Trey McBride, DJ Reader, Nick Herbig among Secret Superstars for NFL Week 13

As any NFL season progresses, there will be more unheralded players who rise up from humble beginnings to become factors, and guys whose careers have gone sideways who somehow find the road back to relevance.

We like to celebrate these players every week in “Secret Superstars.” This week, we have two edge rushers with variations of the same first name, a quarterback who is better than you may think, and two Dallas Cowboys who are flying under the proverbial radar.

Aidan O’Connell, QB, Las Vegas Raiders

With Gardner Minshew, Desmond Ridder, and Aidan O’Connell as their quarterbacks, the 2024 Raiders were clearly hoping that they had enough on the ball at other positions to make an average-at-best rotation at the game’s most important position work to a greater or lesser degree. Having come off the Jimmy Garoppolo Experience, maybe you could forgive them for being gun-shy. But this Raiders team is now tied with the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Giants for the NFL’s worst record at 2-10, Minshew is on injured reserve with a broken collarbone, and O’Connell just returned from a thumb injury that had him out since Week 7. Ridder is a non-story at this point in his career and Las Vegas ranks 28th in Passing DVOA.

Want more fun? The Raiders head to Arrowhead Stadium for a Black Friday game against the Kansas City Chiefs and Steve Spagnuolo’s defense.

Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce previewed matchup as one between “the best team in football against the worst team in football.”

Way to get your guys amped up, Coach.

In any event, the Raiders did not appear to be the worst team in football, though they lost 19-17 to the Chiefs, who are finding more ways to pull last-second wins out of their butts than any team we’ve ever seen. In this case, it was the disastrous sequence of events with 15 seconds left in the game from the Kansas City 32-yard line. O’Connell fumbled the snap, Chiefs linebacker Nick Bolton recovered, and there was a declined illegal shift penalty for good measure.

All that aside, O’Connell was actually quite brilliant against everything Spags threw at him. He completed 25 of 34 passes for 340 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions, a passer rating of 116.4, and five completions in six attempts of 20 or more air yards for 188 yards, and both of his touchdowns.

Per Next Gen Stats, O’Connell’s 58-yard touchdown pass to Tre Tucker with 14:52 left in the game traveled 50.4 yards in the air, the longest completion of his career (and the longest completion by air yards of any quarterback in Week 13). Five of his six longest career completions by air distance came against the Chiefs in this game.

“I think Aidan, our team, our fight throughout [the game], these guys battled until the end,” Pierce said of his quarterback. “Until the clock hit zero, these guys thought we were going to win. They fought their asses off until the end. All three phases at some point contributed to help us get into that position. Aidan did a hell of a job. He stayed in the pocket and made some big time throws for us. He was able to push the ball down the field. Obviously, the numbers say what they say, but he really stepped up.”

Yes, the Raiders will likely go big or go home with a more prominent quarterback in 2025, but at worst, O’Connell has proven to be the kind of backup you can trust for the most part, and the kind of starter you can win with… as long as everything doesn’t go all Three Stooges at the end.

Rico Dowdle, RB, Dallas Cowboys

I am not necessarily of the opinion that the late-season Dallas Cowboys could be serious spoilers with an overall uptick in performance. My longstanding opinion of Mike McCarthy just won’t let that happen. But there is something to say about a team that’s won two games in a row to climb from 3-7 to 5-7, and some sneaky-good guys on that roster have started to show up.

In last week’s Secret Superstars, we brought the takes of quarterback Cooper Rush and cornerback Josh Butler to the fore, and we have two more players with stars on their helmets this week. Let’s start with Rico Dowdle, who has started to create something out of Dallas’ formerly nonexistent run game. Against the New York Giants in a 27-20 win, Dowdle, the 2020 undrafted free agent from South Carolina, put up the best game of his career with 112 yards and a touchdown on 22 carries. Dowdle forced a career-high 10 missed tackles, the most by a Cowboys back since Ezekiel Elliott in Week 16 of the 2020 season. 106 of his 112 yards came after contact, and he had four carries of 10-plus yards – all of which you can see right here.

Where has Dowdle been all this time? He had to get past the misbegotten notion that he should split time with Elliott this season, and this wasn’t his first good game of 2024. He had three games already in which he gained at least 75 yards, including Week 12’s performance against the Washington Commanders, when he broke free for 86 yards on 19 carries.

