In November 2018, one of the most exciting football games in history was played. Week 11, Monday Night Football: Rams vs. Chiefs, 54-51. The rare regular-season prime-time matchup between Super Bowl favorites that didn’t just reach, but dramatically exceeded expectations.
The 105 combined points scored that night in the Coliseum are the third most in a single game in NFL history. (There should have been more: Harrison Butker and Greg Zuerlein missed an extra point each.) Patrick Mahomes threw six touchdowns and Jared Goff another four—one of only 11 games in league history with at least 10 passing touchdowns combined. It was, and remains, the only 50-point losing effort in NFL history.
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Because of the offensive fireworks launched by some of 2018’s biggest stars—Mahomes, Goff, Sean McVay, Travis Kelce, Todd Gurley, Tyreek Hill—the game was called the future of the NFL. How could it not be? Mahomes, then in his first season as a starter, was establishing himself not only as the best young quarterback, but also as a paradigm-shifting player who would challenge our assumptions about how the position is played. The same was true, albeit to a lesser degree, for Hill and Kelce. On the other side of the ball, McVay had done the impossible: taken a clear first-round bust at quarterback in Goff and resurrected him, exceeding even the wildest dreams of the Rams ownership that had taken a risk on the league’s youngest head coach.
Five years later, Mahomes and Kelce and Hill and McVay and Goff are all still defining figures in the NFL’s offensive landscape. But so much has changed between then and now: teams, relationships, expectations. Now that we’ve seen the actual future of football, did that Coliseum prizefight really foretell what was to come?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Let’s take it in pieces.
Mahomes the Star
After the Rams won this game, they had their bye week. They were 10-1. They had scored more than 30 points in nine of the 11 games they played. They were—and I cannot stress this enough—never going to be stopped. (They were stopped two weeks later. More on that below.)
I think if you polled the average fan and analyst after this game and asked, “Who better represents the future of offensive football: Sean McVay or Patrick Mahomes?” the majority of responders would have acknowledged the impact of McVay but answered Mahomes. This moment was right within the dawn of Mahomes; he was the truth, the revelation, the Brady successor, the new star.
Five years later, I think that answer would have been wrong. Probably. Maybe. I’m still waffling.
Let’s consider the impact that each individual had outside their respective teams. Mahomes dramatically impacted the way quarterbacks are evaluated, coached, and defended. (No big deal!) His blend of arm talent, escapability, and creativity created an indefensible passing attack. No longer could defenses line up, take away the primary read, cover the backside route, force the offense into scramble-drill mode, and feel like they were victorious. No, Mahomes was perhaps even more dangerous outside structure than he was within it.
In 2017, when Mahomes entered the league, quarterbacks scrambled on 3.9 percent of their plays. That number has risen nearly every season since, and today it stands at 5.4 percent. This isn’t exclusively because of him, but as other teams and quarterbacks have tried to emulate his play, they haven’t just imitated his throwing style (seen through the prevalence of sidearm releases and no-look passes)—they’ve also imitated how willing he is to run.
When we look at quarterbacks drafted after Mahomes, we see the impact. I am confident that Kyler Murray would not have gone as high as he did (first in the 2019 NFL draft), nor would Zach Wilson and Trey Lance have gone where they did (second and third in the 2021 draft, respectively), if teams weren’t swinging for the fences on quarterback selections, hunting a player who could do the things Mahomes did.
You could even lump Josh Allen into this group. He was not drafted as early as he was because of Mahomes (seventh in 2018, when Mahomes had only one career start to his name). But his development was greatly impacted by Mahomes, as the Bills saw what could be achieved with a quarterback of Mahomes’s skill set and gave Allen the patience and resources necessary to become that player.
So Mahomes’s brilliance has changed the trajectory of quarterback play, just as the gravity of a planet changes the trajectories of objects that pass by it. How could McVay’s impact possibly stand up to this?
McVay: The System
Mahomes has affected the way we think of star quarterbacks—top arms, top athletes, improvisational play styles. McVay impacted something that was in far more desperate need of help: the middle class of quarterbacks.
Tua Tagovailoa, Brock Purdy, C.J. Stroud, Kirk Cousins, Ryan Tannehill, Jimmy Garoppolo, Jared Goff, Geno Smith, Baker Mayfield, Aaron Rodgers. That’s 10 quarterbacks, just off the top of my head, who have had their play lifted at some point in the past couple of seasons by McVay’s style of offense. There’s an MVP in there—a couple of top-five picks, too. But also some middle-round selections, a Mr. Irrelevant, some presumed busts. All of them with McVay’s fingerprints on their careers, and I’m just going off the dome. Will Levis. Matthew Stafford. Justin Fields. Josh Dobbs. I could do this all day.
