Film Room: Revis Extras
Remember the ESPN The Mag article we mentioned yesterday that Bent got a quip into on Revis? Here’s the ESPN Insider (subscription required) link to the whole thing Here’s some ESPN footage from the photo shoot for the article on shelves July 12th.
9 Responses to Film Room: Revis Extras
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JesusRevis says:
Ask Dennis Thurman to describe the dance that Darrelle Revis does before games and the defensive backs coach of the New York Jets stammers. “Well, he kind of — I mean, there’s that — oh, heck, what can I say? It’s just goofy.”
It takes a home video that Revis put on YouTube to understand what Thurman means. There, in a Miami hotel before this year’s Pro Bowl, the cornerback does a bow-legged, crotch-grabbing, hip-hop jig that looks like something Jay-Z might do if he were learning to polka. It’s the last thing you’d expect to see from a young legend in the making, a guy whose timing is so accurate that he has reinspired a cheeky catchphrase — two-thirds of the world is covered by water; the rest is covered by Revis — not to mention a Facebook page welcoming you to the Church of Revis Christ.
Jets coaches can’t say enough about the fourth-year pro, who keyed a defense that held opponents to a league-low 252 yards per game last season. In fact, it’s tough for anybody to categorize Revis, because while there are all sorts of ways to describe offensive success, the dictionary for defense is crude by comparison. To explain how dominating the 5-foot-11 Revis was in holding receivers to a 33 percent completion rate against him in coverage, while allowing a league-low 3.5 yards per attempt, the analysts at Football Outsiders had to reach across the line of scrimmage, declaring Revis’ performance the equivalent of a wideout’s breaking Jerry Rice’s single-season record for receiving yards, or a QB’s topping Dan Marino’s iconic 1984 passing-yards total.
The Revis effect washes over the Jets. Rex Ryan’s 3-4 defense is already the most intricate in the NFL, with linebackers always in motion, shifting between the strong and weak sides, so that offenses never know who’s rushing on any given play. When defensive coordinator Mike Pettine says that Revis “helps us heavy up the box,” he means that by shutting down the league’s best playmakers, Revis frees the other Jets D-backs to crowd the line, which provides more blitzing power. No wonder Gang Green held opponents to just 215 yards a game over their final eight contests before their AFC title game loss to the Colts. “Most teams use their best corner on the second-best receiver and double-team the No. 1,” Ryan says. “But with Darrelle we can man-to-man their best. It makes you feel like you’re playing with 12 guys.”
Ask Revis how he does what he does and he answers with a deep, rolling belly laugh that shakes his shoulders. “I’ll show you,” he says and lifts up his left shirtsleeve to reveal a tattoo of a robot attacking an alien with a football. It’s a vision that came to him in a dream after he spent a night watching sci-fi flicks. “I’m the robot,” he says playfully. Body snatcher is more like it. Take his second-quarter interception against the Bengals during a first-round playoff game last January. Chad Ochocinco’s fade-stop route had been a money play for Cincinnati during the season, designed to get the ball safely to the receiver’s right shoulder as he tiptoed along the sideline. But Revis ran body-to-body with No. 85 at full speed, eyes pointed upfield, waiting until the last second before he turned around and snagged the ball, as if seeing right through Ochocinco’s face mask. “It’s unusual for a defender to get to the ball, because it’s so far out of reach,” says Bengals receivers coach Mike Sheppard. “Much less intercept it.”
Revis flummoxes offenses the way that Lawrence Taylor, Ray Lewis and Deion Sanders once did. At 24, he is already a household name in the NFL’s biggest media market, where the negotiations to make him the highest-paid cornerback in history have vied for media attention with the BP oil spill. Revis waves off reports that he’s demanding a $100 million deal, saying he just wants “50 cents more” than Nnamdi Asomugha, the 28-year-old Raiders corner who became the league’s highest-paid defensive back last off-season, with a three-year, $45 million deal. But it’s clear that Revis has history in mind — the kind he studied to get here and the kind he wants to make.
