Klint Kubiak: From Colorado State Safety to Super Bowl-Winning Head Coach
Klint Kubiak won Super Bowl LX calling plays for the Seattle Seahawks in February 2026. Nine days later, he was introduced as the 25th head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. He was 38 years old. The franchise hadn’t made the playoffs since 2021. The fit made a certain kind of obvious sense — an offense-minded coach with a fresh Super Bowl ring, walking into a building that just drafted running back Ashton Jeanty first overall and already has one of the best tight ends in football in Brock Bowers. Whether it works is another question. But the hire itself was hard to argue with.
The Background — Before He Ever Coached a Down
Klint Alexander Kubiak was born February 17, 1987, in Houston, while his father Gary was playing quarterback for the Denver Broncos. He grew up in Colorado, attended Regis Jesuit High School in Aurora where he played wide receiver and defensive back, then walked on at Colorado State as a safety. In 34 collegiate games, he recorded 111 solo tackles, seven tackles for loss, and three interceptions. He was named a team captain his senior year and earned an invite to the East-West Shrine Game — a decent college career, not an NFL one.
He didn’t plan to coach. Thought he’d play professionally. By his own admission, he was naïve enough to believe the NFL was a realistic destination and had put essentially no thought into a backup plan. When it didn’t happen, he took a job in the oil and gas industry. That lasted about one phone call’s worth of time. Someone from football reached out, and he quit the next day. “You build great relationships and get to teach football instead of a subject,” he said later. He never looked back at the oil field.
The Coaching Tree He Grew Up In
Gary Kubiak didn’t just coach in the NFL — he helped define an offensive system that still runs through half the league. Gary came up under Mike Shanahan in Denver, absorbed the West Coast principles Bill Walsh had introduced to the league decades earlier, and eventually ran his own version of it in Houston and Denver. He won Super Bowl 50 with the Broncos after the 2015 season. The coaches he developed along the way include Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur, Robert Saleh, Vance Joseph, and Mike McDaniel — a list that reads like a current NFL coaching directory.
Klint’s younger brother Klay Kubiak is the offensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers, which means both Kubiak brothers spent the 2025 season as NFC West offensive coordinators. Klint’s Seahawks won the division. Klay’s 49ers lost to them in the divisional round, 41–6. Their father Gary presumably had a complicated January.
Career Timeline: Thirteen Years to the Top Job
After leaving the oil business, Kubiak landed at Texas A&M as an offensive quality control coach in 2010. He stayed through 2012 working as a graduate assistant and inside receivers coach, earning a master’s degree in human resource development along the way. In 2013, the Minnesota Vikings hired him to coach offensive quality control and assist with wide receivers under coordinators Bill Musgrave and Norv Turner. He spent two years in Minnesota, then took a wide receivers job at the University of Kansas in 2015 — one of those career pivots that looks strange on a resume until you understand that staying close to football sometimes matters more than the level.
February 2016, Denver. His father Gary was the Broncos’ head coach, and Klint joined as an offensive assistant. During the 2017 season, with Bill Musgrave promoted to coordinator, Kubiak took over as the primary quarterbacks coach for the final six weeks. That’s where the QB development reputation started taking shape, quietly, under the radar.
January 2019, back to Minnesota. The Vikings hired him as quarterbacks coach under Kevin Stefanski and head coach Mike Zimmer. He worked with Kirk Cousins, built that relationship, and learned the coordinator job from the inside. When Gary Kubiak retired from the coordinator role in February 2021, Klint was promoted to replace him. He was 34. Some people thought it was nepotism. The offense functioned well enough to quiet most of those conversations.
February 2022 brought another move to Denver — this time under Nathaniel Hackett as passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach. The Broncos’ offense struggled badly to open the season. By November 20, Hackett handed Kubiak the play-calling duties. It didn’t save Denver’s year, but it showed the league that Kubiak could run an offense under pressure and on short notice.
March 2023, San Francisco. Kyle Shanahan hired him as passing game coordinator. The 49ers finished second in the NFL in total offense at 398.4 yards per game. Brock Purdy threw for 4,280 yards, 31 touchdowns, and 11 interceptions. Kubiak wasn’t the head of the offense — Shanahan ran that — but he was embedded in the system that produced those numbers, learning a version of the scheme he would eventually run himself.
February 2024, New Orleans Saints, this time as full offensive coordinator. Injuries cost the Saints their starting quarterback for most of the year — Derek Carr played only 10 games, with Spencer Rattler and Jake Haener splitting the rest. Despite that, Kubiak kept the offense functional. Alvin Kamara set a career high with 950 rushing yards and led the team in receptions. Not a glamour season, but it demonstrated that Kubiak could adapt when the personnel didn’t cooperate.
Seattle 2025 — The Season That Changed Everything
The Seahawks hired Kubiak in January 2025 to replace Ryan Grubb under head coach Mike Macdonald. Nobody expected much from that offense. The Seahawks had traded Geno Smith away. DK Metcalf was gone. Tyler Lockett was released. The skill position group heading into the season looked like a collection of question marks and one promising young receiver in Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who was entering just his third year.
