NFL’s 2026 “copycat” blueprint: Rams’ 13-personnel posture, Seahawks’ defensive chess moves could reshape gameplans

The NFL has always leaned toward adaptation, but the pace of tactical convergence has accelerated in recent seasons. As offenses and defenses settle into recurring patterns, coaching staffs have a shorter path from idea to implementation. CBS Sports framed 2026 as a year when two particular identities, the Rams’ approach to 13-personnel and the Seahawks’ defensive “chess piece” sequencing, could become models that other teams try to reproduce.

The key concept behind the “copycat” cycle is that most leaguewide innovations do not arrive as a single tactic. They arrive as a package. CBS Sports points to several earlier league shifts to illustrate that idea, including the widespread rise of zone-read options after Robert Griffin III’s rookie year in 2012, the more recent spread of two-high safety coverage that has limited the biggest passing plays, and the way modern play design has leaned harder into pre-snap movement under innovators such as Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay. The underlying logic is simple: if a scheme forces defensive answers at the snap, it creates exploitable gaps before the first hand hits the football.

From the offensive side, the Rams’ 13-personnel idea matters because it attacks defenses that prefer to match personnel with predictable coverage behavior. In practice, 13-personnel means the offense is presenting a run-pass identity without fully committing to a single style, often pairing it with formation and motion indicates that can tip routes, leverage, or run fits for the defense. CBS Sports’ projection suggests that as more teams see what that personnel posture can create, it will stop being a niche look and become a broader organizing principle for gameplanning.

On defense, the Seahawks’ reputation for creating pressure and confusion through structure and timing has long been tied to the idea of controllable chaos. In CBS Sports’ framing, the Seahawks’ defensive “chess piece” is not just a single player or stunt. It is a way of forcing offenses to treat the defense as a moving problem, where assignment and leverage can change based on formation, motion, and snap count. That matters in 2026 because modern offenses are increasingly built to identify coverage and then strike quickly. Defenses that can disrupt that identification, even slightly, can swing a game by changing which throws are “available” after pre-snap disguise.

CBS Sports also highlights how other league trends could keep accelerating in the background. Two-high safety coverage has become a dominant answer to deep passing threats, which encourages offenses to find alternatives in the intermediate game or through scripted leverage plays. Meanwhile, pre-snap motion has become a standard tool for both Shanahan-tree play-calling and broader league imitation, helping offenses reveal and exploit mismatches. On the special-teams and situational side, CBS Sports points to a broader willingness to go for it in fourth down situations and notes that kickers have been making longer-range attempts at a higher rate than in earlier eras, both of which change how teams manage field position.

The “what to watch next” in 2026 is not whether any single gimmick works, but whether these concepts become default settings. If 13-personnel usage expands while paired with meaningful motion and disguised formations, defenses may find themselves reacting more often than dictating. If the Seahawks’ kind of defensive structural sequencing becomes easier for other teams to replicate, offenses could spend more of their play clock confirming coverage and less time exploiting it. The league already copies tendencies, but the next step is copying the logic behind them, and that is the blueprint CBS Sports believes could spread quickly.