Joe Whitt Jr. and Dan Quinn have had their eyes on Jayron Kearse for quite some time.
The year was 2020. The safety, drafted in the seventh round out of Clemson, had started just five games in four seasons with the Vikings and compiled meager stats over 62 game appearances. He had intriguing size at 6-foot-4, but wasn’t being utilized much in Minnesota. So he chose to leave in free agency.
The Falcons’ newly-hired secondary coach and pass game coordinator, in his first season under head coach Dan Quinn, wanted him.
“We tried to get J.K. when we were in Atlanta; we just weren’t successful,” Joe Whitt Jr. said. “We had a plan for him.”
But there’s that old saying about best-laid plans.
Fast forward 12 months. Quinn had been fired by Atlanta and then hired to be the Cowboys defensive coordinator under Mike McCarthy. Quinn had brought Whitt to Dallas with him, once again as secondary coach and pass game coordinator.
And after less than a full season in Detroit and a few weeks on the Ravens practice squad, Kearse was on the market once again.
This time, Whitt got his man.
Kearse flourished in Dallas. Over 15 starts, he snared two interceptions (doubling his career total to that point), was the team leader in tackles (notching almost 30 more than the Defensive Rookie of the Year), and logged more defensive snaps than all but two of his teammates.
It was enough to earn him a $10 million two-year contract extension.
Indications are that the team will look to get their money’s worth out of the 28-year-old this season.
“We ask J.K. to go from one play playing safety, the very next play he’s playing Buffalo nickel, the very next play on third down he’s going to play the dime,” Whitt explained. “Three different plays, he’s playing three different positions. And you’ve got to remember, he has the green dot on his head. What we’re asking him to do is just very, very hard. And he does it a very high level. I don’t think he got the credit for what we asked him to do.”
That green dot is significant. From a nuts-and-bolts standpoint, it means Kearse is calling the plays in the defensive huddle, relaying messages from the coaches.
But beyond that, it speaks to the Florida native’s innate leadership qualities- qualities that Whitt admits he didn’t know about at first.
“I did not,” the assistant confessed. “That’s been a plus. He’s a true leader, he’s an alpha male. I did not know that about him. But he is all of that. And more.”
Whitt is an up-and-coming sideline star in the league and will have a head coaching job before long. And he sees some of the same traits in his free safety, who has- along with fellow veterans like Jourdan Lewis- started riding herd on the Cowboys’ younger players.
“We were just in the meeting room yesterday,” Whitt relayed, “and one of the young guys didn’t answer a question. I didn’t have to say anything. J.K. said, ‘Hey, listen. When we ask you something, you have to to pop it back.’ I don’t have to correct these guys… they’re correcting it before I even get to correcting it. That’s a benefit to us as coaches.”
Whether coaching is in Kearse’s distant future remains to be seen. Right now, he’s looking to build off the best season of his career on the field. And he’s doing it in a way that’s relatively new for safeties in a changing NFL.
“The middle of the field is open now,” Whitt explained. “You go back 10, 12, 15 years ago when I got into the league, the middle of the field was closed, You had more true, traditional Y-tight ends, U-tight ends. Now you have the Kyle Pittses of the world, you have what they do with [Travis] Kelce splitting them out. So you have to have a guy that has enough ability and strength to go out there and cover a Kyle Pitts, cover a [Darren] Waller… but at the same time, fit in the box: when they pull schemes and [have] tackles and guards getting on them, to have enough stoutness to do that, can blitz and play in the middle of the field. J.K. can do all those things.”
That size that once wooed Minnesota and Detroit is finally being put to proper use against some of the biggest and strongest pass-catchers in the game.
“I love it,” Kearse himself said last week. “You have these high-profile tight ends who go for 150-200 yards, and I pride myself on not allowing 100 yards to those guys. That means a lot to me because there’s not a lot of guys who can stop them. There are a couple in the league I can turn on the tape and I can watch and learn from, because right now I feel like I’m the top guy when it comes to taking tight ends out of the game.”
His position coach agrees. And not just when it comes to tight ends.
“I believe J.K. is the best-covering safety in the league. If you go back and look,” Whitt offered, “last year at what he did in man situations, I think the film speaks for itself.”
Whitt- and others in Dallas- believe Kearse should have been named to the Pro Bowl last year.
For now, though, they’ll have to be content with the veteran who’s come into his own serving as the prototype for the new Cowboys safety.
Whitt already compares second-year man Israel Mukuamu to Kearse in his cover skills; he says rookie free agent Markquese Bell is similar in his physicality.
“They all play with a nasty mentality,” Whitt says of his safety group.
And with Kearse as a hybridized Swiss-Army-type player who can do a little bit of a lot of things, it makes the safety position- little more than a collection of warm bodies for so long in Dallas- a suddenly dangerous group for opponents to face.
With Kearse as the multitasking centerpiece.
“Malik Hooker has shown he’s a high-pedigree guy that, if he can stay healthy, can be a phenomenal player,” Whitt said. “And Donovan Wilson encompasses what our defense is about. We’re a run-and-hit physical defense, and he’s a tempo-setter. So when you put all three of those men on the field together at different targeting positions for the quarterback, they have to figure out who’s who and who’s doing what and what that person’s skill set is. And it makes it difficult for the quarterback.”
Forcing a change of plans for opposing offenses is, after all, the name of the game.
And as Kearse’s own trajectory has demonstrated, good things can happen when plans change.
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