As a rookie, safety Jabrill Peppers did not have the sort of season he would have hoped, consistently falling short for the then-struggling Cleveland Browns.
But Peppers didn’t hide under a rock or hang his head. Rather, he took ownership of his under-performance and vowed to play at a higher clip in 2018.
“I put that on tape,” Peppers told Cleveland.com last year. “Coach didn’t put that on tape. That’s how I looked at it. The coaches can’t play for you, they just tell you what to do and you’ve got to go out there and make them look good and I didn’t do the job last year.
“What I was doing was what I was doing. I was missing tackles, I was taking bad angles to the ball, I was being hesitant. Coach wasn’t making me be hesitant, that was all on me.”
In his second year, Peppers turned things around at a dramatic clip. He went from potential bust to budding star, and Pro Football Focus supplied the data earlier this week to prove exactly that.
Peppers didn’t just scale his rookie wall, he leaped over it and kept running without looking back. He made dramatic strides and improved his game across the board, proving that there’s quite a bit of potential locked up in that 6-foot-1 frame.
Now with the Giants, Peppers will step into an extremely important role on a defense that seems better suited for his talents. And if general manager Dave Gettleman managed to hit the nail on its head, then expect to see a similar analytical leap for Peppers from Year 2 to Year 3.
