When Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor coached at Texas A&M from 2008-2011, he watched the Houston Texans play every Sunday.
The Texas A&M head coach at the time was Mike Sherman, Taylor’s father-in-law. Before he took over at Texas A&M, Sherman was the Texans offensive coordinator under head coach Gary Kubiak.
As Taylor and Sherman watched the Texans, Taylor studied Kubiak’s distinct offense, which meshed Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense with a wide-zone running scheme.
Kyle Shanahan, now the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, was the offensive coordinator on those Texans teams. At the time, the Texans offense used some of the elements that Kyle’s father, former NFL head coach Mike Shanahan, created.
Kyle Shanahan and Taylor were both inspired by the same style of offense.
“I fell in love with the Houston Texans offense,” Taylor said. “There are a lot of people involved who made that thing go, and it's still the principles that marry to us the L.A. (Rams), San Francisco, the New York Jets, the Green Bay Packers, everybody (Kubiak) influenced. It's all in the same family."
On Sunday, when the Bengals face the 49ers, Taylor and Shanahan will call plays for two very similar offenses. The Bengals and the 49ers both emphasize pre-snap motion and use the wide zone.
Even though Taylor and Shanahan come from the same coaching tree, there’s a noticeable difference that separates the Bengals offense and the 49ers offense.
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Shanahan uses a fullback. Taylor doesn’t have one on the Bengals roster. Shanahan’s offense uses a position that was extinct in the mid-2010s, and Taylor gives more blocking responsibility to his tight ends and wide receivers.
It’s the way the 49ers and the Bengals offenses are branching in different directions.
When the NFL was a run-first league, every team had a fullback as the lead blocker in the backfield. Before 2010, all but one team in Bengals history had a fullback in the starting lineup.
Between 2010 and 2017, the prevalence of the fullback position started to fade in the NFL, and the Bengals took the fullback out of the starting lineup. As college football teams moved toward a passing-heavy spread offense, the pipeline for fullbacks ran low. Players who would have played that position in a different era became linebackers, running backs or tight ends.
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At that point, the average fullback was making a lower salary than the average long snapper. It was a dying position.
When the Bengals changed offensive coordinators in 2018, the Bengals cut Ryan Hewitt, who was the last fullback the Bengals had on the roster. When Taylor rebuilt the Bengals offense, he never added a true fullback.
“The bottom line is you have 53 roster spots,” Taylor said. “It's a matter of, are you going to use it enough for a roster spot? It’s about, if you use them enough to validate that 53rd spot, and for us, we’ve carried three tight ends and mixed and matched those guys.”
Over the last three years, the fullback position has had a renaissance, led by other members of the Kubiak coaching tree. The influence of Kubiak’s offense has spread back across the NFL with young disciples like Taylor, Shanahan, Sean McVay, Kevin Stefanski and Matt LaFluer.
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Those five coaches run a very similar style of offense and a very similar run scheme.
“There are always principles that you see in (Shanahan’s) offense that have carried over to a lot of teams I've been a part of and what we do here,” Taylor said.
Most of those coaches use fullbacks, and that’s where Taylor differs from Shanahan’s offense.
Some of the most progressive offenses in the NFL, and some of the offenses that most closely align with Taylor’s, use a fullback. The Bengals are the only team in the AFC North without one, and Baltimore Ravens fullback Patrick Ricard makes $3.6 million a year.
The Minnesota Vikings run Kubiak’s offense, and they have the second-highest paid fullback in the NFL. The Los Angeles Chargers’ high-powered offense for quarterback Justin Herbert has two fullbacks on the roster.
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Recently, NFL front offices started looking for fullbacks like diamonds in the rough, and they’ve found them by converting players from different positions. Now, players who were linebackers or running backs are being transformed into fullbacks.
The Cleveland Browns, who use an extremely similar wide zone scheme as the Bengals, have a starting fullback. And a 49ers offense that has a lot in common with the Bengals has arguably the best fullback in the NFL in nine-year veteran Kyle Juszczyk.
“They’re using (fullbacks) a lot differently than the old school ball,” said Bengals defensive tackle D.J. Reader, who played a little fullback in high school and might have played the position more in a different era. “Fullbacks now are athletic, so they go out on pass routes and do a lot. It’s fun to see the position come back. It was useless for a few years, but now teams are doing a really good job of using them.”
The Bengals and the 49ers have very similar styles of run games, using pre-snap motion to set up wide zone runs. But while Juszczyk plays most of the 49ers offense’s snaps, Taylor prefers keeping an extra wide receiver or an extra tight end on the field.
The Bengals have a few packages where Drew Sample or C.J. Uzomah line up in front of the running back, but the 49ers have built a large part of their offense around Juszczyk. In the Bengals offense, Taylor uses his wide receivers and tight ends in pre-snap motions to line up as blockers. Since the 49ers have a true fullback, Juszczyk fills most of that role.
The Bengals are prioritizing getting more athletic playmakers on the field, which ultimately helps the passing game. The 49ers are prioritizing another weapon in the run game while giving Juszczyk three touches per game.
In the early 2010s, you could distinguish a “modern” offense with an “old school” offense by how much a team played its fullback. In the early 2020s, the opposite has been true.
On Sunday, the 49ers and the Bengals will show how two extremely similar offenses have opposing views about one position.
“They’ve got a really good (fullback),” Taylor said. “If you have a really good one, you want to use them.”
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