The Seahawks may just have a future Defensive Player of the Year in rookie cornerback Devon Witherspoon. If you only looked at the box score from Sunday’s win over the Cardinals, you’d see that he posted four tackles and one pass breakup. What you wouldn’t see are the sack and the interception that he had wiped out by penalties. You wouldn’t hear the violence with which he leveled a ball-carrier in the fourth quarter, or the oOoh that followed from the crowd.
Even though it’s only been a handful of games, Witherspoon is already a must-see type of talent. While top-five picks are supposed to be great, it’s extremely rare for a rookie to make this big of an impact defensively in just a handful of games. Need proof? Three-time Pro Bowl safety Jamal Adams could tell you about the lethal learning curve going from college to the NFL.
Yesterday when Adams was asked about how difficult to is to make an impact at nickel and on the boundary as a rookie, Adams deferred to Witherspoon, admitting he was “ass” as a rookie himself.
Jamal Adams was asked how difficult it is for Spoon to be so impactful as a nickel *and* left corner as a rookie.
“I don’t know. You gotta ask him on that. Because my rookie year, I was ass. So, I don’t know.”
— Dugar, Michael-Shawn (@MikeDugar) October 23, 2023
To be fair to Adams, most first-year DBs in the NFL are. ‘
For Witherspoon to be this tight in coverage, this willing as a tackler, this ferocious as a pass rusher and this good at forcing turnovers this early is mind-blowing, unprecedented stuff. What’s really special is he still has so much time and room to grow as a defender.
Five games isn’t enough to make any definitive judgments about a player no matter how promising they look. That said, we can’t even see his ceiling.
More Seahawks Wire stories
