Inside Today's Bulletin
Eagles' Samuel Still Has Got A Ways To Go
By: G. Cobb, The Bulletin
06/06/2008
You can believe that veteran cornerbacks Sheldon Brown and Lito Sheppard have been on the phone with each other, talking about the fact that the Eagles gave Asante Samuel "the bank," even though he's not head and shoulders better than them and can't play pure man-to-man defense as well as they are able to.
I could just see their faces as Samuel was beaten a number of times by some of the team's backup receivers in 1-on-1 drills this week. There had to have been some emotion coming up in Sheppard and Brown from the fact that the Eagles had given so much money to a guy who hasn't made a single play for the Eagles, as of yet.
All-Pro and all, Samuel had free agents who are long shots to make the team running right by him. The 1-on-1 drill clearly is not his game.
In fairness, the game consists of doing much more than just playing pure man-to-man coverage, even though Samuel should be good at it. I haven't seen the acceleration out of his backpedal that I expected to see when receivers are going deep.
Samuel also doesn't seem comfortable coming up into the press technique. He seems to be more at ease when he's playing off the receiver and looking into the backfield to get an idea of what type of route the receiver is going to run.
He's much better when he's coming up on the pass route, rather than turning and running. He wasn't especially strong with his jam of the wideouts when they came off of the line against him when he was in press technique.
I don't want to make more of the matter than it deserves, but Samuel is clearly more of a system left cornerback than Brown or Sheppard.
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According to the source, "Jim likes his cornerbacks up in the press position in the face of wide receivers. He likes his corners to jam the receiver as they come off the line of scrimmage. He's always screaming for that, but Asante likes to play off of the receiver."
The source also went on to say that he thought Samuel was the best in the game at breaking on the ball, but he's not a pure man-to-man coverage guy.
The source pointed out that he liked Samuel's ability to transition from up in the bump technique to off the receiver and vice versa. He talked about Samuel's ability to play mind games with a quarterback.
