BB on Wilson playing safety and CB and adressing the transition between the two positions, 12-03-04:
Q: Eugene Wilson, he was a little matter of fact about the switching from safety to cornerback. He said it wasn't a big deal. Is that a big deal or is that something that is a matter of fact thing?
BB: No, it's like we talked about many times. [With] some players, they could never make that [switch]. Other guys, it's no big deal. Eugene is a very flexible, as we've seen, person and a very flexible player. He can go in and out of things and transition almost seamlessly. It doesn't really affect him. It doesn't bother him. Like I've said, there are other players where there is no way. I'm not saying skill wise, I am just saying to go from this set of responsibilities and just look at the plays to all of a sudden a totally different one is not something that they would want to deal with.
Q: What is it in his skill set that has allowed him to come in and just really pick it up?
BB: Well, I think it's his natural skill set at corner, his size, his quickness, his athletic ability, and all of that. What gave him the ability to play safety is his tackling. You can't really put a corner at safety without the tackling issue coming up. You just can't avoid that. For a guy to play safety that isn't a good tackler, that is a problem. I think Eugene is a very good tackler for a corner. I think he has done a good job at tackling as a safety. If you have enough ability to play corner, you have enough athletic ability to play safety. I don't think that is going to be too much of a problem. The physical part of it, the tackling, the toughness, the run support, the dealing with the linemen, the fullbacks, the tight ends, the crack blocks all of those types of things that corners don't see as much of, that is a whole different ball game. He has handled that well. He plays physically and he tackles well.
Q: Is it safe to assume that the converse is true, that the safety doesn't necessarily have that flexibility to play corner?
BB: Well, no I wouldn't say that is necessarily true. Some do and some don't. Quite a few of them don't.
Q: Well, that pretty much all corners would have the athletic ability to play safety. Is that what you are saying?
BB: Again, if they have enough size. I don't think you want a 170 pound guy in there or a 175 pound guy. I think when you get to 195 [pound] range, guys that are in that range, and even taking some players like Aeneas Williams and Everson Walls and guys like that, going back, that were primarily corners, Rod Woodson, that had enough size to move inside. Not that they were 220 pound safeties, but enough to go in there [and] they could handle that. Woodson is kind of the prototype really. He is probably what, 210, 212 whatever he was. He was a huge corner and then maybe an average sized safety. But, he was just exceptionally big as a corner. It's just like we talked about a couple of weeks ago with Kansas City. All of their corners are safeties. [Eric] Warfield was a safety in college. [Jerome] Woods was a safety in college who they moved to corner but then they moved back to safety. [William] Bartee played safety in college at Oklahoma. That is not that unusual to take guys as college safeties and bump them outside. You wonder why their colleges didn't play them outside, but that is another matter.
Q: Did Wilson have safety experience in college?
BB: He didn't have any safety experience until Wednesday before the Philadelphia game.
Q: Since he played corner in college, was the transition moving back last week a little bit easier, just kind of brushing up on some skills?
BB: Well, he has been playing corner all year. Eugene and I and Eric [Mangini] and Romeo [Crennel], we talked about that at the beginning of the season, from training camp. 'You are going to get plays at safety. You're also going to take plays at corner and you're also going to work on your skills at corner and do one on one.' In that particular situation, which isn't true of a lot of other positions, but because corner is more isolated than almost every other position on the field, if the corner or the safety, whoever it is, just works on his corner skills in individual periods and one on ones and stuff like that, that can go a long way to being on the road to his team skills. Whereas an offensive guard, he can do one on one pass protection a thousand times per day. You can put all of those other guys there in front of him and pass gains with the tackle and the center and stunts and all of that, you have to have a lot of team work and cooperation and cooperative work in there in terms of blocking that. Not that there isn't a lot of team work at corner, but there is certain degree of isolation out there that you just don't have at most of the other positions as you get closer to the middle of the field or closer to the ball.
Q: When he has played safety he has delivered a lot of hard hits. I just wonder where it comes from because there probably aren't going to be a lot of chances to do that playing corner in college, to just flat-out level somebody.
BB: I thought Eugene was a very good tackler coming out. I thought he tackled probably as well if not better than every corner in the draft. That is part of why he moved into safety, because of what we had seen him do with his physical play as a corner in college. But, still, it's still a big adjustment, going from the outside and seeing all of the plays from the outside in, and then moving inside and basically seeing all of the plays from the inside out. You kind of have to change your processing mechanisms of what you see and your progression of what you're reading. It's different.
Q: I know there are probably one million different keys and reads to play at corner.
BB: I wouldn't say a million.
Q: Did he just hide it? The transition seemed so natural.
BB: Look, Eugene has gotten a lot better. He did a good job last year, but when he first started playing safety, there were still a lot of things fundamentally and reaction wise that were okay, but they have gotten a lot better. That's true if of any second year or third year player. Guys that are playing the same position, whether it is [Ty] Warren or whoever it is. By doing the same thing repetitively through a couple of years, a lot of practices in the same system, if you work hard at it, you can't help but get better and Eugene has gotten better. I think he started at a decent level, but he is a lot better of a player now than he was one year ago. I don't think it's even close.
Q: Given the fact that he is a young player and given how much you have given to him to learn, is he a bit of an anomaly?
BB: Eugene is very versatile and adapts very well and he is very smart. He is a really smart player. Things come easily to him and he reacts to them very quickly and he is instinctive. You get a different formation or a team does something that maybe we haven't seen in a while, 'How are we going to handle it,' he reacts to that naturally and instinctively. Whereas some players, when they see something that they haven't seen in awhile, they kind of freeze. They don't know exactly what to do or they hesitate and wait to see what somebody else is going to recommend how we handle it and what the adjustments is going to be. That stuff comes, and I'm not saying easy, but it's relatively easy to him. He gets it and does the logical instinctive thing.
Q: Were those qualities first evident when you were looking at him in college?
BB: Yes. From watching him play at Illinois, his junior year they played a lot of man-to-man coverage. You could really see his skills. You could see him play against good receivers, guys like [Deion] Branch at Louisville and in the Bowl games and so forth. Then, his senior year they went to much more of a zone-oriented scheme, played some quarter coverages and did more combination types of covering and things like that, which kind of took him a little bit out of maybe the focal point of just playing man-to-man, but you could see a lot of the scheming and combination types of things and seeing him in a different type of system. We use both. It was really kind of a unique [situation]. When they changed their defensive system and changed coordinators there going into his senior year, it was actually helpful from our standpoint to be able to see him doing a lot of different things and doing them pretty well. He returned punts. He's played on special teams, covered kicks. A lot of the things that he has done here, in one way or another, he did in college in those last two seasons in one way or another.
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