MIAMI — The first time I saw Richard Sherman in an NFL uniform, he was an unheralded rookie in Seattle’s 2011 minicamps — a tall, lanky, fifth-round cornerback out of Stanford who seemed to want to beat the heck out of every receiver he faced. Over the next new years, Sherman became the standard at his position as the NFL’s best cornerback on a Seahawks team that led the NFL in points allowed every season from 2012 through 2015 — a four-year stretch unequaled in the Super Bowl era.
The thing about cornerbacks, though, is that they tend to age quickly. Very quickly. The skill set required to play the position at the highest level is so formidable, and the margin for error so razor-thin, that any ding shows up on the field immediately. In Week nine of the 2017 season, Sherman suffered a ruptured Achilles tendon which ended his season, and as it turned out, his Seahawks career. He was released in March, 2018, represented himself in negotiations, and signed a three-year, $27.15 million contract with division rival San Francisco soon after.
Sherman’s first year with the 49ers seemed that it would be the start of that inevitable downhill slide. He had never allowed an opponent passer rating of more than 68.4 in a season (2016), but in that debut season with San Francisco, he gave up 25 receptions in 40 targets for 365 yards, one touchdown, no interceptions, and an opponent passer rating of 100.5. Now past age 30 and recovering from a serious injury that was bound to affect his straight-line speed and short-area quickness, Sherman was going against the odds if he believed that he would ever climb to the top of his position again.
And then, the unlikely happened — in 2019, Sherman put together one of his best seasons, allowing 29 catches in 56 targets for 301 yards, five interceptions, one touchdown, and an opponent passer rating of 36.4. Only New England’s J.C. Jackson posted a lower rating among cornerbacks who played at least 20% of their defensive snaps, and Sherman helped his 49ers defense rank second in the NFL in points allowed, fourth in yards allowed, and second behind the Patriots in Football Outsiders’ opponent-adjusted pass defense metrics.
Watching Sherman through the 2019 season and into the playoffs brought to mind the guy who played the position at its peak through the early- and mid-2010s. That was the guy I sat down with in January, 2016, to review several of his plays from the 2015 season and have him give me a master class in coverage.
You’d expect Sherman to present himself with audacity in such a situation, but what impressed me was Sherman’s vicious intelligence and total recall of any play you presented to him — whether it was from the week before or three years ago. That Richard Sherman was at the top of his game with an infinite highway of success before him.
Fast-forward to the Richard Sherman at the podium on Opening Night at Marlins Park in Miami. He’s a different guy. A family man, a veteran who helps the young defensive backs on his team, and a player who saw the bottom and somehow got back to the top — both as part of a unit and most certainly as an individual.
I wanted to know how he got back to where he used to me, with a few new tricks. What does he know now, after that down season, that he didn’t know in 2015?
“I guess in 2015, it was less about what I didn’t know, and more about the risks I was able to take,” he told me. “And in 2018, with the sutures in my heel, I couldn’t take the same risks. So, I had to play a straight, smart, positional game. Once I got the sutures removed and my athletic freedom back, I guess I still had the craftsmanship I used that whole year — those safe plays, those conservative plays, but also the aggressive plays that can follow them. It changed the way I approached it a little bit. I couldn’t play the way I wanted to in 2018, so that’s been a transition this year.”
The concepts of intelligent risk and athletic freedom as they relate to the cornerback position are interesting, to be sure. The NFL’s best cornerbacks must balance putting their bodies on the line to make plays others might not make with a freakish on-field acumen that allows them to read quarterback’s intentions, and run routes better than receivers do. I asked Sherman if there was one play that typified his unlikely return to the top. After a long pause, he referred to one play in San Francisco’s 24-20 Week 3 win over the Steelers. It wasn’t a big play per se — not a game-changing intercepiton or any other kind of highlight fodder — but it was the play that let Sherman know that, both physically and intellectually, he was exactly where he needed to be once again
“I guess… there was a play in the Pittsburgh game, where I was playing against JuJu [Smith-Schuster]. There was a corner-stop [route] — a corner return down the stem. I was in press, and I had an inside release. I was able to put a foot in the ground and trust it, and I almost intercepted the ball. He got a hand in there and broke it up, but that was just all those things — the trust that I knew the route. my ‘conservativeness’ to get out of the route early so that I could see, and my trust and faith in my lower body so that I could break, and make the play that was there.”
Athletes will often tell you that they wish they could combine the athletic gifts of their youth with the mental attributes they gained over the years as they perfected their craft and worked through adversity. Richard Sherman has received this rare gift after a season in which he was shown his mortality, and he’ll show it off in the NFL’s biggest game.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”