New Eagles OC Sean Mannion ‘loves the run game,’ per colleagues. Inside the designs that could fuel a Saquon Barkley renaissance.

Just under a month into training camp, Lane Johnson outlined the best-case scenario for the Eagles offense in 2026.

It was a lofty aspiration — but not unrealistic, given the success of the offense just two years ago. It centered on its star running back, Saquon Barkley, who accumulated over 2,000 rushing yards in the 2024 regular season and broke Terrell Davis’ single-season rushing record (combined regular season and postseason) by Super Bowl LIX.

“I think all in all, the more productive we are in the run game and stuff feeds all of that, that we’ll see the Saquon of two years ago,” Johnson said on Aug. 19.

That ideal won’t fall on Barkley alone. To recapture his productivity of two years ago, the Eagles are going back about 30, tapping an offshoot of an offensive scheme that rose to popularity around the time the running back was born.

Sean Mannion, the Eagles’ first-time, 34-year-old offensive coordinator, spent most of his playing and coaching careers learning from pupils of the Shanahan/McVay tree. These days in the NFL, “Shanahan” refers to Kyle, the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, but he is preceded by his father Mike, the two-time Super Bowl-winning head coach with the Denver Broncos who helped Davis reach that record in 1998.

When Mike became Broncos head coach in 1995, he named Alex Gibbs offensive line coach. Gibbs, who died in 2021, was a proponent of the wide-zone blocking scheme in the run game that would go on to serve as the foundation for the modern West Coast offense.

His influence lives on in offshoots of the scheme around the league. Mannion called his first exposure to the system in 2017 under Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay “a very exciting point in my football life.” Now, Mannion has the opportunity to make it his own, all while helping breathe new life into an Eagles rushing attack that stagnated in 2025.

“I’ve seen it from afar, but now, actually studying it and working it and trying to put myself in the system, I feel like it’s going to open up some things that I may not have been able to show as much in my career,” Barkley said.

The man seeking to help Barkley elevate his game is a quarterback by trade. But Mannion’s expertise isn’t limited to the passing game. According to offensive line coach Chris Kuper, who played for Shanahan in Denver, the Eagles offensive coordinator “loves the run game,” too.

“The run game is a big part of what we’re going to do,” Kuper said, “And [Mannion’s] got passion for it. And that makes me feel good as an O-line coach, because I think we’re going to be really good at running the ball.”

When Barkley learned that the Eagles offensive scheme in 2026 would have Shanahan/McVay roots, he fired up Todd Gurley’s film.

Gurley spent five of his six seasons in the NFL with the Rams, including two standout seasons in 2017 and 2018. He led the NFL in rushing touchdowns in both seasons, earning a pair of All-Pro honors and an NFL Offensive Player of the Year nod in 2017.

Dean Davidson, the author of the Wide Zone Warriors Substack, watched those years in real time. A native of St. Louis whose memories of the Rams commence with the collapse of the “Greatest Show on Turf” era, Davidson was enthralled with the quick work McVay did to turn the team around. At the time, Davidson had just joined the staff of a struggling high school football team and was looking for inspiration.

“I was trying to figure out how [McVay] took that team from the dumps that they were in my entire life that I could remember to that point to Super Bowl favorites in what seemed like overnight,” said Davidson, who is now the offensive line coach at Obion County Central High School in Troy, Tenn.

At the core of the scheme that fascinated Davidson was the wide-zone run. Its intent is in its name. The blocking unit aims to stretch the defense on the front side of the run, while simultaneously cutting off defenders on the back side.

As Gibbs explained at his 2015 offensive line clinic in Cincinnati, the running back’s aiming point is the backside of the tight end — and if there is no tight end to the weak side of the formation, it would be to the imaginary backside of the tight end. After three steps, the running back would know whether he should hit the edge on the front side or make a single cut up the middle of the field. By the fifth step, he would make his cut.

One of the challenges of defending the wide zone run is the distance that defenders have to cover in order to maintain their gap integrity, Davidson explained.

“Everybody’s moving so far in one direction that the gap that you’re responsible for as a defensive lineman or a linebacker, maybe even a safety, it might still be between the same two offensive linemen, but those two offensive linemen on a given snap could be like 10 yards laterally somewhere else,” Davidson said. “So forcing them to maintain their gap integrity while moving so far laterally, it’s a very difficult challenge.”

