Only once in his career has Richard Sherman lined up against Tom Brady. The Seahawks cornerback was not yet a household name back then, in October 2012. Selected by Seattle in the fifth round of the previous year’s draft, Sherman had exceeded expectations to hold down a starting role from midway through his rookie year but the majority of NFL fans would still have struggled to pick his face out of a crowd.
He did his best to change all that on an afternoon when he intercepted Brady and helped the Seahawks rally from a 13-point deficit to beat the Patriots 24-23. As the quarterback jogged off the field at the end of the game, Sherman ran over to goad him. Later that evening, the Seattle player posted a photograph of the scene on Twitter, captioned with the words “U mad bro?”
That tweet was enough to refresh an internet meme, but not to propel Sherman fully into the national consciousness – as he would discover four months later. Ahead of Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans, Sherman shot a video for Bleacher Report in which he walked down Bourbon Street asking fans whether he or the then Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis – whom he had called out repeatedly during the season – was the best in the league at their position. The responses made it clear that most of his interviewees had no idea who they were talking to.
Few could make the same mistake if Sherman were to repeat the ruse in Arizona. Two years removed from his first meeting with Brady, he has claimed a place alongside the quarterback as one of the NFL’s most prominent stars, a man with more than a million followers on Twitter and endorsement deals worth several times that figure.
Named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2014, Sherman is, as columnist Jerry Brewer put it in a recent piece for the Seattle Times, “a celebrity large enough to attract Kobe Bryant to his charity softball game”. He appears alongside the rest of the Seahawks’ secondary on the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated, but only because editors could not convince him to do it solo.
The tipping point, of course, arrived at around this time last year. A second-consecutive eight-interception season had done Sherman’s profile no harm, but it was his rant against Michael Crabtree at the end of a triumphant NFC Championship game that truly commanded the nation’s attention – 15 seconds of brilliantly bombastic rhetoric in which the cornerback loudly proclaimed himself to be the best in the league, while inviting his ‘sorry’ opponent to talk a little less trash in the future.
So thoroughly did Sherman dominate the news agenda over the ensuing Super Bowl week that one reporter wound up asking Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson what it was like to play second fiddle to a defensive back. More than the initial outburst, it was the Stanford graduate’s eloquence thereafter that cemented his rise to stardom – as he used his new platform to offer forthright opinions on such subjects as language and race.
Sherman has put himself to the fore once again this year in Phoenix. He had joked recently that he was becoming “cliché” in his dealings with the press, suggesting he had learned how to give the sorts of boring answers that keep him out of the headlines. But if that is true then we must also assume he knew exactly what he was doing when he waded into the Patriots’ latest controversy.
The league is investigating how balls used by New England during the AFC Championship game came to be deflated after they were inspected by referees in the build-up to kickoff. Sherman’s team-mates have, for the most part, declined to pass judgement, with defensive end Michael Bennett dismissing the whole story as “propaganda” designed to increase the Super Bowl hype.
But when Sherman was asked on Monday about the perception that the Patriots – previously fined and docked a draft pick over the ‘Spygate’ scandal in 2007 – play things close to the line when it comes to following league rules, he replied: “I think perception is reality. It is what it is. Their resume speaks for itself.
“You talk about getting close to the line, this and that. I don’t really have a comment about that. Their past is what their past is. Their present is what their present is. Will they be punished? Probably not. Not as long as [Patriots owner] Robert Kraft and [NFL commissioner] Roger Goodell are still taking pictures at their respective homes. [Goodell] was just at Kraft’s house last week before the AFC Championship. Talk about conflict of interest. As long as that happens, it won’t affect them at all.”
Sherman was only just getting started. He used his column in Sports Illustrated on Tuesday to attack the NFL over its requirement that all players make themselves available to journalists on a regular basis – an obligation that his team-mate Marshawn Lynch has bridled against. In Sherman’s words, “Marshawn’s talking to the press is the equivalent of putting a reporter on a football field and telling him to tackle Adrian Peterson.”
He followed up on that thought by arguing at media day that, if players must speak to the press on a weekly basis, then so should all other NFL employees – including Goodell.
It was a calculated line, playing on the unpopularity of the commissioner among fans. Earlier in the day Kraft had responded to Sherman’s comments regarding his own relationship with Goodell by describing the player as a “very smart marketing whiz”.
But if Sherman is good with words, then he is even better at covering wide receivers. Not everyone would support his claim to being the No1 player at his position (Revis, now a Patriot, certainly would not) but the stats do suggest that he is the most feared. According to ProFootballFocus, Sherman is targeted by opposing quarterbacks on just one in every 8.5 cover snaps. He gives up a reception on one in every 17.8. Both figures are comfortably the highest in the league.
Even Aaron Rodgers knows to stay away from Sherman’s side of the field. The Packers quarterback is the bookies’ favourite to be named as the league’s MVP for 2014, having thrown for 4,381 yards and 38 touchdowns with just five interceptions this season, but when his team faced Seattle in week one he did not aim a single pass at a team-mate being covered by Sherman.
Green Bay lost that day, and Rodgers was dared by the press to show a little more moxie in the build-up to their rematch this month in the NFC Championship game. He wound up getting picked off by Sherman on the first drive of the game and only threw one more pass in the cornerback’s direction all afternoon. This despite the fact that Sherman finished the game playing effectively with one arm after injuring his left elbow.
“I got an interception early in the game, and then everyone who told them to throw at me kind of swallowed what they said,” said a gleeful Sherman at the end. “They were like, ‘Oh, that’s why you don’t throw at him. He intercepts the football. He has 27 of them in the last four years. You probably should stop throwing at him.’ Maybe that’s what they were thinking.”
That quarterbacks could become so reluctant to throw in Sherman’s direction is even more striking when you consider the alternatives that face them in Seattle’s secondary. Earl Thomas, Byron Maxwell and Jeremy Lane are hardly slouches in coverage. Kam Chancellor is one of the most feared safeties in the league, a man who, in Sherman’s words, “damages people’s souls”.
New England might be better equipped than most to confront such a challenge. Sherman and his Seattle team-mates thrive in part by confronting receivers at the line of scrimmage and preventing them from making a clean release. But Brady’s favourite target, Rob Gronkowski, presents them with match-up dilemmas – both because of his size at 6ft 6ins, 265lbs and his ability to line up in different positions across the offense.
Sherman’s injury may also be a factor, as might the shoulder separation suffered by Thomas during the win over Green Bay. Both players are expected to play on Sunday, but only time will tell if they are at 100%. Patriots cornerback Brandon Browner, a former Seahawk, caused a stir by telling ESPN on Monday that he would encourage his team-mates to target both players’ injuries.
And then there is Brady himself, a future Hall of Famer chasing his fourth Super Bowl ring. Sherman justified his rant after their previous meeting by asserting that the quarterback had been talking trash on the field – pointing at the scoreboard when New England were ahead and inviting Seattle’s defenders to come and see him after the game.
He hinted at that notion again when he described Brady as “fiery” this week, saying at media day that, “A lot of the quarterbacks try to stay even keel throughout the game and not get too high, not get too low. He’ll show his emotions a little more than the rest of them.”
Sherman will hope to prove his point again on Sunday. Nothing could satisfy Seattle’s defenders more than to make Brady mad a second time.