So maybe it was a case of the coaching staff finally figuring things out.

“I wish I would’ve had him in a better position earlier in the game,” McCarthy said after the Giants game. “But I just think that’s just really clear evidence of what he can do if he gets to touch the ball north of 20 carries.

“Rico is a young man that has worked incredibly hard. He’s fought through the injury challenges in the early part of his career, you’re just getting to see what we see every day.”

Trey McBride, TE, Arizona Cardinals

If you want to transcend niche notability as an NFL tight end, you should endeavor to do one of two things:

1. Create as many explosive plays as possible for a Super Bowl contender.
2. Date Taylor Swift.

Trey McBride of the Arizona Cardinals does neither thing at this point in his career, which is why the 2022 second-round pick out of Colorado State is a “Secret Superstar”. McBride’s football story is one of dogged production and sneaky efficiency as opposed to highlights all over the place. This season, he’s been targeted three times on passes of 20 or more air yards, and he hasn’t caught a single one. His route chart is mostly a mixture of slants, drags, hitches, flats, screens, and sits. But the Cardinals understand exactly how valuable McBride is, even without any obvious explosions.

In the Cardinals’ last two games, McBride had 12 receptions in each contest, making him the first tight end in NFL history with at least 12 catches in consecutive games. Which is not bad at all. In last Sunday’s 23-22 loss to the Minnesota Vikings, McBride riddled Brian Flores’ outstanding defense for 12 catches on 12 targets for 96 yards. As you can see, McBride doesn’t do anything at a Superman level, but he does get open – over and over, and he makes catches – over and over.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

McBride now ranks third in Receiving DYAR for tight ends on the season, behind only George Kittle of the San Francisco 49ers, and Mark Andrews of the Baltimore Ravens.

“Our sideline gets excited when guys make plays,” Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon said Monday of McBride. “Obviously, some plays pop to your eye a little bit more than other ones, but 11 yards is 11 yards to me, so those ‘nondescript’ 11 yards, I get excited about. Yeah, he’s obviously a big-time playmaker for us. We have a bunch of playmakers, and they do some awesome things and yeah, I think it creates some energy and excitement. When you’re out there executing at a high level and making plays that typically breeds good emotion.”

Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell, who knows as much about how to design a great offense as anybody in football at any level, is certainly on the bandwagon.

“I told him pregame — he came up to me pregame and said really nice things to me,” O’Connell said after the Vikings win. “I said ‘Hey, man, I think you’re one of the best going right now in the NFL,’ because he does it so many different ways. I think that’s where you saw the volume come into play today, where maybe they want to be ready for pressure looks and things like that. At the same time, he’s essentially on many of those downs acting as the third wide receiver underneath, catch and run. Tons of yards after catch. Had a huge conversion underneath the sticks, able to get the first down. When you really study them on tape, they’re designing ways to get him the ball, and he’s also a really good blocker. So it can really be a tough task as a defense because you’ve got to basically account for the whole playbook when he’s in there, based upon his skill set. Really, really special player. I told him that before the game. I was kind of hoping he’d go easier on us than he did, which he did not. He was incredibly impactful today.”

So, while Trey McBride is nowhere near a superstar in the common sense, he’s an ascending force in the minds of the NFL’s shot-callers.

DJ Reader, IDL, Detroit Lions

The 11-1 Detroit Lions might be the best team in football right now, but their potentially fatal flaw – if they have one – is their absolutely rotten injury luck on the defensive side of the ball. The report going into Week 14 is just preposterous.

The front seven has been especially affected, and one has to wonder how much more the roster can take before a defense that once looked like Detroit’s key to a Super Bowl win will start circling the drain. But it didn’t happen in Detroit’s 23-20 Thanksgiving Day win over the Chicago Bears. Beyond the situational goofiness that eventually got Bears head coach Matt Eberflus fired, the Lions showed a ton of depth along that battered defensive line with multiple underrated names. Za’Darius Smith (8), Al-Quadin Muhammad (7), and DJ Reader (7) all set or tied season-highs in pressures generated against the Bears, only the second game a team has had 3 players with 7-or-more pressures this season.

