“People used to tell me that all the time: Try safety.” Pete Ittersagen says. “Like it’s easy. So you want me to put on 25 pounds and play inside the box? Nah. I’m a corner.”
Dustin Fox would disagree with that assessment. Though his size and his stats suggested that cornerback was Fox’s natural position Nathan Shepherd Super Bowl LI Jersey , the NFL insisted it was not. “I started at corner for four years at Ohio State [from 2001 through ‘04], won a national title, was named All–Big Ten—and I get to the NFL and suddenly I’m a safety,” he says. “At 5'鈥?1″, 185 pounds. After I ran a 4.43 at the combine. Why?”
Fox’s position coach at Ohio State was Mel Tucker. “I’ve never worked with a coach at any level for whom [race among cornerbacks] mattered,” says Tucker, a black man raised in a predominantly Jewish section of Cleveland who is now the defensive coordinator at Georgia. Tucker said this as he sat watching tape of DBs. “There’s no sound on these clips,” Tucker says. “All I’m looking at is jersey numbers and physical movements and reactions. This has nothing to do with white or black.”
Try telling that to Fox, who arrived at the 2005 combine expecting to find his name listed among the cornerbacks (“right above Domonique Foxworth’s”) but instead finding it among the safeties, none of whom were smaller than Fox’s 191 pounds. That sudden demotion—and it was a demotion (a ’11 study in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research concluded that cornerback is the most challenging of football’s 15 positions; it’s also paid, on average Tanner Lee Jersey Elite , the sixth-highest, whereas safeties are paid tenth-highest)—was softened by the strange praise Fox heard from several NFL coaches that week. Having observed him only from the nosebleed All鈥?2 angle, these coaches told Fox, wide-eyed as they shook his hand, “We thought you were black.”
Fox’s defensive coordinator with the Vikings in the summer of 2006, Mike Tomlin, called his little-used safety “the American Dream Dusty Rhodes,” after the white professional wrestler from the 1970s who fought on behalf of the working man. Fox laughed at the joke, but by the time his four-year career reached its last stop, in Buffalo, it was slightly less funny.
“Why didn’t I come into the league as a cornerback?” asks Fox Wholesale DJ Moore Jersey , 34, who today cohosts a popular radio sports talk show in Cleveland. “My measurables were better than half the corners in the league. I made plays at Ohio State. Started [37] college games. I can’t even get a shot? I vertical-jumped 40 inches. [Actually, Fox’s vertical at the 2005 combine was 43 1/2 inches—not only second best among safeties that year but second best among corners and fourth best among all players.] I’m telling you right now, I was as good as or better than half the cornerbacks in the NFL. They got the opportunity, I didn’t.鈥?#8230; The NFL was great. But I always felt like I never got a fair shake playing the position because I was white.”
There were precedents for Fox’s angst. In 1994 the Giants moved Sehorn back to safety the moment they drafted him. After two years of calls to Thurman, seeking his college coach’s counsel—“He told me, ‘You’ve got to fight to play corner,’” Sehorn remembers; “‘they’re not gonna move you back just because you want to’”—Sehorn was finally sent homeward to the boundary.
“The only resistance we felt [at USC],” says Thurman, “came from scouts and personnel people when they first came in to evaluate Jason. They asked, ‘Is he a safety?’ I said Adidas Dylan Larkin Jersey , ‘No.’ They were like, ‘What?’ Jason went out there and proved them wrong.”
It’s been 21 years since Sehorn officially became an NFL corner. He recalls the first time he lined up opposite Michael Irvin. “I don’t know if he had honestly never seen me or what,” Sehorn laughs, “but he said, ‘Dang, you are white!’ ”
Playing safety wasn’t an option for Donny Lisowski, nor was it an option for Pete Ittersagen, another undersized (5'鈥?0″, 190 pounds) cornerback from a small school, D鈥慖II Wheaton (Ill.) College. Ittersagen played two snaps at corner for the Titans in 2010 thanks to a series of injuries at the position and, more specifically James Washington Jersey Elite , to a winding 88-yard interception return by Jason McCourty that was negated by a penalty and which forced McCourty, the exhausted starter, to pat his helmet and let Ittersagen pinch-hit for two plays. “People used to tell me that all the time: Try safety,” Ittersagen says. “Like it’s easy. So you want me to put on 25 pounds and play inside the box? Nah. I’m a corner.”
In 2008, Texas A&M had a white cornerback named Jordan Peterson who returned an interception 48 yards for a touchdown against New Mexico. One year later another white corner, Colorado State’s Nick Oppenneer, took one 97 yards to the house against the Lobos. New Mexico’s coaches presumably do not tell recruits this.
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13.06.2018 08:32
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