How Seahawks rookie Rylie Mills performed in his NFL debut against the Indianapolis Colts. DH

It’s been a long and difficult journey back to football for defensive tackle Rylie Mills. His promising career was derailed on December 20th, 2024, in the third quarter of a College Football Playoff game against the Indiana Hoosiers.

Mills registered a sack of quarterback Kurtis Rourke, the seventeenth of his Notre Dame career. It would prove to be his final as well. He sustained a knee injury on the play, his season officially announced as over on December 23rd, further tests later revealing a torn ACL.

Notre Dame did overcome the loss of their star interior defender enough to make a run to the Championship game, but Mills had to watch his Fighting Irish fall with a title on the line, giving up nearly 450 yards of offense and 34 points. 

Entering the draft despite not being able to partake in most of the workouts leading up to it, the Seahawks made him a fifth round pick despite knowing that he might miss his entire rookie year.

Sunday was his first time being active since entering the NFL, just six days shy of a complete calendar year since sustaining the injury. He got to take the field for an elite defense, alongside all-pro caliber linemates like Leonard Williams and Byron Murphy, for a team that is in a fight for the top seed in the NFC.

By all accounts, he made it through the game clean, contributed to a defensive effort that resulted in 16 points and 215 yards allowed, and as Gregg Bell details in his tweet here after the game, was very happy to be back to work.

While it was great to see Mills finally overcome his ACL tear and suit up, his performance was forgettable. He played 7 snaps and did not show up in the box score, and while that’s not entirely indicative of how well he played, my initial viewing of the game suggested that he was a part of the problem on many of Jonathan Taylor’s more successful runs.

Consistently being cleared out of the way and driven backwards by blockers, his struggles were part of the reason why Indianapolis was able to have the little success that they did.

While 7 snaps out of 60 might seem insignificant in the grand scheme, and Seattle still held the Colts to under four yards a carry, I believe there was a concentrated effort to attack Mills when he was in.

None of this is to say that Mills should be judged for any first game struggles he may have had. You’d expect any fifth round rookie just returning from major injury rehab to have some issues.

You’d probably even expect those issues to persist throughout his entire rookie campaign. But this matchup against Indianapolis was never going to play in his favor, and likely put his worst traits on display while minimizing his best ones.

Rylie Mills is at his best rushing the quarterback. In 2022, Mills was actually an inside/outside tweener for the Fighting Irish, playing 207 snaps as a defensive end and 207 snaps as a defensive tackle.

He added weight to become a full time interior defender in 2023, but remains very undersized by the standards of the position (his combine weight was 291 pounds, 15th percentile for the defensive tackle position).

Add in his unique height (over 6 foot 5 inches, 93rd percentile), and he’s very clearly a particular kind of player, even playing on the inside. Most offensive guards have 25-30 pounds of weight on him, and leverage does not come easy to those who have great height.

Bottom line, this is not a defensive tackle you want trying to hold his ground against A-gap and B-gap runs.

The Colts were always going to place a heavy emphasis on running the ball this week, minimizing the number of attempts the 44-year-old Philip Rivers would have to make.

When he did throw it, the goal would be to get the ball out of his hands as fast as possible. And Jonathan Taylor, the star Colts’ running back, lives in the interior gaps.

Throw in the fact that the Colts were in the lead for almost the entire game and never felt any urgency to throw, and it was not a good situation for Mills’s first game.

Look for Riley to show off his abilities in future games against more pass-happy teams, or in games where Seattle gets an early lead and forces the opponent to be one-dimensional to try to come back. But for now, just getting on the field and lining up at all is a great victory for Seattle’s rookie.