The nine most interesting teams of the offseason, Volume 3: Bengals, Vikings and Patriots
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2025
⏱️ 68 minutes
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Summary
The third and final entry in the annual TAFS Most Interesting Teams of the Offseason series is here, and it's a doozy. We've got Paul Dehner on the Bengals, Alec Lewis on the Vikings and Chad Graff on the Patriots. Will Tee Higgins and/or Trey Hendrickson still be Bengals in 2025? What's the Vikings plan with Sam Darnold and the quarterback position? How will the Patriots use their immense resources this offseason? Robert Mays gets into all that with the beat writers, and a whole lot more.
Host: Robert Mays
Co-Host: Derrik Klassen
With: Chad Graff, Paul Dehner, Alec Lewis
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Producer: Michael Beller
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Transcript
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| 0:36.1 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:38.3 | I'm Robert Mays. |
| 0:39.2 | The third and final installment of our most interesting teams of the off-season discussion |
| 0:44.7 | with our beatwriters here at The Athletic. |
| 0:46.4 | Man, I've had a good time doing these. |
| 0:47.8 | And today was no exception. |
| 0:50.2 | Teams kind of all over the place in terms of the hierarchy in the NFL on this episode, but no less interesting. |
| 0:56.2 | I think you guys will see that when we dig into this discussion. |
| 0:58.8 | I wanted to start this show with the chat we had with our Bengals writer at the Athletic, Paul Danaer Jr. The Bengals are at the center of this for a bunch of different reasons. There was a fun moment that we talked about on the show where we had just finished with Chad Graf, our Patriots writer, and Paul was sitting down. |
| 0:56.3 | And Chad asked Paul what was going to happen with T. Higgins. And so that's how you know where the T. Higgins thing sits in all of the dominoes they're going to fall this offseason. We chatted about T, the defensive spending, how the Bengals are planning on fixing that side of the ball, where the barriers they have are to building in the way that other teams do. |
| 1:30.6 | Paul does such a great job, not only covering that team, but the ability to communicate why they are the way that they are. |
| 1:37.6 | I love that discussion. |
| 1:39.2 | Followed that up with a chat that we had with our Vikings writer here at the Athletic Alec Lewis, |
| 1:43.9 | another big |
| 1:44.4 | domino to fall this offseason. Sam Darnold, what is going to happen with his market? |
| 1:48.9 | What does that mean for the Vikings? Where are they going to spend that excess money in free agency |
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