Head Coach Brad Childress following selection of 2nd-Round S Tyrell Johnson
OK, this thing is going rather quickly upstairs – new format. We might be done by 8:00, which would be an upset. Just a couple of words about Tyrell (Johnson). He’s listed as Marcellus in a few different spots, but Tyrell is what he prefers. We just saw a solid all-around athlete. He’s 6’0, 207. Where he really jumps out is if you watch him play against the University of Texas this year, he had an outstanding game against, again, a pretty good caliber Texas team, so you always watch a guy when he competes up, particularly when you’re looking at a I-AA athlete. We liked everything about him from our interview. He’s a very smart, clear-eyed guy. He’s a very physical football player. He has a very quick see-to-do. I feel like he’ll be obviously an outstanding special teams guy, and ironically, when we go through with Rick’s (Spielman) grading system, he was the 17th player on our board, ironically. Zygi (Wilf) is the guy that pointed that out up there, so that’s a little irony there. He has a very good pedigree. His mother was a track athlete at Arkansas. His father is Alvin Robertson. You maybe remember, he was a first-round draft pick of the San Antonio Spurs. He played with Darrell Walker, who was a first-round draft pick from Arkansas. This was after the Sidney Moncrief era for those of you who are old enough to remember Sidney Moncrief. Scott Hastings and U.S. Reed were all on that Arkansas team coached by Eddie Sutton back then. I think the last safety that was drafted here was 1995, Orlando Thomas, who I believe led the NFL in interceptions that year. Again, he’s a solid person, and he’s as excited to be a part of our club as we are to have him.
Q: Was there a point where you thought, “We’ve waited long enough. He’s dropped far enough, and we need to get him?”
A: Well there were a few different people between us and when we started making our calls and doing our math. There are numbers of people there that are doing that. There were a few people, including Philadelphia that we thought possibly could make a move for a safety – Denver being one of them. So we just wanted to make sure that we ensured that, and actually, what we did was, yeah, we had to give up a fourth but we flipped and (got their fifth round pick).
Q: Did you have to tell Philadelphia you were taking a safety?
A: No, you never do that. The verbiage is, “If your guy is not there, we have a guy there.” You don’t ever want to share that.
Q: How high of a priority was safety heading into this draft?
A: Pretty high, pretty high. We wanted to get a young player. We had obviously some people higher than that, but this guy and the Phillips that went to New York, we had them right next to each other and we had this guy on top of Phillips.
Q: What was it about your safety position that made you feel you wanted a young guy like this on your roster?
A: Yeah, it’s not that you wouldn’t have taken a young corner or a young something else, but that’s where we had that guy graded and actually had him graded above where the line was. You can’t get enough good guys to play in there in and around the box with the range to be able to play in deep centerfield and have the physical nature to play up on the line of scrimmage.
Q: Can he acclimate quickly and help you on defense this year?
A: Just based on listening to him, it will be interesting to see if he’s a vocal communicator back there. In our interviews we thought he had good learn-ability and was an articulate kid that was a good communicator.
Q: Did you bring him in here for a visit?
A: No, we didn’t bring him here. We saw him both at the senior bowl and combine.
Q: Where did you talk to him?
A: I talked to him in Indianapolis.
Q: Which safety spot do you see him filling in for? Do you see him in Darren Sharper’s spot?
A: He’s at the safety position. Those guys go back and forth. We could put S and S and they both have to be able to do the same, identical things.
Q: He has good size and speed. Do you see him as someone who can play nickel or corner also?
A: He shows the flexibility to be able to do some things in the return game, whether or not he in fact does that, I don’t know. He had pretty good numbers in terms of the punt return game and as a kickoff return guy, so he exhibits that. He obviously has good hands, which is important back there, even though most people think if a guy can’t play wide receiver, they move over to defensive back because he can’t catch. This guy catches pretty well.
Q: Do you have enough picks to get what you want out of this draft?
A: Oh I think so. There are always going to be players that we can find. We’re just not going to be up at the crack of dawn.
Q: Do you remember the last draft when a wide receiver wasn’t selected in the first round?
A: Boy, I’d have to think hard about it. It’s probably been a while. I don’t know how long a while though.
Q: Did the shortened time change the atmosphere in the draft room?
A: No, it really didn’t. It had a little bit better clip to it, and if you were thinking about things, you were thinking about them early and communicating with people ahead of you and behind you. But nobody’s head was in a vice or anything like that.
Q: Were there any other bigger schools he played against other than Texas that stood out to you?
A: That’s the one that sticks out for me, but he showed up all the time. Arkansas State typically plays some upper-echelon schools. I’m trying to think who else we saw. Those are always the first ones you pull off the shelf. You look for the Division I schools and then you look for the rest. But the bright lights didn’t diminish anything he did; as a matter of fact, he probably showed up more.
Q: Did it take much negotiating to trade up?
A: There was a little give and take. When you start out early, I’ll let Rick explain it to you, but you start out with the people that are above you and you say, “Would you,” and, “For what, if you don’t have your guy.” You’re always trying to pull a deal, as are they, so there is a little give and take with numbers.
