Coming for the Kingdom: How Chiefs DC Steve Spagnuolo has the NFL — and the Shanahan tree — flummoxed

The Kansas City Chiefs are trying to do something no team has ever done: win three straight Super Bowls.

The rest of the NFL is trying to stop them.

Here are the key elements of the Chiefs’ success, which will again play a role in their quest — and could provide clues to how other teams can unseat the kings of the NFL.

The Kansas City Chiefs‘ offense was inconsistent last year. Sure, they won the Super Bowl and finished in the top-10 in all the underlying metrics and Patrick Mahomes was still Patrick Mahomes. But it was not a reliably efficient unit week-in and week-out in 2023.

What was reliable, and what helped carry the load for the Chiefs’ Super Bowl run, was the defense led by coordinator and longtime coach Steve Spagnuolo. Spagnuolo’s defenses during his Kansas City tenure have been the afterthought of the overall Chiefs hierarchy. It was Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Andy Reid and a little bit of Chris Jones to close out games. That’s the formula, everyone else get out of the way so we can get back to it.

It was typically a high-risk dice roll scheme that was designed to create chaos and to get the football back quickly in one way or another to their all-time quarterback, with the unit generally improving as the season went along and into the playoffs as Spagnuolo started to work his magic as one of the best single-game defensive planners in recent NFL memory. But last year, there was a stark difference with how Chiefs games felt. The Chiefs’ defense was good. Like, really good.

A big part of that was the recent injection of talent via the draft and free agency throughout the defense, with Spagnuolo understanding how to unlock his unique collection of personnel.

They’re well-coached and physical. A contrast to the smoke and mirrors and, shall we say, indifferent attitude toward tackling than this unit had in recent years (which was also what likely led to the Justin Reid addition). The plethora of defensive backs that Spagnuolo would deploy all played physical and took it to wide receivers. Blowing up screen passes, getting involved against the run and on blitzes at the quarterback. It’s not often a team’s defensive backs set the tone for an entire unit, but that’s how the Chiefs were last year.

It’s not just the improvement of the personnel on the defensive side of the ball, either. Spagnuolo, thanks to his experience of calling plays against dozens of offenses, also has aspects to his defense that are perfect for the current NFL landscape. As he has particular answers for offenses that come from the current in vogue tree in the NFL: the Shanahan tree.

Why Spags’ Chiefs are adept at slowing the NFL’s most en vogue offense

It’s not only the Shanahan tree that Spagnuolo has some answers for. The 2023 Chiefs that prided themselves on tackling with well-coached and well-designed defensive game plans would be effective against any type of offense. But there are specific answers that Spagnuolo has part of his menu that can create speedbumps for the staples that the play-callers from this tree like to implement.

There are a variety of ways to install and run an offense or defense. Each with their own pros and cons. Shanahan offenses, because of their reliance on using shifts and motions before the snap of the football, like to have their centers “set and forget” their protection calls. This means that once they dictate their “point,” which centers the offense and gets everyone working on the same page, they won’t adjust off of that original point. Instead of pausing before the snap and letting the quarterback and center work to get the perfect protection call, these offenses rely on built-in aspects of the concept (typically a “hot” route that the quarterback can get to quickly) to get out of any bad situations. They are essentially exchanging slowing down the pre-snap process and getting to the perfect answer for tempo and the design of the play winning in the end. Which takes a huge load off of the quarterback in particular, since he can just worry about finding the right route answer instead of sorting out any protection look. (Again, this is just one way to run an offense.)

Spagnuolo is great at understanding the base rules for the offense and the corresponding rule breakers. Even things like timing up blitzes with when the offense sends a player in a jet motion, using the offense’s own advantage-maker against them create even more advantages against the current offensive meta.

Here, against the Vikings, the Chiefs bring a blitz that would be essentially unblockable against the base protection rules of the offense.

There are a couple ways for the offensive line and running back (Vikings fullback C.J. Ham in this case) to potentially block this. But any answer they could come up with, unless they had something special planned, is as Brad Pitt in “Snatch” would say: “proper f****d.”

The Vikings appear to use a 5-O protection call here, which means the five offensive linemen will block the five defenders aligned across from them, with Ham (circled red) blocking any potential off-ball defender that blitzes.