Let’s focus on Reader, who has become an absolute monster in the middle alongside fellow defensive tackle Alim McNeill. Reader is a former Houston Texan and Cincinnati Bengal who signed a two-year, $22 million contract this offseason with $7.465 million guaranteed. Against the Bears, he had two sacks, three quarterback hits, and two quarterback hurries, and the tape showed that even when the Bears were double-teaming Reader, he was mauling through the pocket.

Against single-teams? Fuhgeddaboutit.

That got Dan Campbell’s recognition after the game…

…and defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn’s mention on Tuesday.

“Any time you have an inside presence like Mac and Reader, it really frees up the edge players and it goes vice versa, too,” Glenn said of the McNeill/Reader dynamic duo. “When you have edge players, it helps free up the inside guys. But Mac, Reader, those guys have been causing terror to offenses for the longest and to see him go out there and get the production that he had this past week – because he doesn’t get the credit he gets. But to see him get the production with the two sacks, it was just time coming. We knew that he can push the pocket, we knew that he can make plays like that, and again I’m going to say this, he’s way more athletic than what people give him credit for. And I expect those things to continue to happen for him.”

It’s borderline nuts to see how well the Lions’ defense has played with all these injuries, and DJ Reader is a major reason shy.

Nik Bonitto, EDGE, Denver Broncos

In the long history of the Denver Broncos, two players for the franchise have put up at least 10 sacks and one pick-six in a season; Von Miller in 2012, and Nik Bonitto in 2024. That’s rare air for Bonitto, the 2022 second-round draft pick out of Oklahoma who had a very nice 2023 season with nine sacks and 47 total pressures, and has amped his game up even more in his third NFL campaign. Now, Bonitto has 11 sacks in the new season (tied for second in the NFL with Houston’s Danielle Hunter, behind only Cincinnati’s Trey Hendrickson’s 12), with 43 total pressures. It’s all kicked in for the third-year man from Oklahoma, and his splashy 71-yard pick-six against the Cleveland Browns on Monday night – one of TWO pick-sixes thrown by Jameis Winston in Denver’s 41-32 win.

The interception was especially interesting. The Broncos have one of the NFL’s most blitz-happy defenses, but in this case, they backed off from a five-man front to a three-man pressure by sending Bonitto and fellow edge-rusher Jonathon Cooper into coverage. Dropping eight seemed to short-circuit something in Jameis Winston’s brain, and Winston really didn’t expect to see Bonitto in the slot, ready to jump the throw to tight end Jordan Akins.

“I’ve been trying to tell people I used to play safety back in the day and people are surprised,” Bonitto said of the play. “Just trying to do my job. When I saw a chance to break on the ball, I kind of just went and did that.”

The Broncos lead the NFL with 47 sacks, and that’s a big part of why Vande Joseph’s defense has been such a prominent advantage for the team this season – they’ve risen to fifth in Defensive DVOA from 30th in 2023. And in Bonitto’s case, there’s more than meets to the eye to the overall skill set.

DeMarvion Overshown, LB, Dallas Cowboys

Our second Dallas Cowboy this week is another safety turned linebacker. Selected by Dallas in the third round of the 2023 draft out of Texas, Overshown moved from one position to the other in his junior year of college, and made his way thusly. Sadly, after an outstanding collegiate career, Overshown missed his entire rookie season with a torn ACL suffered in his second preseason game, and he’s started to work his way into Dallas’ defense now that he’s healthy again. That process took a step forward in the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving win over the Giants when Overshown blew up running back Devin Singletary on a pressure of quarterback Drew Lock, forced Lock’s subsequent uncomfortable throw, tipped the ball in the air, and then caught the thing for a 23-yard interception return.

For one brief moment, Overshown appeared to be his entire defense.

“When the running back let me loose, I was like, ‘There’s some BS going on,’” Overshown said of the play. “And then the quarterback threw the ball and I was like, ‘This is my play to make.’ I was able to kick in some nitrous and we were dancing in the end zone.”

Micah Parsons has believed in his teammate all along, even when everybody had to wait to see what he could do in the NFL.

“I told y’all from the beginning he was gonna be a dude,” Parsons said post-game. “From his rookie year, before the injury, I said, ‘That will be an All-Pro, Pro Bowl type of player.’ I’m just happy that he’s finally showing it.

“I saw it from the beginning.”

