In 2025, only 34.1% of run/pass snaps league-wide came with a quarterback's hands under center. Fifteen teams ran it on fewer than one snap in three. Washington bottomed out at 12.2%.

And then there were the Los Angeles Rams, who ran 59.0% of their offensive snaps (624 of 1,057) from under center — a rate nobody else in football came close to. Seattle, at 53.8%, was the nearest neighbor. The gap between LA and the league average was nearly 25 percentage points.

This wasn't a stylistic quirk. It was the base offense Sean McVay built the Rams around in 2017-18, walked away from during the shotgun-heavy stretch of the Matthew Stafford era, and re-installed almost completely in 2025 — with the run and the pass working out of the same look, at efficiency levels the rest of the league couldn't match from the same formation.

The McVay under-center arc, 2017 to 2025

McVay came into the league as an under-center guy. Then, for a few years, he wasn't.

The drift is clean: peak under-center identity in 2018, a decisive move to shotgun once Stafford arrived and the Rams leaned into a spread passing game (bottoming at 38.4% in 2023), and then a full-scale rebuild back to a McVay-era baseline. The 59.0% mark in 2025 was the second-highest of McVay's tenure — trailing only 2018 — and the largest year-over-year jump he's made.

Under center is where LA got unpredictable

On those 624 under-center snaps, the Rams averaged +0.111 EPA/play with a 51.3% success rate. The other 31 teams, on 10,611 combined under-center snaps, averaged +0.008 EPA/play at 44.4% success. That's not a small edge — it's the gap between a top-tier offense and a roughly break-even one, produced from a formation most of the league treats as an obligation rather than a weapon.

The mechanism: McVay didn't let under center become a run tell. On 1st down, the Rams lined up under center on 369 of their 487 snaps (75.8%) and still threw the ball 40.9% of the time from that look. The rest of the league, on 1st-down under-center snaps, passed just 29.6% of the time — an 11-point pass-rate gap on the exact down and formation where defenses are conditioned to sell out against the run.

Those 1st-down under-center snaps produced +0.133 EPA/play and a 50.4% success rate for LA. The rest of the league, on the same down and formation, sat at −0.009 EPA/play and 41.3% success.

The run game didn't suffer for the unpredictability — if anything, it benefited. On 378 under-center rushes, the Rams averaged 4.92 yards per carry, +0.026 EPA/play, and a 49.2% success rate. The league's other under-center rushes (7,482 of them) averaged 4.18 YPC, −0.035 EPA, and 42.5% success. When defenses guessed run, LA still moved the ball.

Stafford, from under center

Stafford arrived in LA as a shotgun quarterback. In 2025 he lined up primarily from under-center, and the numbers stood out.

On 236 under-center dropbacks (sacks excluded), Stafford posted:

• +0.356 EPA per dropback
• +5.13 CPOE (completion percentage over expected)
• 8.38 average air yards
• 68.6% completion rate

The rest of the league's quarterbacks combined for 3,158 under-center dropbacks and averaged +0.233 EPA/db, +2.01 CPOE, and 8.03 air yards on 57.9% completions. Stafford threw about as far downfield as the league norm from that look, but did it markedly more accurately relative to expectation and generated roughly 50% more EPA per attempt.

Broken out by down, Stafford was sharpest early: on 147 under-center 1st-down dropbacks he posted +0.405 EPA/db, +6.7 CPOE, 9.05 air yards, and 70.1% completions. On 76 under-center 2nd-down dropbacks he was nearly as effective — +0.301 EPA/db, +5.39 CPOE, 69.7% completions.

And LA lived in that world: 75.8% of its 1st-down snaps and 57.0% of its 2nd-down snaps came under center. The rest of the league ran only 29.4% of its 2nd-down snaps from that same look.

The formation isn't the whole story — the balance is

LA's shotgun offense in 2025 was also excellent on its own terms: 433 snaps at +0.186 EPA/play, 52.4% success, and an 85.9% pass rate. When the Rams got in shotgun, everyone in the building could reasonably expect a pass, and it still worked.

But shotgun-heavy passing is what most of the league already runs. What separated the Rams was that they got nearly the same per-play value (+0.111 EPA, 51.3% success) out of under center — a formation where they still passed 39.4% of the time, well above the league's 29.5% rate from the same alignment. That's the trick: nearly six in ten LA snaps came from a look the rest of the league treats as a run signal, and Stafford's average dropback from it still gained 8.38 air yards at a +5.13 CPOE clip.

What to make of it

The league-wide trend has been to spread out, get in shotgun, and let athletic quarterbacks solve problems in space. McVay rode that trend for several years and then, in 2025, moved sharply against it — not by scheming around Stafford's limitations, but by putting his quarterback back into an under-center pocket at a rate no other team in football approached, and getting arguably the most efficient version of that offense he's fielded since 2018.

On 624 snaps of the least fashionable formation in football, the 2025 Rams put together a genuinely strong version of it — and did so while beating the league average on nearly every efficiency measure that formation produces elsewhere.