It’s a challenge the Eagles offensive line enjoyed creating throughout training camp. Cam Jurgens said the scheme “lets you be a little bit more of an athlete” given how quickly the front side blocking unit must fire off the ball laterally toward the sideline.

The goal, according to Kuper, is for the defense to defend every blade of grass on the field. That task, ideally, would tire out the defense as the game wears on, Lane Johnson said. After Johnson, Jurgens, and Landon Dickerson had a full offseason to recover from the ailments that plagued them last year, they are up to the assignment.

“We’re getting to really run, stretch the field, cover some yardage,” Johnson said. “So in that way, it tires out defenses. Makes them cover each gap.”

The wide zone could be at the foundation of the Eagles’ rushing attack, but in all likelihood, it won’t be the only style of run in their playbook. When Gibbs was designing the Broncos’ run game 30 years ago, he only believed in coaching zone runs — primarily wide zone and some tight zone, in which the running back’s landmark is typically behind the center.

David Gibbs, his son and the secondary coach at Arizona State, explained that his father didn’t believe teams could excel at executing both zone schemes (blocking a certain area of the field) and gap schemes (blocking a specific defender or gap). But the game has evolved, the younger Gibbs said.

“You have to be able to do both, because the defensive linemen are so good,” he said. “They’re so big, athletic, strong, and the reality of it is defensive linemen are just more athletic than offensive linemen, in my opinion. And so you can’t give them the same schemes all the time.”

Brett Kollmann, an NFL Media analyst, called the Rams’ 15-6 loss to Vic Fangio’s Chicago Bears in 2018 “one of the defining games of the last decade” that prompted an evolution of McVay’s scheme. At the time, the Rams’ rushing attack was wide-zone heavy. Fangio’s solution was to stack bodies on the line of scrimmage in a 6-1 “tilt front,” putting a body in every gap and forcing the running back to cut back into a defender.

Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots would follow the same blueprint to stop the Rams in the Super Bowl that season. To counteract the defense’s penetration at the line of scrimmage, McVay would eventually introduce more “counter” runs, a gap scheme that calls for two pulling blockers to create a pair of gaps ont the play side.

The incorporation of different types of runs gives defenses more to process, according to ight guard Tyler Steen, which in turn forces them to slow down.

“One minute you’re going wide zone and D-tackles and D-ends are running,” Steen said. “The next minute, you’re going ‘duo’ and you’re going downhill. So I think that gives defenders a lot to think about. And so it kind of makes it easier on the O-linemen, because [the defense doesn’t] know what to play.”

After the Eagles’ 34-17 loss to the New York Giants in Week 6, Johnson tried to surmise the state of the Eagles offense.

As he spoke at his stall, he used some form of the word “predictable” three times.

“I don’t know if we’re predictable, but it seems a lot harder than what it needs to be,” Johnson said. “Maybe moving forward have a little bit more variety, hitting the perimeter some and doing a little bit more of that.”

Johnson emphasized that he wasn’t trying to point fingers, and at the end of the day, the Eagles needed to execute better. Still, his analysis was a harbinger of things to come for the shotgun-heavy offense that seldom disguised its intentions.

The Eagles are set to take a different direction under Mannion. Like other offshoots of the Shanahan/McVay tree, Mannion emphasizes the importance of the marriage between the run and the pass — more specifically, the play-action pass.

When runs look like passes, and vice versa, offenses are less predictable, Johnson said.

“I think setting up with the play action is just going to be a whole lot tougher to distinguish what we’re doing,” Johnson said during mandatory minicamp. “Whole lot harder to catch on [to] tells with stuff that we’re doing. So I think this stuff, we can disguise it more.”

The key to pulling that off is keeping the presentation the same. If the Eagles are running wide zone, for example, and building the play-action pass off of it, the blocking unit is executing the same assignment. Johnson stressed the importance of keeping a “low hat” to sell the run, and if the linebackers bite down, the quarterback can target the vacant middle of the field.

Marry that with motions, and the defense is confronted with another layer of complexity to decipher. Even the quarterback’s alignment under center can further disguise the intent of the offense on any given play, Jurgens explained.

