Biggest Surprises of the NFL Season with Ollie Connolly

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2:17Welcome to NFL Daily, where we're still getting over Nick Benito sacking us earlier this week. I am Greg Rosenthal. I am here in the TalkSport studios talking to one of my favorite analysts in the game. Yes, it's an extra show. We're here in London. I wanted to have Ali on more than once. Ali Connolly, welcome. And I love the fact that you are no longer really on Twitter or any social media. So you have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to Nick Benito.

2:47Ollie Connolly:I only know through listening to this show, getting out of the takers fit is fun. You getting burned by the quickest player off the ball in the NFL is one of the highlights of my season. Totally burned. And the sad thing is I've talked him up. OK, I got to get over it. But just people just keep bringing it up. So Ollie Connolly runs one of the best sub stacks and podcasts in the game. The read optional. Go subscribe. It is the best, most in-depth, if you're really into football, podcast out there with John Ledyard. And Ollie also writes these great pieces as part of the sub stack. So we're going to go over just four weeks in, back and forth, just some surprises.

3:30And we only have a little bit of time here, so let's just get going with it. I'll have you start.

3:35Ollie Connolly:Number one surprise for me is the efficiency of the Patriots passing game. I had high expectations that the McDaniels may partnership, but this has exceeded my expectations. How excited are you feeling? Are you just sucking up to me, knowing I'm a Patriots fan, going with this as your first thing? No, it's kind of a pat on the back because I did Mina's part in the offseason. I did the quarterback draft, what you pick for the next three years, and I think I took Drake May like fourth overall. I was kind of having an out-of-body experience, and I think I took him fourth. So I'm trying to rev my own, you know, crank the juice up.

4:07I do think Josh McDaniels has done a really good job watching them every week. That just looks like, oh, yeah, this looks like a highly schemed offense that knows how to get receivers open. What have you seen that he's done to help Drake May specifically out?

4:23Ollie Connolly:The thing that really stands out is how expansive it is, how sophisticated it is, how much new stuff there is every week, And I thought when McDaniels got there, it's really this fusion of, here's all the glorious stuff when we're in the passing game. It's all the Brady goodness. And then in the run game, I'm going to take all the cam stuff I ran from 2020. And it's the first time in my career as a coach, I've been able to fuse those two ideas together. But the volume and the amount of different packages every week, that's not something I kind of associated with Drake May coming into the season.

4:54Ollie Connolly:I thought maybe he would be a little bit overwhelmed by all the Brady-ness of the passing game, and it would take maybe two years of the partnership to really tap into everything. So the amount they put on his plate and how successful and how effortless a lot of it looks for him, I mean, guys are wide open, to be fair, but the effortless of him running the whole operation stands out to me. He's so young, and the Drake May believers in the draft, of which you were one, Nate Tice was certainly one. I always thought he should have gotten more credit for how he read the field, like how smart he was, How is that showing up?

5:29Because there are moments still like that. The turnovers as well as he played in the Pittsburgh game, other than the turnovers, like there are plays where he fritzes out a little bit. What have you like seen in terms of him having that balance of like being that incredible athlete and and just doing kind of what McDaniels wants him to do?

5:48Ollie Connolly:I think you're just going to have to live with that being two or so boneheaded plays a game. But that's down from the five to four that was in good weeks last season. and further along than I thought he would be. Everything is just so fast with him, so quick. The decision-making, knowing where to go with the ball, his eyes are never in the wrong place. Now, however, he makes a good decision once he gets there. It's kind of a different conversation, but he knows immediately where to attack and does it really quickly. And that's just not what was happening last season. I mean, it was a mess anyway, all through last season, behind the scenes, obviously on the field.