Now, he’s not the only one.

Nick Herbig, EDGE, Pittsburgh Steelers

Ideally, the Steelers’ pass rush is produced on the outside by edge terrors T.J. Watt and Alex Highsmith – that’s a duo that’s just about impossible to block. But as Highsmith has been out since Week 10 with an ankle injury– his second major injury of the year after missing time in September and October with a groin issue – and that’s opened things up for Nick Herbig, the 2023 fourth-round pick from Wisconsin.

In his rookie season, Herbig totaled three sacks and 10 total pressures in 81 pass-rushing snaps. Now, with more opportunities to show what he can so, Herbig has doubled down on those totals. He has six sacks and 21 total pressures in 162 pass-rushing reps. Four of those sacks and 17 of those pressures have come in the Steelers’ last four games, which means that the arrow is pointing up.

In Pittsburgh’s 44-38 Sunday win over the Cincinnati Bengals, Herbig was an absolute terror. He had a sack and six total pressures and the sack was a strip-sack of Joe Burrow, which linebacker Payton Wilson returned for a touchdown. Five of his pressures came in under 2.5 seconds, the second most quick pressures by any Steelers pass rusher in a game this season.

“We expect Herbig to do great things,” Mike Tomlin said after the win. “He’s a talented young guy. We knew that would be a critical matchup, to be quite honest with you. We knew they would throw some schematics at T.J. — that’s just the responsibility with playing that spot. Alex Highsmith owns it. Herbig owns it. I’m appreciative of it.”

“Yeah, Herb’s a young baller,” Watt said of his ascending teammate. “He’s continued to grow each and every week. He takes coaching really well. Nothing’s personal – if you tell him to correct something, he does it. He’s got his own set of moves that he brings to the room that we’re all trying to learn, and he’s trying to do the same to us, and he’s just a guy that brings a lot to this defense. And as you can see, he can play with the best of them. People talk a lot of crap about his size, his lack of speed. I know I’m faster than him, we can tell him that. The kid balls out and he plays good football. And when Alex comes back, and we’ve got Preston [Smith] too, and [Jeremiah] Moon, I think we’ve got a very dangerous rotation at outside linebacker.”

As for Herbig, he’s just soaking it all in.

“Look — he’s been doing it for seven, eight years now,” Herbig said of his Watt. “He’s a Hall of Famer, and I’m sure he leads the league since he’s been in the league in forcing fumbles, and I think that’s the culture that coach Tomlin builds. These guys lay the foundation for guys like me, younger guys that are looking up to them. The chemistry we have in the room is unbelievable.”

As Watt intimated, that edge-rushing rotation should be a real problem for opponents down the stretch.

Tarheeb Still, CB, Los Angeles Chargers

The transition from Brandon Staley to Jesse Minter as the Chargers’ defensive architect has been extremely positive. When Jim Harbaugh moved from Michigan back to the NFL in 2024, he brought his defensive coordinator with him, and that’s why the Chargers have risen from 26th in Defensive DVOA in 2023 to sixth this season. Beyond the metrics, one way you can tell that a defense is drawn up the right way is the number of unexpected players who are sudden (and Secret) stars.

Tarheeb Still, the fifth-round rookie from Maryland, is one of those guys. Starting in Week 4 against the Kansas City Chiefs, Still started to see major time on the field, and efficiency has improved with experience. Against the Atlanta Falcons and their weird passing game last Sunday in a 17-13 win, Still had two interceptions of Kirk Cousins, and another big pass breakup on a Cousins throw to Drake London with less than a minute left in the game, and the Falcons trying to drive for a winning score.

“He’s been just so locked in,” Jim Harbaugh said post-game of Still. “The thing that impresses me the most is how locked in he is for a young player. I mean, they can get a little drifty, just in their preparation as the season goes on. But he has been locked in. Cool as the other side of the pillow, as Stuart Scott used to say, he’s been tremendous.

“What a beautiful thing. I mean, what a beautiful thing we are all witnessing. It’s players, it’s coaches, it’s the personnel department, it’s ownership. It’s an entire organization coming together, playing complementary, winning football. It’s a beautiful thing.”

How good was Still in this game? He was “randomly” required by the NFL to take a drug test after the fact, which is the league’s version of a backhanded compliment.