What followed was one of the more surprising single-season offensive turnarounds in recent memory. Sam Darnold — the quarterback drafted third overall in 2018, waived by two teams, written off by most — completed 67.7% of his passes for 4,048 yards, 25 touchdowns, and 14 interceptions. He made his second Pro Bowl. His completion percentage was the highest single-season mark of his career. Smith-Njigba led the entire NFL with 1,793 receiving yards on 119 catches, added 10 touchdowns, earned first-team All-Pro, and was named the league’s Offensive Player of the Year. The running game went from 28th in the league in 2024 at 95.7 yards per game to 10th, at 123.3. Kenneth Walker III ran for 1,027 yards. Zach Charbonnet scored 12 rushing touchdowns.
By Week 10, the offense ranked top five in points scored. By season’s end, it averaged 28.4 points per game — third in the NFL — with 351.4 yards per game and 5.9 yards per play. The Seahawks scored 483 total points, a franchise record. Their point differential was plus-191, also a franchise record. They finished 14–3, won the NFC West, beat San Francisco 41–6 in the divisional round, defeated the Rams 31–27 in the NFC Championship, and won Super Bowl LX. Cooper Kupp, who played for Seattle that season, said of Kubiak: “Guys love him. You want to play for guys like Klint.”
That quote matters because it came unprompted, from a receiver who knew his play-caller was likely leaving. Player trust is harder to manufacture than statistics. Kubiak had both.
The Offensive Scheme — What He Actually Runs
Kubiak runs a version of the Shanahan West Coast offense. The DNA traces from Bill Walsh through Mike Shanahan to Gary Kubiak to Kyle Shanahan and now to Klint. The system’s defining characteristics have stayed consistent across that lineage: a zone-based running game, heavy play-action off the run, and personnel packages designed to force defensive mismatches before the snap.
He leans into 12 personnel — one running back, two tight ends, two wide receivers — and 21 personnel, which uses two running backs, a tight end, and two receivers. What this does is force opposing defenses into a choice they can’t win cleanly. Put a linebacker on the field to stop the run, and a tight end or receiver can exploit him in coverage. Put a nickel corner or safety in to handle the passing threat, and the run game finds gaps. Kubiak uses that conflict deliberately, and his play-action numbers reflect it — when defenses are genuinely unsure what’s coming, quarterbacks get cleaner looks downfield.
Shortly after taking the Raiders job, Kubiak told reporters that finding a fullback was a priority in the offseason. That single comment told Raiders fans most of what they needed to know. Fullbacks are central to this system — they’re lead blockers in the run game and create mismatches as checkdown targets in the passing game. The Raiders hadn’t used a fullback consistently in years. With Ashton Jeanty in the backfield and Brock Bowers at tight end, the raw materials for this offense are already better than most people realize.
The one stat that frames the opportunity most clearly: in 2025, Kubiak’s Seahawks averaged 6.4 yards per play on first down — tied for the best rate in the league. The Raiders, that same season under Pete Carroll, averaged 4.7 yards per play on first down, tied for third worst. A one-yard improvement per first-down snap doesn’t sound dramatic. Across a full season of possessions, it’s the difference between a functional offense and a dominant one.
The Raiders Job — What He Inherited and What He’s Building
The Raiders finished the 2025 season at the bottom of the league. The offense was historically inefficient in meaningful game situations — nearly 41% of their total points came in garbage time under Carroll and Geno Smith. That’s the number Kubiak and new quarterback Kirk Cousins have to make irrelevant in 2026.
The Cousins reunion is worth noting. They worked together in Minnesota when Kubiak was quarterbacks coach and later offensive coordinator. Cousins knows the offense, knows the language, and trusts the play-caller. He said publicly that Kubiak’s culture centers on “team-first, team-focused” and playing with “shocking effort” — Kubiak’s phrase is apparently “ride for the brand,” which is either motivating or corny depending on your perspective, but the players seem to believe it.
Fernando Mendoza — the quarterback out of Indiana selected with the first overall pick in the 2026 draft — gives the Raiders a long-term answer under center, assuming things develop the way they’re supposed to. Kubiak has spoken directly about his philosophy with young quarterbacks: let them learn, protect them with the run game, and don’t put them in situations where they’re being asked to carry an offense before they’re ready. That’s how this system works. Jeanty and the run game carry the early weight. Play-action creates easy reads. The quarterback develops within a structure that doesn’t require him to be elite on day one.
Bowers had 64 catches for 680 yards and seven touchdowns in only 12 games last season. In Kubiak’s 12-personnel-heavy scheme, a tight end with Bowers’ athleticism and hands is as close to a guaranteed weapon as you can get. The Seahawks used their tight ends as intermediate route runners and red-zone targets in ways that fit Bowers almost perfectly.
The Raiders haven’t made the playoffs since 2021. The AFC West with Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs remains the hardest division in football. Nobody is projecting a Super Bowl run in year one. But for the first time in a while, there’s a coherent offensive identity in Las Vegas — a scheme with a proven track record, a head coach who has developed quarterbacks at every stop, and a roster with genuine playmakers at the positions this offense requires. That’s not nothing. It’s actually a reasonable foundation.
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