Mike LaFleur already knows who will play Nacua, Adams roles in Arizona

It should come as no surprise that a Sean McVay acolyte is trying to bring the Los Angeles Rams‘ offense to a new team. McVay’s former assistants are sprinkled throughout the league as head coaches or top coordinators, and it’s not hard to see remnants of his work other teams.

Count the Arizona Cardinals as another franchise looking to bring the success of the McVay offense into the fold. New head coach Mike LaFleur, who spent the past three years as Los Angeles‘ offensive coordinator under McVay, will do just that in his first year at the helm of the Cardinals.

LaFleur recently told ESPN’s Josh Weinfuss that he has already identified who on his Cardinals team will take on the roles that Puka Nacua and Davante Adams held in L.A. Marvin Harrison Jr. will operate as the “X” receiver, essentially the Adams role, while Michael Wilson — coming off his first 1,000-yard season — slides into the “Z,” the same spot Nacua mans with the Rams.

Now, it might not be a spot-on comparison, but Wilson noted that “it’s easy to kind of picture to the average fan who doesn’t know specifics about ball to kind of see what role you’d be doing.”

Given how productive both Rams receivers were in that scheme last season, it makes sense that LaFleur would want to mirror that in Arizona. Nacua led the NFL in receptions and receiving yards per game, finished second in the league with 1,715 receiving yards, and ranked fourth in both targets and yards per target. Adams, working primarily as the “X” on the left side, caught 60 of 112 targets for 789 yards but led the NFL with 14 touchdown catches, including a league-high 12 scores in the red zone.

LaFleur’s system is a version of the West Coast offense, and like McVay’s Rams attack, it’s built around moving receivers around rather than boxing them into a single alignment.

“You can move them inside and outside on a whim, just in terms of our formations, our motions and all that kind of stuff,” LaFleur said. “You don’t want to say you can protect them by bringing people inside, but you can just utilize their skill sets in different ways.”

For McVay and the Rams, it’s another sign of the offense’s growing influence around the league, with a former coordinator now exporting the blueprint — and the roles that made it work — to a division rival’s roster.

Now, whether or not LaFleur and the Cardinals can emulate that success is a completely different question. They don’t have a quarterback like Matthew Stafford and will likely lean on veteran Jacoby Brissett again or rookie Carson Beck. They’ll also have to face a Rams defense twice that knows this offensive system through and through.

And for the Rams, they’ve done it enough under McVay that continuing to build the momentum of their offense shouldn’t be an issue.