McVay’s offense was on full display in this game. Not just the broad strokes that everyone knew—the outside zone, the play-action, the 11 personnel—but the fine details. This was a great game for quick-count snaps from the Rams offense. Watch how often they hiked the football on the first sound, never letting the defense key in on a formational tendency.
Play clock manipulation has been a huge part of McVay’s offense, and Kevin O’Connell is now using the headset to help Josh Dobbs the same way McVay helped Goff all those years ago. So to do play-action fakes remains the most dangerous wrinkle to throw on a passing play (ask the San Francisco 49ers, whose head coach, Kyle Shanahan, spent 2018 waiting for Garoppolo to get healthy), and pre-snap motion remains the easiest way to give quarterbacks free and easy targets (ask the Miami Dolphins).
Perhaps the biggest reason why this game represents McVay’s impact on the future of offense is because of what the Rams weren’t doing. This wasn’t a huge game for under-center zone runs ripping up the field for 6 yards a pop, or boot play-action creating the easiest throws an NFL quarterback has ever seen. The Rams were in shotgun a ton, with empty and four-wide formations that gave Goff lots of receiving options.
As the years went on, McVay would need a more reliable quarterback to give those options to, and he would cast Goff aside to Detroit in favor of Stafford—but similar schematic adjustments in the McVay offense were made in the years to come. O’Connell in Minnesota, Zac Taylor in Cincinnati, and Matt LaFleur in Green Bay have all leaned on the empty/gun/spread iteration of McVay’s offense. Meanwhile, other coordinators would stay under center and make the necessary investments in the running game to utilize McVay’s original offensive approach: Ben Johnson in Detroit with Goff, Arthur Smith in Tennessee and Atlanta, and Shane Waldron in Seattle. The McVay coaching tree flourished over the course of the 2018 season, which culminated in this game. (And then they played Vic Fangio’s Bears, and they scored six points, and then Belichick copied it in the Super Bowl, and it was the beginning of the end for McVay and Goff—but that’s a story for another day.)
The reach of McVay’s influence is greater than that of Mahomes; more and more teams have adopted or iterated his offense, and those who haven’t done so have at least cribbed a concept or two. Without question, those two lead actors in this offensive performance represented the future—one in scheme, the other in talent—and became exactly that over the next few seasons. McVay for his reach, Mahomes for his mastery.
Since that game was played, there have been five Super Bowls, and Mahomes has played in three of them, winning twice. McVay has been on the sidelines in the other two, winning once. You simply cannot tell the story of football between then and now without either of them.
So who matters more? I don’t know. You decide.
Tyreek Hill and Games of Hide-and-Seek
Of all the skill-position players who feasted in this game (Brandin Cooks! Robert Woods!), nobody had a better day than Hill, who recorded a 10-catch, 215-yard, and two-touchdown line—his first 200-yard game.
Jason Witten (remember when he was calling games on MNF?) made some comments on Hill’s skill set during this game that reminded me of our perception of speed receivers in 2018, and how it would change. On this deep comeback from Hill, listen to Witten talk about Hill’s improved route running and his development into more than just a speedster.
“He’s really improved as a route runner. We know about the speed. That’s a double move—and then watch the transition at the top. The ability to bend, to get low, sink your hips so you can come in out of the cut. I am really impressed with him. I studied him a lot the last few weeks. There’s a lot of talk about his speed, but now, they’re putting him in the slot, in here.” Witten circles Hill on the screen, lined up as the no. 3 receiver on the trips side. “He’s moving all over the field. He’ll be in the backfield …”
This is an important moment. In 2023, we take the idea of moving star receivers into the slot for granted; in 2018, that movement was well underway, but it was far from complete. But even the notes of Hill in the backfield are important. In 2023, Hill ends up in the backfield often for the Miami Dolphins under head coach Mike McDaniel, who was a key offensive mind in San Francisco when Deebo Samuel started getting handoffs while lined up as a traditional running back.
On this very play, with Hill in the slot (“Speed at 3!” as the defensive alert would go), the Chiefs score a touchdown. Mahomes to Hill on the deep over, where Hill’s speed allowed him to run away from coverage.
Of course, there was tons of pre-snap motion in this game from both sides—Andy Reid’s and McVay’s offenses have both been among the league leaders in pre-snap motion over the past five seasons. There wasn’t much of what we’ve seen from Hill in Miami these days—the whirlybird nonsense, the sneaky motions into free releases. That future of offense wasn’t on display in Los Angeles that night, but it was in its incubatory stages.
One final future of offense, and particularly of Hill, was present for the Chiefs that night, though. It came on this play.
Recognize the pass concept? That right there is Wasp. It’s the concept that won the Chiefs the Super Bowl in 2019.