6:20Ollie Connolly:I just, I'm surprised he looks so comfortable and I'm surprised how much they've put on his plate. so early. I'm excited that he gets a national stage against the Bills. Defense is not playing that well. I think that could be a fun high scoring game. I do, like there is part of me that is watching it and can't quite believe that a very effective offense exists in the year 2025 in the NFL without a great offensive line in particular and with Hunter Henry probably as the key like pass catcher on the team like it's hunter henry it's digs a little bit now but like the offense kind of goes through hunter henry and this is an effective way of like doing business the offense goes through drake may his threat as a downhill runner makes them essentially plus one in every area of the field because people are terrified of him running downhill and they've flashed that early on with some of the option game stuff and so it just broadens the field for every defense and so you get why is hunter henry who is not quick off the ball wide open eight yards down the field basically every other play um so i i think that you're seeing with may this like force multiplying effect that the really great ones have um and it's it's just strange to see guys that open when the talent is it's not all the way there and the connection with digs now from last week in particular i think that's really ramping up they have great chemistry may may already be one of the three best back shoulder throw guys in the league um that's actually pretty short list at the moment because aaron's not throwing them so well anymore these days um but he just feels like the complete full field threat individually the way you get with the really great ones alan uh lamar and it's just can you get the consistency that one of the things i do love the granular things about him he's such a power thrower and you love recognizes when he has to take pace off the ball everything about him slows down like you can see him thinking oh no I've got to be really slow on this one.

8:20Ollie Connolly:Josh has told me I go one to two and I hit the check down and he just seems bored of the easy stuff when he actually gets to and does the easy stuff compared to when you watch sometimes Daniels and particularly Caleb. It's like they're just not interested in the easy work. They want to do the really difficult stuff. If we just clipped that last 45 seconds and sent it to Bill Simmons, he would have you on his podcast. So we need to do this. We need to sell some subscriptions while you're here. we only have so much time you know together how is the will campbell experience in your mind so far some good some good run game reps for sure to this untrained eye the run game reps are legit and getting him out into space is like a prominent part of the offense that there is a shelf life on that stuff i always think about this with penny soul where they'll have three or four plays a season where it's soul out in space and it's usually like sunday night football or a primetime game.

9:14Ollie Connolly:And so I think people believe that's like a core element of the Lions offense when it's like, really, that's four or five plays a season. And he's just a complete freak. And 90 % of his work is doing the dirty offensive line work at the highest level you can in the league. With Campbell, I still have real concerns about absorbing knockback power and not even against a Jared Verth or the truly great power rush. I just don't think he can quite sink and bend the way the real great ones can to absorb power. And so it's more of a finesse game. Bradbury's been really good inside. Talk about surprise of the season.

9:44Ollie Connolly:Having a quality center in a league where there's three good centers at the moment, that's been a surprise. But Campbell specifically, I still just like, sometimes you get in your gut. I'm like, I think he could be a really, really gifted guard and you could unlock more in the offense with him at guard than just trying to force him and tackle because you took him at a premier spot in the draft. My hope was just, can he be Anthony Costanzo? Not the same style, but like that level of player, Bernard Ryman. That'd be fine. That'd be fine, but I think he could be Joe Tooney. Okay. My God. That's fair.

10:14Okay. My first surprise, and I'll speed it up. It's kind of the teams that are bad at rushing the ball. So it's like the whole offseason, oh, it's the year, you know, now where everyone's going to run. And it's like maybe the defenses were more ready for that than we think, first of all. And then it's specifically the teams that are bad at it. Some of them are injuries, the Buccaneers being this bad, largely because of injuries. the 49ers, I'm not sure I'm going to give them that big of a pass. They actually kind of have their group back. They're one of the worst running teams. The Cardinals are one of the worst running teams in the league.

10:51And then if you look at the teams that go heaviest 12 personnel, everyone loves talking about 12 personnel, the extra tight end on the field. And it's up a few percentage points. If you look at the teams that are the heaviest, they're almost uniformly the worst running teams in the league right now, which I find interesting. So the Browns are in that mix. The Bears are in that mix. The Cardinals, the Ravens are in that mix. The Packers are a surprisingly bad running team. They're not as much 12, I don't think. The Chiefs are another team. To me, I'm just grouping all these teams together and curious what you think about some of the teams specifically and why these running games aren't working.

11:32Ollie Connolly:Yeah, they each have their own particular challenges. I think something that's important to note is if you just isolate the run game as a standalone in 2025, it's really difficult to rip something away from it. You almost need to combine rush success rate with play-action explosiveness because they're only investing in the run game to such a degree to hit play-action explosives, to make it look, smell, feel like they really intend on running the ball and particularly in 12 to try and get some of the mismatched stuff by getting an extra linebacker on the field. So it's like when you see the Seahawks run game figures, they're pretty poor for a team that have brought in Clint Kubiak and you expect to be a very good rushing team.