Q: Is it just the way the league works that there’s always going to be a young guy available to replace a Sharper or a veteran who is coming to the end of his career?
A: Well you’re always mindful. There’s an old axiom that you don’t want to grow old at a position all at once, and so whether it’s safety or in the offensive line or your linebacking core, at the position there are only two safeties and at the offensive line there are five players, but you don’t want everybody to be approaching it at the same time. You’d like guys to be at different levels.
Q: What were your thoughts on Jacksonville jumping up that far?
A: It wasn’t surprising because they were a player in the Jared Allen sweepstakes.
Q: With the way things fell today with the defensive ends, do you feel better about the Jared Allen trade?
A: Well we had a pretty good idea that those guys were going to be gone and the tackles were going to go in a hurry because you know what the rest of the board looks like. You know what the strengths are, so you might have a need at a position, but I can think of only two inside linebackers that we had above the line – one above the line and one below the line. So you say, “Where are you going to get your picks?” As that starts to develop over the last two or three weeks, you’re saying, “Wow, where are you going to be with those picks? How fast are those guys going to go? What’s going to be left?”
Q: What does it say about the NFC North that the top two teams didn’t have a 1st-round pick?
A: I don’t know what kind of analogy you can draw from that. Not to speak for Green Bay but they do like to move out and move back and amass them, not that we wouldn’t, but we were able to do something a little different with ours.
Vice President of Player Personnel Rick Spielman following selection of 2nd-Round S Tyrell Johnson
All right, we made a trade. Again, I think it was something that was similar to last year when we went up to get Brian Robison. There was a guy that we felt on our board that was high up on our board that was, when it got within striking distance, we felt we had to go up and get just because he was too good of a football player to sit there and wait. When you strategize and you look at the teams that are ahead of you, you start to wonder could he not get down, because there are some teams up there we felt may need safety needs, or try to fill him with safety. He was probably, him and (Kenny) Phillips, were the two highest guys on our board. When he was sitting there and within striking distance, that’s when we decided to go up and get him.
Q: You always talk about taking the best player available. Was that what you felt like, that he was truly the best player available?
A: He was truly the best player available on our board and rated highly on our board. I know what Brad (Childress) said, and we felt very strongly about him and then after we got an opportunity to sit down with him at the combine after his workout at the combine, when you go back and look at the tape and you see him against high level of competition, against the Texases of the world, and all the 1-A schools that he played against, the upper echelons, and he stuck out like a sore thumb from that standpoint. So we were very excited that he was there and felt that it was worth going up to get him. Basically all we did was take our fourth and flop it with Philly to go back, so we didn’t lose a pick. We just moved back into the fifth round.
Q: Defensively, where does this draft rate in the first two rounds with other drafts in the past?
A: Again, if you throw in Jared Allen as our first-round pick and then to get a safety. Last year, we kind of struck on the offensive side of it to get Adrian Peterson and to get a Sidney Rice with our first two picks. This year I think one of the things that I know everybody was talking about improving was our pass defense because we’ve been not very good the last couple years at it. So by getting some help on the back end and being aggressive to go out and get a Madieu Williams, to go out and get a safety like Tyrell, and then to add a pass rusher like Jared Allen, hopefully that will fill some of our needs, especially on the defensive side.
Q: In your experience, how much time do safeties need to get on the field?
A: Again, that will be coaching. Just see when he gets in here and how quickly he comes along. Darren Sharper is here and he’s got the ability to learn. It’s a thing that he doesn’t have to get on the field right away, but again, I think Coach will handle all the personnel questions from that end.
Q: What do you like about him athletically?
A: Again, you have a big safety that ran 4.4s at the combine. When you compare him, we thought he had unique ball skills which is something that’s very important, especially at the safety position. He has excellent closing burst, anticipates well, does a nice job when they do send him on blitzes. He can play either off or up in the box, so he brings you a complete safety where it gives you some flexibility on the back end to roll your safety up. He’s effective inside when you put him up in the box and he’s also very effective playing in half coverage and deep middle.
Q: Did he really stand out to you at the combine?
A: Yeah, he was unique, and we thought he was unique just as a player on tape. Again, you don’t go off combine numbers to draft a guy, but when those numbers were verified and he jumped off the charts there, now you’ve got one, an A-plus kid, A-plus character, A-plus athlete, and we feel an A-plus football player.
Q: Brad talked the other day about one of the reasons you moved up to get Jared was because of the cost that it would take to get one of the top defensive ends. With the way things fell today, did it make you feel better?
A: Well, no, everybody does what they have to do. I think you saw today teams that wanted to go up and get someone they coveted did what it took to go get him and to make sure they had their guy. We felt Jared Allen; we had to do what we had to do to go get a Jared Allen, to get that deal done. What you can see there has been a lot of some pretty rich deals as far as trades and stuff going but again, it’s all going to come down to did you get the player that you coveted and is that player going to help you get to where you need to go?