Dallas City News

The Cowboys enjoyed a very good win in their season debut, with the defense smothering Cleveland from start to finish. Now they get to return to Dallas for their home opener, and they’ll be taking on a Saints team who just walloped the Panthers 47-10. Coming into this game, the Saints are fifth in offensive DVOA and lead the league in scoring. That’s a big change from where New Orleans has been the past few years.

For a very long time, the Saints were one of the most consistently elite offensive teams out there. Head coach Sean Payton, who called the plays, had developed a perfect chemistry with quarterback Drew Brees, and the two put up record-setting numbers over the course of their 15 years together. Then Brees retired, and things began to fall apart. Payton’s lone year in New Orleans without Brees saw the offense drop to 26th in offensive DVOA. Payton then stepped away, leaving defensive coordinator Dennis Allen to take the top job.

Allen opted to retain offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael Jr., who had held that role under Payton for 13 years. With Payton gone, though, Carmichael was now tasked with calling the plays in an attempt to keep continuity schematically. But things remained as bad as they had been in Payton’s final year, with New Orleans ranking 22nd in offensive DVOA.

The Saints apparently came to the conclusion that their offense thrived for so long not because of the scheme alone but because of the franchise quarterback who ran it. That led to the organization shelling out some cash to land Derek Carr in free agency following his unceremonious (and, in hindsight, extremely unwise) dismissal from the Raiders. Carr had a good enough year – 68.4% completion rate, 3,878 passing yards, 25 touchdowns to eight interceptions – but the Saints still only managed to place 17th in offensive DVOA. That, and pressure to return the Saints to a perennial playoff contender, led to Allen moving on from Carmichael, who ended up reuniting with Payton in Denver.

The search for a new offensive coordinator led Allen to tab Klint Kubiak, who served the 2023 season as the pass-game coordinator for the 49ers. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Kubiak is the son of Gary Kubiak, a longtime coaching veteran who worked side-by-side with longtime Broncos head coach Mike Shanahan to devise the variant of the West Coast offense that has now taken the league by storm thanks to the (re)popularization of it by coaches like Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay.

In other words, Kubiak is offensive football royalty. At just 37 years old, he’s very young for a coordinator but he’s already well-traveled. And just like last week, when Cowboys defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer went up against his former offensive coordinator and protégé Kevin Stefanski, there is a history between these two coaches as well.

When Zimmer first took the Vikings head coaching job, Kubiak had just finished his first season as a quality control coach in Minnesota, his fourth season of coaching at any level. Zimmer, who has been close with Gary Kubiak for a long time, kept the younger Kubiak on staff for that season. Kubiak ended up leaving for a promotion elsewhere, but Zimmer brought him back to coach quarterbacks, filling the void left by Stefanski when he was promoted to coordinator.

That move also served to reunite Kubiak with his father, who was working as an offensive advisor at the time. When Stefanski left for the Browns job, the senior Kubiak was named the offensive coordinator, though Klint Kubiak received a more involved role in the offense. A year later, in what would prove to be Zimmer’s final year as a head coach, the younger Kubiak was bumped up to the coordinator role. Suffice it to say that Zimmer knows the Saints’ new offensive coordinator very well.

As far as the scheme goes, all you have to do is look at the last name. Kubiak brought the Shanahan style offense to New Orleans, and it’s the offense he’s been majoring in his whole life. Specifically, he worked under Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco last year, and it’s no surprise to see Kubiak running a lot of the same things with the Saints so far.

What all does that mean? It all starts with the running game, which is built around the wide outside zone. Only five teams ran the ball more in Week 1 than the Saints, and four of them also hail from the Shanahan tree. Much of that comes from the outside zone, designed to stretch defenses horizontally. Kubiak also used a ton of pre-snap motion as misdirection, with a heavy play action passing game built off the run game; Carr ran play-action on 40% of his dropbacks in Week 1, the third-highest rate in the league.

If you’ve seen the 49ers play lately – and Cowboys fans have certainly seen enough of that – then you know exactly what this Saints offense will look like, at least from a scheme standpoint. New Orleans doesn’t have Christian McCaffrey or Deebo Samuel or George Kittle, but the scheme was enough to get an All-Pro caliber performance out of Carr a week ago.

That said, Zimmer’s defense had plenty of success against Stefanski, a fellow Shanahan tree coach, last week. The Saints have a better quarterback, but the principles of the scheme they’re facing remains the same. Will that be enough for the Cowboys to lock up this offense following their explosive start to the season? Only time will tell, but this will be a good first test of just how sound Zimmer’s scheme is.