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For Revis to emerge as a legend, he needs to walk off the field a winner the next time he plays in an AFC Championship Game.Diana Gilbert, who ran track as a kid in the Pennsylvania steel town of Aliquippa, northwest of Pittsburgh, was a single mother who kept her oldest son off gang-infested corners by using the kind of one-liners that Darrelle still quotes with reverence: “Associate with successful people, and you’ll be successful.” But it was Diana’s brother, NFL defensive lineman Sean Gilbert, who showed her boy the way to the big time. The third overall pick in the 1992 draft, Gilbert played 11 seasons; he is best known, however, for sitting out the entire 1997 campaign, to force a trade from the Redskins that got him a seven-year, $46.5 million deal from the Panthers, at the time a record sum for his position. Uncle Sean was at the top of his career in Carolina, and a fixture in his nephew’s life, when Darrelle was at Aliquippa High. In those days, “Rell Rev” was a hoops star, the high scorer on his two-time state championship team. But the NBA wasn’t really an option for a kid his height, and there wasn’t much of a market for a drummer from the Sound the Alarm Ministries chorus. So Darrelle and his uncle watched football game films together, dissecting the one position they knew he could play at the next level: defensive back.
By the time Revis got to Pitt, he had modeled himself after Sanders — “I loved the way Deion was always up in a guy’s face,” he says — and another tough-as-nails Aliquippa alum, Pro Bowl corner Ty Law. Pitt defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads saw in Revis a hard charger who hated to get beat in practice. But what really impressed Rhoads, now the head coach at Iowa State, was that “nobody ever got separation from Darrelle.”
Revis studied opponents like he studied jazz drumming, going as far back as their high school game films to get tips on their timing. “I watch how they stand when they’re still,” he says. “If it’s a running play, are they more relaxed? If it’s a pass play, are they tenser? Is the heel up or flat? Is the guy grabbing his gloves tight? If I’m in your timing, I’m in your DNA.”
The Jets made Revis the 14th pick in the 2007 draft, and it took him time to find his rhythm. For one thing, he had to learn how to tackle (which he did with abandon, notching 87 as a rook). And he still remembers being stunned the first time Randy Moss gave him an elbow in the back while going up for a ball. “I was so bugged out,” he says. “I was like, Wow, I got a lot to learn.”
When Brett Favre came to town the next year, Revis was a bright spot in a dismal secondary. But he wasn’t quite Revis Christ. Facing a barrage of Pro Bowl receivers — Moss, Brandon Marshall, Larry Fitzgerald — he allowed receivers a 45 percent completion rate against him. Good, but not elite.
What a difference a new coach makes. Following a late-season collapse, the Jets fired Eric Mangini and hired Ryan, who ushered in a system that makes Revis the most critical defender on the field. Ryan is fond of quoting his dad, Buddy, as saying, “It’s easier to hit a guy than cover him.” And Revis has made that his mantra. “As D-backs, all we have is those first five yards,” he says. “My goal is to make those five yards the hardest I can on you with my hands. I want to be a master of those five yards, because free access is what makes receivers great. My game plan is to get up in their faces. But I also like the little things, whether it’s getting in position to tackle or giving the defensive end a call where he goes into the C-gap and makes a play.”
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The Jets list Revis’ weight at 198 pounds, but he’s closer to 215, thanks in part to his annual July retreat to Phoenix, where he works out in the 120-degree heat at the Fischer Sports training center alongside Donovan McNabb and Titans corner Rod Hood. As Sheppard, the Bengals coach, puts it, “You can’t move him, so you have to go around him.” And that’s when you know you’ve arrived on Revis Island, a place patrolled by hands as deceptively smooth as the blunt end of a butcher’s mallet.
At a predraft party in Manhattan this spring, Revis ran into Jerry Rice, who said that if he were still playing, he’d lose Revis with a couple of shakes at the line. Revis nodded politely and thought, That’s exactly what I’d want you to do. Because in the course of swinging wide and to the outside, Rice would be pinned between Revis and the sideline. In fact, Revis rarely runs more than a few inches away from his man. The Jets coaching staff has been nagging him to drop back a few yards, so he can have more time to react to the ball. But he can’t do it. Being that far away dulls his senses, makes him nervous. To feel the hunt, he needs to be closer. “A lot of teams have started to put receivers in motion, so they can get me to back off,” he says. “Which is kind of funny, because I’m not going to back off. I’m not going anywhere.”
To show what he means, Revis pops a DVD into his MacBook. It’s a play from the Jets’ game with the Patriots early last season, when New York was down 3-0 in the first quarter and Moss was in motion on a first-and-10. Revis is playing two yards off the line, keeping Moss facing him. After the snap, Moss tries to juke, but Revis is too close, too inside Moss’ pads, if not his head. The two end up running 35 yards upfield along the sideline, at which point an errant Tom Brady pass curls into Revis’ outstretched hands.
