample sizes. Derek Carr currently has 152 DYAR under pressure, which is comically unsustainable. No one else in the league right now is above -2 DYAR, and the high-water mark last season for a qualified quarterback was -185 by Joe Flacco in a very small sample size. Carr has not magically turned into the greatest quarterback under pressure in the history of the game; that will revert pretty hard to the mean.

But it’s not fully a mirage, and a lot of credit can be given to offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak for dragging the offense kicking and screaming into the 2020s. We sometimes joke about how anyone who has had a cup of coffee with Kyle Shanahan or Sean McVay gets a crack at calling an offense, but the night-and-day difference between the Saints offense of 2024 and the Saints offense is 2023 shows why these sorts of playcallers are in high demand. The New Orleans offensive structure is night and day different than it was under Pete Carmichael, as a quick look through StatsHub can show you. It has underneath complete Kubiakation and now looks very much like what you’d see in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

This is just scratching the surface of the changes Kubiak has made to the offense. It doesn’t even get into the two- and three-man route concepts they’re using to drive linebackers batty, or the designed rollouts which have gotten Carr into space. It’s a great case study about what simply instituting a better scheme can do. This is basically the same Saints offense as in previous years; their only big offseason additions of note were third wide receiver Cedrick Wilson and rookie tackle Taliese Fuaga. Otherwise, this is mostly the same unit that finished 17th in offensive DVOA a year ago and had us reaching for our thesauruses to find new synonyms for mediocrity. All of a sudden, they’re explosive and exciting.

Perhaps finally escaping the offensive playcalling clutches of Pete Carmichael, Josh McDaniels and Jay Gruden was all Carr needed to become a double-digit DVOA passer for the first time since 2020. Perhaps it was the lack of a threatening pass game, and not age, that saw Kamara’s production fall off since 2020. Hand the same ingredients to a better chef, and you get better results, and Carmichael hadn’t cooked since losing his Hall of Fame main course in Drew Brees. The Saints joining the ever-expanding Shanahan tree has given them an exciting offense for the first time in half a decade.

First of note – play action has been almost entirely missing from the roots of the tree. Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers use play action less than ever before, continuing a trend that has been going down for a few years. Brock Purdy’s now using play action just 11% of the time, after using it 20% of the time in 2023 and 23% of the time in 2022. And it isn’t a result of weird situational football – in tied or one-score games, Purdy’s play action rate drops to last in the league, 7.1%. That’s interesting for the Saints, considering Kubiak was the 49ers’ passing game coordinator last year – he’s bucked that trend by just dumping as much play action passing as he can possibly get into the Saints’ offense. Kubiak’s very much running the Shanahan Offense Classic, polished to perfection when Shanahan and McVay were trotting out Jimmy Garoppolo and Jared Goff rather than Brock Purdy and Matthew Stafford. It’s only been two games, and there was no real reason to veer away from the play action strategy when the Cowboys were biting on every single fake, every single time, but it’s interesting to see the strategies diverge, especially on a relatively recent branch of the tree.

The other thing that jumps out is that despite using more play action than anyone else, Carr has actually been significantly more effective on straight dropbacks. That’s rare, and it also wasn’t true for Carr last season; the Saints saw their passing DVOA increase by 26.0% when using play action in 2023. That’s almost certainly a small sample size fluke, with Rashid Shaheed’s 59-yard touchdown against the Panthers and Alvin Kamara’s 57-yard touchdown against the Cowboys both coming on regular dropbacks. It is interesting, though, that Carr falls outside the top 10 while using play action passing, and that isn’t really a small sample size fluke. Carr’s 36.2% DVOA while using play action is within spitting distance of his total from last year (26.4%), and still wouldn’t have cracked the top five after a full season of play. It will be worth following that number throughout the season, because if the Saints are going to be so far ahead of the rest of the league in play action usage, it’d behoove them to be the best at it.

But while Carr isn’t leading the league despite the addition of extra play action, Alvin Kamara is loving this new outside zone life.

Mind you, against Dallas, Kamara could have run inside zone, outside zone, AutoZone, friend zone or anything else he liked – he was in his comfort zone as the Cowboys bit repeatedly on everything the Saints tried. And you can tell by some of the attempt numbers that there’s some more small sample sizes at play here, but this is a stat that has had some sticking power in recent years. Your leader after two weeks in 2023 was Christian McCaffrey, on his way to his Offensive Player of the Year season, whereas Nick Chubb went from first after two weeks in 2022 to fourth by the end of the year.

Kamara hasn’t always been put into the best positions to succeed by recent Saints offenses. He’s someone you want to get out in space, and to push rushers to the boundaries, and yet under Carmichael, the Saints were primarily an inside zone team. Prime Kamara was basically built for an offense like this, so seeing his numbers bounce back so strongly through two weeks shouldn’t be much of a surprise at all.

As for the Saints offense as a whole, it is bound to come a little bit back down to Earth sooner rather than later. But ‘Earth’ in this case may well be a very good offense, a far sight better than the slush Saints fans have had to sit through over the past three seasons.