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Kliff Kingsbury And The "Illusion Of Complexity"

Kliff Kingsbury was talking about what he saw as the most difficult part of his offense for the players to digest, a timely topic given that it is minicamp and that people are wondering specifically how rookie QB Kyler Murray is doing in understanding the playbook. It's the tempo, Kingsbury said, and the times in which the Cardinals will want to play fast and the players knowing things well enough to execute multiple plays in a short amount of time.

"You want to have that fine line of not thinking too much, but we want to have enough in that we can still be an attacking, kind of giving the illusion of complexity out there," Kingsbury said.

That's an apt phrase, "illusion of complexity." Not because it gives a window into Kingsbury's offensive thought process (although it does), but because that seems to be the concept many of the new wave of NFL offenses are based upon. When the Cardinals played the Chiefs last season, that's what defenders talked about, the fact the Chiefs boiled down didn't do a lot of different things offensively just that they dressed it up with formations and motions to at least momentarily confuse the defense as the ball was snapped. The Rams like doing that, and so do the 49ers -- coincidentally the two teams with young head coaches/playcallers, much like Kingsbury.

Finding that balance between play options and simplicity (the latter of which the Cardinals did not have on offense last season) is what Kingsbury seeks. If you can find it, and the Cardinals are able to use their illusion, all the better for the offense in 2019.

Kliff Kingsbury watches a minicamp practice
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