In those moments, you have to marvel at what Thurman calls Revis’ “natural balance,” which lets him backpedal, pivot and run at full speed with poise. “A lot of guys who run fast lose control of their bodies,” Thurman says. “Now, some can improve, but not to that level. At that level, it’s just genetics.” Adds Will Sullivan, Revis’ speed and strength coach at Fischer Sports: “If he can’t reach out and get a hand on you in those first five yards, he’ll get a body on you down the field. In the NFL, position is power.”
Revis coolly sums it up by saying, “When I’m in it, I don’t freak out. Everything is like in slow motion.” But when Bill Belichick refused to give him any credit for holding Moss to four catches and 24 yards that day, saying Revis was aided by “a lot of over-the-top coverage,” it started a debate about whether — gasp! — Revis was truly indispensable or just a replaceable cog in Ryan’s machine.
It’s unlikely Revis would have had the same kind of season anywhere else. Since the Jets’ pass rush forces quarterbacks into quick dumps, and he always lines up with the A-wideout, he gets a ton of action. “We don’t want him to get bored,” quips Pettine. Revis’ 31 passes defensed last season were 15 more than he had in 2008, before Ryan arrived. And compare the 96 passes thrown his way with the 25 that Asomugha saw in Oakland. Asomugha was limited by the fact that his coaches lined him up on only one side of the ball, and his weaker teammates get thrown at more often. As a result, he only recorded four passes defensed.
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When our own KC Joyner suggested Revis was replaceable, the fans went into a virtual (and digital) tizzy.The voters who choose the AP’s Defensive Player of the Year presumably knew all that, but they picked Green Bay’s Charles Woodson over Revis by a 28-14 vote. And they weren’t the only ones offering a contrarian perspective. KC Joyner, the “Football Scientist” and a contributor to ESPN Insider, stirred the blogosphere in June by suggesting that the Jets could make do by putting Dwight Lowery and newly acquired Antonio Cromartie opposite one another, with first-round draft pick Kyle Wilson in the nickelback position, and still have “one of the best secondaries in the league.” The resulting backlash — Ryan blasted the AP vote, and one commentator at thejetsblog.com argued in response to Joyner that getting rid of Revis would be like “the Bulls getting rid of Michael Jordan because B.J. Armstrong and John Paxson were good” — suggests that Revis has tapped into the local psyche in a big way. His shutdown of Moss (58 yards in two games), Houston’s Andre Johnson (35 yards) and Indy’s Reggie Wayne (88 yards in two games) last season puts him on a par with Yankees closer Mariano Rivera as a stopper in the minds of New York fans.
Curiously, Revis’ jersey is still more recognizable than his face. When his friend Ice-T called recently to say that Snoop Dogg wanted to meet him, Revis grabbed the keys to his Dodge Charger and headed to Hoboken on his own, blending in with the crowd. But this is an off-season full of change for the Jets star, as he becomes more comfortable with his growing fame. He’s building a house in Livingston, N.J., with a full-service recording studio, complete with mixing board and instruments, so that his friends can come over to jam. (He also bought a home in Fort Lauderdale last off-season to spend more time with the kids whose names are tattooed on his arms: Deyani Shavae, 4, and Jayden, 2. He’s giving himself a new look, too, trading the Charger for a tricked-out Mini Cooper and his silk threads for preppy glasses and bow ties, so “I can go all Andre 3000.”
But what were supposed to be low-key negotiations to extend a six-year rookie deal that has earned him $15 million so far, but will shrink to $1 million this season, went off the rails when he staged what appeared to be a sit-out protest one morning at minicamp in June. (For the record, he claimed to be lightheaded.) It was a curious statement from a player whose practice habits are so fierce. It also gave heartburn to a coaching staff that needs Revis to lead in the locker room. The Jets said goodbye to a trio of veterans: safety Kerry Rhodes and running backs Thomas Jones and Leon Washington. Meanwhile, the team has added Cromartie, who reportedly needed a $500,000 advance on his salary to deal with at least five separate paternity suits, as well as Santonio Holmes, the troubled former Steeler’s wideout who spent the spring explaining why cops met with him at the Pittsburgh airport for refusing to shut off his iPod during a plane landing. “Darrelle has the respect of everyone in the locker room and the league,” Ryan says. “Now he has to understand he can use that like Tom Brady does in New England. He has to make the players around him accountable.”
