Written by Tom Schreier
Cordarrelle Patterson has “it.” It is the ability to be a media darling, but not a diva. It is the ability to demand the ball, but not complain when it doesn’t come your way. It is the ability to revel in your athletic prowess, but also defer to the coaching staff. It is the ability to joke around and create laughter, but earn the respect of your teammates with hard work and dedication to the task at hand.
Patterson is not Chad Johnson or Terrell Owens, but he’s not Larry Fitzgerald or Andre Johnson either. He has personality, charm and a great sense of humor, but it would be out of character for Flash to wear a Hall of Fame jacket on the sidelines or stuff his face with popcorn after a big play. He’s achieved balance, which is rather impressive for a 23-year-old sophomore player that’s just beginning to enter the limelight.
Patterson was on fire during his media session before the New England Patriots game. Men and women with recorders and video cameras made a semicircle around a pillar in the locker room of the Vikings practice facility in Eden Prairie, waiting for the young star to take center stage. Unlike head coach Mike Zimmer or starting quarterback Matt Cassel, who had held formal press conferences in a makeshift classroom in the training facility the previous day, this was a rather informal meeting with just about as many media members — fitting, for a player that kept it rather loose.
“Oh man, oh man, Coach Turner’s offense, he has so much in it and, like I said, this week I probably won’t have no runs, no carries this week,” he said with a smirk on his face. “I got mine last week, I scored, so you’ve got to game plan on something else.”
He seemed both genuinely interested in Turner’s offense, or at least projected that he enjoyed playing in it, while also offering a little gamesmanship: Don’t plan for me to run the ball, Patriots, I had my fill last week.
He did not run the ball against the Patriots, despite Adrian Peterson’s absence, and referred back to his statement after the game. “I told y’all in the interview that I’m not getting any carries,” he said. “I was a decoy the whole game, and it paid off a lot. Everybody was focused on 84, and we’ve got 44 wide open on the sideline for a touchdown.”
There’s an art to what he said, something that is equally difficult to pinpoint as it is to learn. Whatever it is that allows him to do that, he has it.
This “it factor” is not unlike his abilities in the field. Thousands, if not millions, of kids play high school football every year. Fewer play in college. And even fewer play in the pros. There are kids with Patterson’s vision and with his football IQ, but they’ll never be able to break off a 67-yard touchdown run like he did against the St. Louis Rams. That’s a gift. He has “it.” “Every time I touch the ball, I feel like I need to score and want to score to get six points on the board,” he said when asked about being a marked man. “I don’t like being tackled, so every time I get the ball, I just try to get six points.”
There, he did it again. I don’t like being tackled, so I’m just gonna score. He displayed determination to succeed, while also portraying a loosy-goosy, fun nature by cracking a joke. Of course he doesn’t like being tackled; nobody does. Being tackled means the play ends. Being tackled means you didn’t score. Being tackled hurts.
That’s all part of the game, however, and the ability to take a hit and get a few extra yards is something that Turner is looking for out of his young receiver. “Those plays, when they happen, are exciting and they’re great, and you can’t count on those,” he said. “A guy like Cordarrelle is capable of doing that with his physical ability. The two other runs [he had] were more impressive to me because they were challenge runs or physical runs.”
Turner is right. The Vikings cannot depend on a 60-plus yard running touchdown every week from Patterson. He’s an amazing athlete, but he’s also human. Patterson acknowledges this, saying that he’s been a physical player ever since playing college ball at the University of Tennessee and Hutchinson Community College before that. “I feel like I’ve been physical since junior college, man,” he says. “It’s something you’re gifted with, breaking tackles, that’s something you can’t learn. You’ve just gotta have that in you.
“Coach would always tell me, he wants a dog: He wants a Rottweiler, he doesn’t want any poodles or anything,” he adds, snickering. “We come out there, we want to be dogs out there. We don’t want to be no chihuahuas or anything.”
“He’s great,” says Cassel of Patterson. “He’s a fun kid, he’s still young, he’s silly, but at the same time he takes his work seriously, he wants to be successful, and he wants to be one of those guys that — he’ll be the first one to tell you, and I’ve said this before also — he’s still growing a lot as a receiver.”
Patterson says that it has been a blessing to work with Cassel. Not only do the two have lockers next to each other in the practice facility, but they also worked out together in Southern California during the offseason. In Cassel’s press conference he said that Patterson will occasionally lobby for the ball during the week leading up to the game. Never one to whine about his touches during the game, Cassel says that he butters him up while they are sitting in their Eden Prairie locker room by bringing him cookies.
Patterson refutes this claim. “I have never brought Matt cookies,” he says emphatically. “I think Matt was joking. If you see me catch eight balls this week, or nine, or something like that, he will have a lot of cookies in this locker.”
Not everything has been free and easy for Patterson, though, even if he makes it look that way both on the field and in press conferences. He says that nothing in particular about the game is giving him trouble, even if Turner’s playbook is rather large and complicated. He says the hardest thing to do right now is get up everyday knowing how much of a grind professional football is.
“I don’t think there’s no hard challenges,” he says. “The most difficult thing is getting up in the morning and going to do this job every morning. This is year round, so you’ve gotta want this, and this ain’t easy, man. It it was easy, anyone would do it, so just waking up in the morning and coming here, that’s probably the hardest thing.”
He also says his newfound fame presents challenges as well. While he says that his celebrity status has not changed him, and certainly his actions back up his words, Patterson admitted that he’s starting to receive pressure from outsiders looking to cash in on his notoriety and NFL paycheck. “I don’t think my life has changed, I just think I have more friends than I ever did, more family members that I never knew of,” he says with a strained laugh. “That’s the only thing that’s changed, man. That’s the only thing that’s changed.”
Here’s to hoping that Patterson doesn’t change. Here’s to hoping that he will have “it” throughout his playing career and after he’s hung up the cleats. Patterson has the ability to be like Percy Harvin, the player he replaced, Randy Moss, the player whose number he took, or Cris Carter, a former Viking that will analyze him from Bristol every Sunday, but the “it” factor he has on the field will go by his mid-30s — every player experiences a decline. But the hope is he never loses that “it” factor off the field. Hopefully he remains dedicated and silly. Hopefully he remains gregarious and humble. Hopefully he remains himself.
It will be tough. As documentaries like League of Denial and Broke have shown us, the brutality of the game and the relentlessness of moochers can take their toll on a player. People change over time; sometimes for the worst. After all, this is a game for rottweilers, not poodles or chihuahuas. And it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.
Let’s hope Patterson has “it” now and in the long run. Let’s hope that one day he fills Cassel’s locker full of cookies.
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Tom Schreier can be heard on The Michael Knight Show from 2-3:00 on weekdays. He has written for Bleacher Report and the Yahoo Contributor Network. Follow him on Twitter @tschreier3. |