Kevin O'Connell's Run Game Might Change, And Here's How

It’s funny how the tides can change in professional football. A random offensive lineman from Miami of Ohio can find himself joining the defending champion New Orleans Saints as a low-level offensive assistant. He can learn from Howard Mudd while driving him to the airport, and work under Sean Payton and Joe Lombardi.

Frank Smith recognizes how lucky he is. After the Saints, his next stop was Chicago during Adam Gase’s meteoric, but ill-fated rise. Gase and Sean Payton ran entirely different schemes, diversifying Smith’s experience. 

From there, he stopped with Jon Gruden and the Raiders as tight ends coach before finally latching on with Mike McDaniel’s dynamo Dolphins offense. That 2022 offense took the league by storm, dropping a 70-ball on the Denver Broncos in their second year as their magnum opus.

_{Wide Left is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.}

That game feels like an eternity ago. Just three years later, the Dolphins failed to keep the offense up, and the whole staff got cleared out.  Frank Smith found himself, along with McDaniel, GM Chris Grier, and the rest of his colleagues, in free agency. 

Meanwhile, a vacancy opened up for Minnesota’s Assistant Head Coach position as Mike Pettine announced his retirement. So the Vikings brought in Frank Smith for his diverse expertise.

It doesn’t take much for you to go from the object of a puffy feature at The Athletic to radioactive damaged goods. But Miami’s collapse could be Minnesota’s boon, as it freed up Frank Smith to be a consultant for another whiteboard maven head coach.

In the first part of this doubleheader on pre-snap motion, I identified the pros and cons of the Vikings’ use of pre-snap motion, and hinted at the possibility of a change, signaled by Frank Smith’s hiring. There are also a couple of sailing stories in there.

That piece focused on the Vikings’ use of motion, however. Today, we’ll look at how it compares to the Dolphins’, and what O’Connell could be looking to add. 

As a refresher, the first piece went over how I defined different types of motion. A lot of those names are unofficial or inaccurate to the real systems teams use, because this is an internet blog [Editor’s Note: It’s a newsletter, Michael] and not an NFL offense. We can afford to pare things down a bit. At any rate, refer to that piece for what certain motions are.

The headline here is not necessarily that the Dolphins use more motion than the Vikings. That’s true - they used the 2nd most motion in the league last year - but the headline is in the Dolphins’ diversity of motion.

For this data, I charted two Dolphins games that went well for them in 2025: against Atlanta, and their home game against Buffalo. I wanted to see the offense working on all cylinders. 

Comparing that motion usage to the Vikings’ motion usage from the last piece, you see a significant difference in usage.

Below, people who received the newsletter via email saw a static image. Web users see the below applet.

The Vikings have one clear favorite motion, like Raymond in Everybody Loves Raymond. There’s an ensemble of supporting motions, but there’s no arguing who the lead is. Comparatively, the Dolphins are like Friends, where there are several leading motions that all combine to make the larger picture.

I should also mention that my bucketing process gets heavily stressed by the Dolphins’ offense because of the diversity within the buckets. They have motions for running backs to enter the backfield from out wide, from tighter splits, from wide splits but with 5 yards of depth, and shift versions as well. Those are different tags with wildly different effects, but my bucketing system labels them all “Hay”. 

That is to say, the chart above greatly understates the degree to which Miami uses more motion diversity. The Dolphins use motion much more, and therefore they had many more ideas for variations. So if your motion diet has gotten a little stale, it makes a lot of sense to bring someone like Frank Smith in to inject fresh ideas into the offense.