But, uh, two off-ball defenders blitz, making Ham wrong no matter what he decides to do and leaving a free running blitzer heading right to Kirk Cousins.

This is just one example of Spagnuolo and the Chiefs doing this. In the Super Bowl against the 49ers, something I wrote about more in the aftermath, the Chiefs were again manipulating protection rules to create a game-changing play.

There’s also ways that the blitzes Spagnuolo uses take advantage of all the tight splits in modern offenses. The Chiefs are more than happy to blitz their cornerbacks on any down and hide their intent because of the splits.

Spagnuolo uses two-high shells to get to these plays and disguise his devilish intent. It helps the Chiefs alter between safer coverage looks and getting to the whackier stuff on his call sheet. Not just blitzes and simulated pressures that look like a blitz but only send four pass rushers, but coverage calls like their double-double coverages, which take away the top two options for an offense. This uses a corner on the line of scrimmage and a deeper safety to bracket pass catchers, forcing quarterbacks to work through their progressions and auxiliary options to win one-on-one.

It turns passing situations into a game of chicken for offenses.

“Do we call a double-move right now?”

“What if they send another blitz?”

“What plays do we have for our WR3 to get open?”

Spagnuolo turns the dial back and forth between normal coverage calls, double-teams, blitzing and not blitz, or quasi-blitzing with a defensive back but dropping a defensive lineman to get the math back to neutral. All of this is to make the offenses and quarterbacks confirm their own rules after the snap of the ball, rather than getting everything set and square before the play even happens.

Here, the Chiefs bring creeper pressures, with a defensive back or linebacker rushing the passer but the Chiefs still only bringing four. The kicker to these looks is that not only are the Chiefs not bringing a blitz, they are running cover two, a safer coverage call that can trap quick-throwing quarterbacks, and getting their in unconventional ways. Again, making the quarterback and offense confirm what they see before the snap with what happens after the snap.

Watch the safeties on all of these plays and where they end up.

This is hard to discern for a lot of quarterbacks. But Shanahan offenses dictate a lot of what they do by the offensive looks they are presented before the snap of the ball. They will package two (or more) play calls together to get to the perfect beater against the defense they’re going against (or think they’re going against) on that snap.

But when a quarterback thinks he’s about to run a play against man coverage and it turns out to be a soft Cover 2 shell, with players in unusual spots and with uncertainty about his own protection, it leads to uneasiness and mistakes. Especially in offenses that like to dictate that their quarterbacks operate and throw to certain points against particular looks. When the quarterback is antsy and isn’t quite sure what he’s going against, big plays for the defense can happen, like the first clip embedded above against Tua Tagovailoa.

Physicality and versatility of Chiefs’ secondary is vital, too

The two-high shells, and physical nature of the Chiefs’ defensive backs, also showed up when they pressed and attempted to disrupt the timing of the outside receivers. It threw off the precise nature of quick-hitting play-action concepts on which these offenses thrive. It shows up against the run and against packaged RPO plays like bubbles and flats that modern offenses love to include, too. Chiefs defensive backs take it to receivers attempting to blocking them, saying “no easy buckets” as offenses try to find gimmes against the chaotic defense they’re going against.

Again, the well-coached nature of this defense shows up here with how fast and physical the defenders played.

And even though Shanahan offenses have expanded their run menu to concepts other than outside zone, especially Shanahan himself in San Francisco and Sean McVay in Los Angeles, the Chiefs’ defense shows that they have answers to make it tough sledding.

Time and time again, you can see the Chiefs cornerbacks getting involved in the run game, knifing inside and making a mess of the perimeter against outside-hitting runs. They also build fronts that take away double-teams and angles in the run game, too, again using defensive backs to create fronts and advantages for the defense, like six-man fronts that can give zone runs issues.

Here against the Dolphins, they have several head-up defensive linemen and star cornerback Trent McDuffie (a key player in this defense) playing as a de facto outside linebacker to set the edge.

The Chiefs won the Super Bowl last season, so it’s not like I’m going out on a limb saying how important this defense was to them winning. It’s a truly fun defense to study because of how unique it feels in today’s NFL.

It’s also fun to see a veteran coordinator like Spagnuolo being the one that has some of the best answers for the current attacks that NFL offenses deploy. And as long as the Chiefs have Mahomes and Spagnuolo, I feel quite good in penciling them as a contender every single year.