“I feel like that’s just another way to keep defenses on their toes,” Jurgens said during mandatory minicamp. “You get a little less predictable. And so I feel like it kind of gives us a little better angles as well. Defenses can’t cheat things, ‘cause they don’t know where we’re going to go. You can set up a lot of your plays a lot better.”

Kollmann is aware of Jalen Hurts’ historical lack of targeting the middle of the field. Dating back to his rookie season before he became the full-time starter, Hurts has targeted the short middle of the field (a maximum of nine yards from the line of scrimmage) on 8.3% of his pass attempts, according to an Inquirer analysis. The league average is 14.5%. From 10 to 19 yards beyond the line of scrimmage over the middle, Hurts’ attempt rate drops to 4.6% (closer to the 7.4% league average).

But Kollmann said that conflating “hasn’t” with “can’t” isn’t necessarily fair. He said he believes that the Eagles lack of a wide-zone, play-action game in the past is to blame for not helping free up that area.

“When they are so shotgun heavy, and therefore when their play action game is really just kind of faking inside zone, that’s the kind of run fake that doesn’t really draw linebackers in, because they can see the ball the entire time,” Kollmann said.

The fake from under center requires a quarterback to turn his back to the defense, shielding the ball from the view of the linebackers. They can’t see it, so they step up, theoretically giving the offense more room to operate over the middle.

It’s easier said than done for any quarterback, as they must temporarily take their eyes off of the pass rushers seeking to take them down. But according to Josh Grizzard, the Eagles passing game coordinator, Hurts has been a “natural” with turning his back to the defense and selling the fake.

“When you have the runs and they look like the keepers and they look like the play passes, then the goal would be for those guys to see the same thing,” Grizzard said. “And then if you can get that second level of the defense to step up, then you have an ability to now push the ball down the field and be able to marry the run and the pass as well as create explosive passes.”

Speaking of keepers, will the quarterback designed run game return to the Eagles offense in 2026?

By December of last year, Hurts was averaging 1.1 designed runs per game in 2025, according to Pro Football Focus. He averaged 3.6 designed runs per game in his first four seasons as the starter.

The modern West Coast offense hasn’t necessarily needed a mobile quarterback to thrive, as evidenced by the success of Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford with the Rams. But the 2026 Eagles offense isn’t going to be a carbon copy of other schemes around the league from the same tree, and Mannion is well-aware of Hurts’ rushing ability.

“Jalen has a unique skill set in that way,” Mannion said. “So that’ll certainly be a part of what we do, but we’re looking again at all areas as an offense to really attack defenses on a weekly basis. He is uniquely skilled in that way. That will be a part of it, but it won’t be the only part of it.”

Zone reads aren’t totally foreign to this coaching tree. In 2012, while Mike Shanahan was Washington’s head coach and Kyle was his offensive coordinator, the team drafted Robert Griffin III with the second overall pick.

The rookie quarterback would go on to rush for 815 yards and seven touchdowns, all while throwing for 3,200 yards. His production on the ground wouldn’t persist far beyond 2012, though. Washington took a more conservative approach with Griffin III as a rusher, especially as he dealt with injuries that began during a rookie season that was ended by a serious knee injury.

Still, Davidson said a backside threat is important in the run game, whether it’s a quarterback run or a bootleg. In the case of the bootleg, which the Eagles incorporated throughout training camp and the preseason, the quarterback exploits the unblocked defensive end who flows with the running back, rolling out unabated in the opposite direction and completing a pass on the move.

“If you’re just under center or even the pistol, and you don’t have anything that keeps the defense on the backside, then it’s a lot easier for them to chase [the ball] down [in wide zone],” Davidson said. “But if they know that they have to defend boot on the other side of the field or defend a quarterback run on the other side of the field, it can really slow the defense down.”

Time will reveal the contents of Mannion’s playbook. While it may contain odes to his influences, it could also include all of the plays he would’ve liked to run throughout his nine-year career as an NFL backup quarterback and two seasons as an assistant with the Green Bay Packers.

Whatever the offense becomes will be unique to the Eagles, Kuper said.

“Those webs of guys kind of break out, and they kind of make it their own, and that’s what our goal is,” Kuper said. “This is going to evolve into Sean Mannion’s offense. This is going to be a derivative, maybe.

“There’s going to be flavors of what you’ve seen throughout the league, and some of his mentors, but this will be our offense.”

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