When Revis was still in high school, his Uncle Sean took him to look at expensive watches in a Charlotte mall. “I love watches, but that wasn’t the point,” Darrelle says. “He wanted to show me the difference between being rich and having class.”
With that lesson learned, Gilbert is trying to keep his nephew focused on history. “A lot of great players have 10-year careers, but just a few have awesome ones,” Gilbert says. “How many guys get to have an impact?”
It seems hard to imagine that No. 24 can outdo himself this season. A couple of slips on the New Meadowlands Stadium turf, and he’ll easily give up more than the 2 TDs he allowed in 2009. But of course there’s always room for improvement. Thurman says that Revis tipped away four balls that could have been game-changing interceptions last season, and that by playing a little more off the ball, he’ll improve his vision.
Looking at the new schedule, Revis picks out the matchups he’s anticipating most. He has never faced Minnesota’s Sidney Rice, or Donald Driver and Greg Jennings from Green Bay. “Oh, and Calvin Johnson,” he adds, pointing to the Jets’ date in Detroit on Nov. 7. “That’s a good one too.”
Does he worry that opponents won’t throw at him as often this year? He starts that belly laugh until his shoulders are shaking again. “You know, the other guys trust their player too,” he says. “That’s their big playmaker. They’re still going to throw at him. So am I worried? No. As long as I’m watching that guy, I’ll get my chances.”
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Today’s winners in Stats & Analytics:
Jets fans, Darrelle Revis, Rex RyanToday’s losers:
AFC wide receivers, Lito SheppardShaun Assael’s excellent profile of Darrelle Revis, which just came out in ESPN The Magazine, is a story about a man meeting his moment. The Jets cornerback had one long highlight reel of a season last year, peaking as his team surpassed expectations and made it to the AFC Championship Game, and he’s just settling into the lifestyle of a New York superstar.
So is Revis worth the contract extension he wants, one that would pay him something like the $15.2 million per year that Oakland CB Nnamdi Asomugha gets?
It would be hard to post better raw numbers than Revis posted in 2009, when he gave up an absurdly low 3.6 yards per pass attempt and just two touchdowns. 3.6 YPA is what a quarterback would get if he completed just 50 percent of his throws while gaining only 7.2 yards per completion. As far as I can tell, Revis’ figure is the lowest attained by any defensive back since analysts began tracking this stat. For the purposes of comparison, at his peak in 2007, the outstanding Champ Bailey gave up 4.7 YPA.
You can’t dump short throws at Revis (4.0 YPA in 2009 on passes of zero to nine yards), or throw medium passes at him (10-19 yards: 4.2 YPA), yet longer attempts are just suicidal. Opposing QBs were a ridonkulous 2-for-27 on attempts of 20 yards or more against him last year, for just 53 yards, with one TD and three INTs.
Of course, there’s a lot of debate about how much credit Revis deserves for neutralizing opponents’ passing games, and how much should go to Rex Ryan’s defensive plans. On June 10, Insider’s K.C. Joyner triggered an Internet dustup with a piece called “Elite? Yes. Irreplaceable? No.” Joyner argued that “in the worst-case scenario of a long-term Revis holdout, New York could place [Dwight] Lowery on the field opposite [Antonio] Cromartie and start first-round pick Kyle Wilson at the nickel,” giving the Jets one of the NFL’s best secondaries even without Revis. A week later, Joyner slammed the critics who called his view “ill-informed,” noting that the Jets are deep in DBs and that a “Ryan defense” doesn’t require a shutdown corner.
As you might imagine, I disagree.
There are two problems with assuming that Revis is just a very talented cog in the Jets’ wheel. One should be obvious, but the people arguing over Revis keep missing it, so here goes: When evaluating other players on the Jets who are helped by the team, Revis is part of that team! Joyner notes, for example, that Lowery finished second in the league in YPA, and that Lito Sheppard was also in the top 20. “That alone indicates just how much … Ryan’s scheme helps cornerbacks … [Sheppard] went from posting one of the worst YPA totals in the league to one of the best, yet the Jets sat him down in the playoffs and let him go after the season … it was the scheme more than his physical skills that accounted for Sheppard’s improvement.”
