Asante Samuel

Patriots cornerback sees dollar signs up ahead

During a game the football field isn’t occupied by 22 players who all have the chance to cash in on statistics quite like the two or three corners who are out there on a given play. Besides the left tackle position and worthy quarterbacks, first-string veteran cornerbacks earn more per year than most players on any team. There are plenty of them going here or there each offseason, but the “shut-down” cornerbacks in this league are few and far between. What results of course is maximum 7 year contracts with signing bonus cash entering the player’s bank account in 5 million dollar chunks or more on the first day of training camp. Asante Samuel has his eyes on just that heading into the divisional round of the playoffs.

With 11 interceptions under his belt so far, the chances of a holdout or sign-and-trade deal getting done before or after the draft are probably higher than Samuel receiving that kind of a contract from Bill Belichick. This writer would have been scared in the past over such a reality, having to lose a player of Samuel’s caliber, but at this point I’m of the mind to assume that regardless of what ends up happening, the Patriots will benefit. A first round pick in return from the team that wants him is a no-brainer, and considering that Deion Branch was given in exchange for what will be a pick in the 20s, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that more than one pick could be demanded.

That is the business side of it, but for my money I’m also considering the impact of Belichick’s schemes and Brady’s arm, how both of them tend to increase the market value of the players they work with. Simply put: Star-level talent in a poor scheme can equal a disappointing product, whereas better than average talent in a great scheme can equal an overpriced product. The New England Patriots as an organization, from year to year, manage to produce more of the latter than any other team in pro sports. Combine this with an uncanny ability to realize top value for the draft picks they make year after year, and it plays well to this reality for a periodic shedding of players seeking their 2nd contracts as pros in return for more draft picks.

Is Asante Samuel a “better than average” or “star-level” talent? I wouldn’t pretend to know the answer to that question, but from what I do know about the game, it’s safe to say that he does benefit in the stat department by playing within Bill Belichick’s defensive scheme. A perfect example of this is the similarity between his two playoff interceptions in the past two years, with the first coming versus Jacksonville last year and the second versus the Jets last Sunday. On both plays he lines up facing the opposing team’s right receiver, who will be running a route straight ahead. Samuel will run with the receiver at first, giving the quarterback a read that indicates he’s going to have single coverage on his slot receiver whose route will take them to that same part of the field. (See play diagram below)

The diagram is crude, but for our purposes will suffice, as the important thing to understand is what the quarterback is thinking and seeing prior to making a throw. By the second half of most games against the Patriots front seven, the opposing quarterback is still in pain and most times eager to get that ball out of his hands before having to feel more of it. He knows that anything more than three and a half seconds after the hike, with whatever’s left of the pocket by then, is going to earn him a whack. For this reason he makes his reads faster than he normally would, storing information at a glance and counting on it being what he remembered when the ball leaves his hand. He sees Samuel one on one against the receiver along the sideline with a safety on that side providing cover-2 deep help on that side, meaning that option is off the table. From there it begins to look like the Steelers and Patriots against Peyton Manning these past few years.

One on one coverage with a linebacker or nickleback on the tight end or wideout in the space that Samuel and his receiver are running past is where the quarterback decides to go with the ball. At a precise moment when the ball is being released, Samuel suddenly jumps off of his assignment and turns around to pick it off. The play worked versus Jacksonville in last year’s playoffs, with Belichick and Mangini celebrating afterwards. What might appear to be ironic is anything but, as Mangini’s Jets are bitten in the exact same way on the exact same play last Sunday. Clearly, Asante Samuel is not a Jedi, but rather a player who does what he’s told to do extremely well. Therefore, two nationally televised interceptions returned for touchdowns in separate playoff games are not the manifestation of his ability alone, but perhaps could have resulted exactly that way had Ellis Hobbs been on his side and vice-versa.

My point is describing all of this is to highlight the fact that pressure and a keen understanding of what a quarterback will do in response to it has more to do with the play’s outcome than the cornerback executing their role. It is well known by now that when you have the team that can apply that kind of pressure to Peyton Manning in particular, this sort of misdirection and route changing can and will produce interceptions. His mind will read the initial look and when that defensive back changes course 90 degrees or more, he hasn’t noticed it until the ball has already left his hand. Troy Polamalu and Ty Law can certainly vouch for this. It works against less talented quarterbacks than Manning of course, but if a case study to prove what I’m saying in this piece were to be conducted, there would be nothing more effective than the game tape from his playoff loses the last three years.

Again, I don’t know enough about what I’m seeing in terms of individual talent at the cornerback position (network TV has the cameras set up so that most of what they do is off the screen after the ball is snapped), but at least those two interceptions, his two most notorious I’d imagine, can be credited to the scheme as much as his execution of it. To the casual observer this play might look like others where the cornerback is providing a cushion and jumps the route of a pass to the outside, but they are entirely different. Whereas the scheme accounts for one, the second is pretty much a skill that cornerbacks will have before leaving college, and most likely learned in high school with a coach getting the player to watch the quarterback’s eyes and time their move.

But I digress…as the initial point of all this was to point out that with two first round picks in hand already (our own and Seattle’s), Belichick and Pioli’s track record in selecting defensive backs (Asante Samuel 120, Eugene Wilson 36, Christian Morton 233 Panthers, Dexter Reid 113 Colts, Guss Scott 95 Jets, James Sanders 133, Ellis Hobbs 84, Willie Andrews 229), all still playing in the NFL…if it’s “no more #22” next year, it won’t be the kind of thing that drives me to drink. A loss to San Diego this Sunday though…

I think I just realized the wisdom of having blue laws.