12:10Ollie Connolly:But they are hitting chunk plays all over the place specifically because they're in a formation, in a set, in a look that is telling you we want to run the ball. So as long as you're investment, you get the payoff in the play action game. That to me is like perfectly fine. It's if the play action game is poor and the run game is poor, you're in trouble. and it's not that having a good running attack alone creates the play action game, but it's do you have enough variation, enough different looks in the way you try to run the ball? If you're just silent as we do one thing, we are a wide zone team, that's trouble for everyone.

12:43Ollie Connolly:If you have a really varied run game and it's just pretty poor, which is what the books have, you can at least get to the play action shots. So maybe the Packers would be an example of like, yeah, it's not totally clicking and injuries were certainly a big part of that. But it is setting up formationally what else we're doing. The Packers in particular is a tough one. LaFleur is like a demigod of my life. I love Matt LaFleur. Even after Sunday night in the clock management? He's put together some pretty ropey game plans by his standards. I think if you gave him some truth serum, he would say that's not some of my best work.

13:17The game plan against the Browns in particular

13:21Ollie Connolly:was like a Hall of Fame bad one for him, which I'm sure he would want back. So I think as much as that has gone into it, their situational play calling is pretty poor. Their game planning against the opponent has not been like, let's attack a weakness. It's like, we're just going to do what we do, and that's just never been the way he's rolled. Maybe a team that will benefit from the week off right now, but yeah, I don't know. Just seeing the Cardinals make no sense with a running game this bad to me, it feels like they're a little dead on arrival if that's the case the 49ers feel a little I know they're three and one I they'll figure it out if they get everyone healthy but they feel a little bit while we're talking Packers I'll just throw out my second one too which is that like the Packers didn't get a win in a two-game sample against the Browns and the Cowboys like I know you had them winning the Super Bowl I believe I think you had them winning the Super Bowl before the Micah Parsons chase.

14:20Ollie Connolly:And I've done that now for like three years in a row. So I'm just going down with the ship until it's proven correct. Like what, how did that happen? Like, what do you think about these last two weeks? The last two, like I said, the Browns one being so many penalties and just a pretty poor game plan on offense against a team that can only really score 10 points in a game on offense is a bad one. The Cowboys one being the clock management. They're going up against maybe the most cohesive offense in the NFL. and it shows maybe some of the concerns with the Packers defensively for the fun and joy of all the creativity on the back end and having Micah and those guys up front and the creativity in the pressure game.

14:57Ollie Connolly:When it's just one-on-one, third down, who's got the best players? I still don't know if they stack up with that and that's where I would get concerned. If they have to go into the link in the playoffs and it's third down and they've got A.J. Brown, what are we actually doing here? Who do we put on Dallas Goddard to figure that stuff out? So that would be my concern. But I still think the underlying profile of what they do, explosive plays against good teams, being able to create pressure with four, that's like the Super Bowl profile. Yeah, I'm not too worried. I think they would have been my Super Bowl pick.

15:29I had the Lions and I wasn't going to just change it. Like, I'm not I'm not worried about the Packers because of those two games. But when I was thinking, like, what was the most surprising thing that happened? Like that that pretty much was it right now. You said something interesting there, though, that the Cowboys were the most cohesive offense potentially in the NFL. Is that is that on your list? No, no, no, no. It should be. Can we talk about that for two minutes?

15:50Ollie Connolly:My guy Clayton Adams goes in. They ultimately have the best run game in football. You go look at the Cardinals run game. It's not looking so pretty. So you say cohesive like you're talking about the marriage of the passing game and the running game, because I've talked a lot about how just watching Dak. I don't know if you like I think he's been the best quarterback in the league this year. if I had to choose one it's tough to choose like to not choose Josh Allen so whatever you're just picking like two amazing quarterbacks but that's the I love watching the style that Dak plays like but we haven't talked a lot about the running game like what have you seen in terms of the running game and how that works with the passing game yeah it's they do everything and they were not a very good gap oriented base run team basically ever since Dak's been there it's always been zone and kicking and going and stretching the field and then he would boot out there and then when Dax legs started to go and he stopped using the legs it was no longer even effective no one respected the boot out of it now they've got Clayton Adams as we mentioned who is the go-to guy for like you want to build a power spread system a downhill running attack system he's the number one guy in the league right now and has been honestly for three four seasons and you see the impact on the Cardinals when he left the thing I just love about them is there's of rhythm to great offense the one you just feel in your bones when it's like this thing rolling down a hill where it's like they just feel like a freight train the rhythm they have in and out of the huddle bouncing between the run game to play action how it all ties together to dak you know drop back game from under center to dak seeing the field and spreading it around they've been able to marry up like him wanting to be paid to manning with him accepting like well there has to be some movement emotion and in this offense pre-snap which he's just never really allowed since Kellum Moore left.