Todd Gurley and the Running Back Position
Entering this game, the offensive stars for the Chiefs were Mahomes, Kelce, and Hill; for the Rams, they were Goff and Gurley, who was fresh off an Offensive Player of the Year win in 2017. Some folks thought he should have been an MVP candidate that season, and through the first 10 games of the 2018 season, he was on a 16-game pace of 1,580 yards and 21 touchdowns rushing, plus another 643 yards and six touchdowns receiving. He was making a case for MVP candidacy again.
In Week 15 of the 2018 season, Gurley suffered a knee sprain that didn’t just shelve him for the rest of the regular season, but forced him into a time-share for the rest of the postseason with veteran free agent C.J. Anderson. In the following season, the Rams still used Gurley as their lead back, but his efficiency and explosiveness tailed off both as injuries caught up to him and as defenses deployed solutions to McVay’s wide-zone rushing attack. When the 2020 offseason kicked off, the Rams cut Gurley two years into what had been a market-setting extension.
As such, this game does tell the future of offense in the NFL—not for Gurley’s dominance, but for the absence of his impact. Gurley ran for 55 yards on 12 carries on the day, scoring no touchdowns on a prolific day for scoring touchdowns. Five years later, Hill remains what he was in 2018: a field-tilting playmaker. Kelce remains Mahomes’s best friend, and Mahomes remains the most dangerous quarterback leaguewide. Goff is as he was: a gifted executor of an effective offensive system. Heck, even Josh Reynolds, Gerald Everett, and Robert Woods remain relevant, valuable receivers.
And Gurley is gone. Out of the league at 26. His impact on those Rams offenses is all too easily forgotten.
The $60 million contract L.A. gave Gurley in 2018 and Gurley’s subsequent fall were watershed moments in the league’s understanding of running back value. When they’re fresh and healthy on rookie deals, they’re great, but those touches sure accumulate fast, wearing down the tread on the tires. As productive and talented as Gurley was—and he was certainly both—we know now that his success as a rusher was far more the result of the offensive system and offensive line than it was his individual merit. We also know that his role in the game—ballcarrier—has less impact on offensive success and scoring capacity than pass catchers, pass throwers, and pass blockers do. Throwing is king in the modern NFL.
On a night of star performances, it’s the absence that speaks volumes here.
The One Thing That Wasn’t There
I’d argue there is one key item of offensive evolution that isn’t particularly present in this game: fourth-down aggressiveness. Each team went 1-for-1 in this game on fourth-down tries. The Rams’ attempt came on a fourth-and-1 early in the third quarter with the score tied at 23. Joe Tessitoe was quick to acknowledge, “You gotta go for it,” but there was no mention of data or analytics. It just seems like, in a game with this many points, you gotta go for a fourth-and-1 in fringe field goal range.
The Chiefs’ attempt came in a more desperate spot: 4:37 remaining in the fourth quarter, down by three, fourth-and-2 on their own 43. Again, the broadcast crew was fine with the choice—this was an obvious go—but there was no analytics mention. This time, the conversion comes courtesy of what would later become the Chiefs’ most reliable play: the “Travis Kelce just sits down somewhere between some zone defenders, and Mahomes finds him because they share the same brain” play.
That’s it for fourth-down tries. Reid was, of course, one of the more aggressive fourth-down coaches for quite some time—but I wonder if he would have coached this game differently were it played again in 2023. He passed up on a fourth-and-goal from the 2 to take a 21-yard field goal. For McVay, I have the same question: He punted on fourth-and-less-than-1 from his own 25 while the Chiefs lined up in a defense designed to prevent a fake punt (L.A.’s punter at the time, Johnny Hekker, attempted three passes the season prior).
To not have a single decision—to go or to punt—centered on models of win probability was, frankly, surprising to watch. Five years later, basing decisions on those models is normalized in broadcasts and offensive philosophy. Not only are teams more likely to go for it, but they are more likely to play on third down for a potential fourth-down conversion attempt. That was simply not present in this game at all.
If you were writing the prophecy of offensive football off this game alone, you’d get a lot right, but the explosion of fourth-down aggressiveness is a key through line I think you’d miss.
In Conclusion: 10/10, Good Football Game, Would Like to See It Again
In November of 2018, I was a junior in college who believed he had a pretty good idea of how football worked. I also had no clue how football worked. I didn’t know what I was watching or how it would matter so much. I just knew it was sick.
Looking back on it now, this game deserved the title it received: the Future of the League. The players and coaches who were stars then remain stars now; the lessons that their offenses taught us have impacted countless more over the past few seasons. Every flash of elite offensive football this week, next week, in this Super Bowl, in the next Super Bowl, and in many more to come will, through some transitive chain of coaching or quarterbacking, lead us back to the 2018 Chiefs, the 2018 Rams, and 105 points scored in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.