Under-center football showed up more often around the NFL in Week 1, a small change in alignment that carried the feel of a leaguewide turn. For a sport that had spent years leaning hard into shotgun, the sight of more quarterbacks moving back under center stood out immediately.
That is why people are looking at the Tnf Score now. The shift lands at a moment when the NFL had already been moving away from the shotgun-heavy habits that took hold after 2017, and it is showing up in a week when offenses are always being judged for what they are becoming, not just what they ran on a single Sunday.
The pullback from under center is not new. After 2017, the dropoff was notable, and the league settled into an era that fit a generation of quarterbacks raised on spread systems. The author even texted a longtime defensive coach about the wave of under-center usage in Week 1, a reminder that this was not being treated as a routine wrinkle. It was being noticed as a pattern.
Part of the reason is that shotgun football has been easier for many passers to live in. Patrick Mahomes came out of Texas Tech, where the Air Raid helped define that comfort, and Andy Reid turned his offense into a human laser show after getting a copy of the playbook. Mike McDaniel also fit the modern mold by retrofitting some rushing concepts into a shotgun costume, while Baltimore’s Navy-ified rushing scheme with Lamar Jackson made it convenient for coaches to keep their passers in the gun.
Jimmy Garoppolo is the cleanest example of what that preference can look like in numbers. In 2019, when he was San Francisco’s franchise quarterback, he was a top-seven quarterback in passer rating, completion percentage and on-target throws out of the shotgun. Under center, he fell to bottom-12 in passer rating and completion percentage. That split explains why so many offenses built their identity around the gun even as under-center football never fully disappeared.
What makes Week 1 matter is that the league’s recent habits are being nudged the other way. Under-center usage proliferated around the league even though the NFL had become heavily shotgun-oriented after 2017, and that friction is what gives the trend weight. The question now is not whether one game or one coach can make that change look real. It is whether the offenses that opened the season this way keep pressing in that direction once defenses adjust.
For now, the league has given itself a fresh signal. More teams are willing to line up differently, and more quarterbacks are being asked to work from a spot that had started to feel less natural in modern NFL football. If the Week 1 numbers hold, this is not a one-week curiosity. It is the first sign of another swing in how the NFL wants its offenses to look.