17:37I don't think people, and I would include myself in this, have really wrapped their minds around the fact that they just put up 40 on the defense going into the week that I would have said was the best defense in the league with Kavante Turpin as their number two receiver, Javante Williams, who's looked great, but as their number one running back, and massive injuries on the offensive line, like missing two of their guys in the interior and benching their left tackle during that game. It's kind of a coaching masterpiece, and I'm loving it because I was kind of high, not high, but I thought Brian Schottenheimer could be a better head coach than he was a coordinator.

18:18And the Adams hire and the fact that he's empowering him, I think that was the worry in Dallas was like, are they going to let him do this running game? And I guess the answer is yes. Based on the training camp I saw, it was the biggest mismatch in any training camp possible was the Cowboys offense versus the Cowboys defense every day. I think it just gave them so much confidence after that month that no one could tell them anything.

18:42Ollie Connolly:We're moving to another surprise. Go for it. The Lions defense being this good this fast has me a little bit shook because I thought they would be really good by like week 18 and round into form for the playoffs, and it surprises me that they've been able to get up to speed this quickly. So what about them? Because there's not like a secondary pass rusher really other than Aiden Hutchinson. So what are they doing that makes it work? I mean, Shepard, to his credit, has basically said, and I love when coaches do this, like they've been waiting in the sidelines and the wings for like work on their philosophy and tinkering away.

19:14Ollie Connolly:Then they get put in the big boy chair and it's like, I'm going to do everything I think the old guy was doing wrong. I'm going to throw out everything Aaron Glenn did for the most part and try and build my own style. And that's where I thought it would take some time to be like this push-pull tension between we know what's successful, we've run it for years. And then Shepard comes in and says, what we were doing previously was pretty old-fashioned, pretty outdated. You see it now with the Jets, and it doesn't look so pretty when you don't have Aiden Hutchinson up from. We've got to be more of a pressure-based team.

19:40Ollie Connolly:We have to blitz on earlier downs, and he's brought them. If you go and look at the best teams over the past three seasons defensively, they all have kind of these trigger points in terms of early down blitz rate, sim pressure rate, four-man pressure rate. They're above the threshold for all of those best groups in the league. To get those pieces to fit into that right away, They have obviously a crazy amount of talent. I just thought that would take a lot of time before they could figure it out. And even in week one, it was pure ego coaching from Sheppies, dropping Hutchinson on third down. It's like, okay, this guy's a little over his skis.

20:12Ollie Connolly:It's a little bit too philosophy over the players. And immediately they just course corrected. And he's like, okay, some of the stuff I did was wrong. Let's go play football. You said like a ridiculous amount of talent. What Brian Branch stands out, obviously, and Hutchinson is just like premier players. what are you what are you seeing about like how they're using talent Kirby as well McNeil coming back the Lamar game plan when we do like game plans of the year which you probably wouldn't do but I certainly would do sat at home it is my goal if anyone from my heart is listening like I've been wanting to hire Ali Connelly for a while and then we would do game plans of the year if you would told me after week one when I saw Kelvin Shepard's game plan which was all about Kelvin Shepard which I accept and he's really articulate and I think he's a fabulous coach but it was all about looking it was a look at me plan if you told me a few weeks later he would go up against Todd Munger and Lamar Jackson and undress them I would have been flawed do you remember where you were when Calvin Shepard was traded for Jerry Hughes one for one I do not remember no in like it was kind of like we don't want it was kind of just like a mistake trade like whoops we blew it and then Jerry Hughes went on to have like one of the most underrated careers ever.

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