Well, as Tonto might have asked, “What do you mean, ‘scheme,’ white man?” Or as an irate blogger at AFCBeast.com did ask, “How can you discount the fact that locking down one side of the field for coverage and the … effect that has on how you run the rest of your defense? If Revis is alone, then the safety is rolling the other way, something we saw Ryan do again and again … Providing cover-one help away from Revis much of the time, guess whose numbers would get a bump? Oh right.”
Revis played every game, switching from side to side to cover the opponent’s top receiver, while Ryan mixed and matched Sheppard, Lowery, Drew Coleman and Donald Strickland opposite him, with safeties often helping them. And the Jets’ 2009 schedule stacked Revis up against elite receivers nearly every week: Andre Johnson, Randy Moss twice, Marques Colston, Terrell Owens twice, Mike Sims-Walker, the Panthers’ Steve Smith, Roddy White, Reggie Wayne and, of course, Chad Ochocinco. Against the rest of the NFL, those wideouts averaged 5.1 catches and 75.5 yards per game and scored 91 total touchdowns. Against Revis, they went 2.9-26.4 and scored just two TDs all year.
With all due respect to Joyner, you can’t just take the fact that Revis and Sheppard have similar yard-per-catch numbers and infer that they’re equally or even similarly replaceable. Sheppard benefitted from the Jets’ scheme, just as Cromartie will, and Wilson will, too. Revis is the scheme.
One area where the Jets’ play calling does have a huge effect on Revis’ stats is in the number of passes thrown to him. Revis not only led the league in YPA, he snuffed out passes when they mattered: Football Outsiders calculates a “Success Rate” for defenders, which is the percentage of passes that don’t get at least 45 percent of the needed yards on first down, 60 percent on second down, or 100 percent on third down, and Revis topped the NFL in that, too, with a 72 percent success rate. He also gave up just 2.4 yards per catch after receptions, which ranked eighth in the league. Yet opposing teams threw more than 100 times at Revis anyway, four times as many passes as were directed at Asomugha. Clearly, Ryan’s endless blitzing forces opposing QBs to throw when and where they don’t want to. (Revis must also do a pretty good job of allowing receivers to appear open, then blanketing them once balls are in the air.) It’s like baserunners not being able to stop themselves from challenging Roberto Clemente’s arm, then getting themselves thrown out again and again.
I wish we could better quantify the impact Revis has, both on plays he’s involved in and plays that other teams funnel away from him. But at the moment, I can’t say with confidence that Revis saves a particular marginal number of points, let alone how many dollars those points are worth. Football plays and players are intertwined in extremely complex ways that metricians are still sorting out, and analysts can’t even see the entire field when charting games. But we can say that the Jets’ defense was the best in the NFL by the end of last year, that it was keyed by a passing defense that was a staggering 34.2 percent better than average on a play-by-play basis, and that Revis was the linchpin of that defense.
And here’s a stat that’s just as important as Revis’ production: He’s just 24. In contrast, the highest-paid defenders in the league, such as Albert Haynesworth, Terrell Suggs and DeMarcus Ware, are 27 to 30 years old. Asomugha is 28. Revis’ combination of performance and youth is probably the best in the NFL, regardless of position. In fact, Outsiders’ Bill Barnwell has pegged Revis’ trade value as the highest in the league. (He puts Peyton Manning at No. 2.) Lock Revis up now, and the Jets will keep him through his best seasons, rather than paying him big money just after his peak, which is what happens with so many free agents. Let him go in a couple of years, and he’ll be especially hard to replace over the long haul.
In the NFL, there are plenty of creative ways to write contracts whose average pay or total three-year value satisfies players while keeping cap values manageable for teams. This means Revis will probably end up somewhere between Asante Samuel ($9.5 million a year, $23.6 million guaranteed, $32.1 million over three years) and Asomugha on the compensation scale.
The Jets have been fearless about turning over their roster and shedding contracts. But understanding that most players are replaceable only helps a team if its willing to sign the very few who aren’t.
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Was that the longest post in thejetsblog history?
I copied and pasted both articles, theres some great stuff in there. Enjoy. -
BigKatt says:
thanks dude
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Yeah, great article. I cant wait to get the ESPN the Magazine when it comes out.
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Bent says: It was a great article. Oddly enough, the only part I had a problem with was the paragraph where they mentioned TJB.
One quote from Rex and one comment on a fansite – that constitutes a “backlash”???
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bring revis mangold brick and harriss into the same room and disscuss contracts and money to keep other good players
someone with insider copy/paste the article here please