Humble, Landon Collins Anchors New York Giants Defense

In just his second season, New York Giants safety Landon Collins has turned into a rock solid performer for the Big Blue defense.

New York Giants safety Landon Collins might be a millennial, but there is something about the way he approaches the game that is timeless. A quiet, unassuming type who goes by the Twitter handle @TheHumble_21 Collins has brought a swagger to the Giants’ defense that had, for a while, disappeared.

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Only 22 years old, the 6-0, 216-pound Collins is too young to remember the glory days of the fierce Giants defenses that were mostly make up your classic blue-collar types. Those who showed up for work, gave all that they had, and went home at the end of the day—usually with a win.

Yet somehow, in just his second season, he has managed to be affected by the spirit of those throwback legends whose images adorn the walls of the Quest Diagnostics Training Center and whose names hang from the Ring of Honor at MetLife Stadium.

As humble a fellow as @TheHumble_21 suggests, Collins has come a long way in just a season and a half.

Great Expectations

Like so many other young boys who start in Pop Warner and advance through high school and college playing football, Collins had dreams of playing in the NFL.

In choosing his college, he hitched his wagon to Nick Saban’s program at Alabama. The Crimson Tide program has a storied history of producing top-shelf NFL players who typically enjoyed shorter learning curves when making the leap from college to the pro level. Of course, that’s thanks to Saban’s structured program that emulates that of an NFL team.

To be successful in Saban’s program, it’s said that a young man has to be committed, intelligent, determined, and—perhaps the most important quality of all—willing to be molded into a man.

“Coach Saban’s mentally challenged us as young boys,” Collins recalled. “He pushed us to the limit to where we didn’t think we could get to exceed.”

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Not that Collins, who is self-motivated, needed a lot of pushing. But that extra shove he might have gotten from Saban put him right on track to realizing his NFL dream. In three seasons for the Crimson Tide, Collins finished with 184 career tackles, including 8.5 for a loss. He also produced five interceptions while breaking up 13 passes, forcing three fumbles while recovering four.

In sophomore season in 2013, Collins finished third in the SEC in interception return yards with 89, as well as seventh in forced fumbles. In 2014, his 99 tackles ranked 10th in the SEC while his three interceptions ranked eighth, all of which contributed to his selection as a Consensus All-American honoree.

In addition to his hard-hitting ways on defense, Collins also served as a part-time return specialist, returning three kickoffs in his final year at Alabama for 55 yards and recording one punt return for 13 yards as a freshman.

By the end of his junior year, Collins was ready to head to the NFL. While he knew that he stood a very good chance of being drafted high—NFL.com projected him to be a first-round pick—Collins’ battle to live up to the high expectations he had of himself was just getting started.

Finding His Way

No matter how well prepared a young man might think he is for the bright lights of the NFL, there is always going to be a learning curve that, if not managed properly, can sometimes swallow a young man up whole.

Although Collins was well prepared after having gone through the rigors of Saban’s program, there were steps along the young man’s path to the NFL that didn’t always work out the way he hoped.

First, Collins was not drafted in the first round, a disappointing development considering his ranking as the top safety in the 2015 draft class. Second, Collins dreamed of playing for Washington, the very same team that once employed his idol, the late Sean Taylor.

Instead, Collins ended up being the first pick—No. 33 overall—in the second round. The Giants, one of Washington’s most heated division rivals, traded up seven spots in that round to snatch Collins off the board.

“Oh, that was way more pressure than ever,” Collins admitted. “I was like, ‘They came up and got me. They’re expecting a lot out of me.’

“When I went to college, I knew they expected a lot out of me, but not as soon because I knew they had guys in front of me which let me take it step by step. But here, I couldn’t take it step by step because I didn’t have that much time.”

That lack of time was due to the Giants’ decision to move on from veterans such as Antrel Rolle and Stevie Brown, who were eschewed in favor of the youth movement led by Collins.

“I thought they would keep Antrel, and when I heard they let him go, I thought, ‘There’s nobody there,’” Collins said. “I looked at all the safeties we had on the roster and none of them actually played except for Nat (Berhe), who played in a few games. Knowing that, I knew I had a lot to learn.”

A Lifeline

If Collins appeared, at times, to be overwhelmed on your television screen during his rookie campaign, that’s because he was.

With no mentor at his position to guide him (as guys such as Mark Barron, Vinnie Sunseri, HaHa Clinton-Dix and Robert Lester did in college) and with the entire defense having to learn a brand-new system under Steve Spagnuolo (re-hired by the Giants after having depart the team following the 2008 season), Collins initially had nowhere to turn for help among his peers.

“I was trying to figure it out,” he said. “I knew I was a rookie and I wasn’t expected to know everything right then and there when I came through the door, but then I have one of the hardest jobs on the field where I have to control the whole back end of the defense and be on with right signals and right terminology. I had a lot on my shoulders.”

It also didn’t help that the injury bug tore through the Giants safeties, which forced Collins to have to play alongside of a different face perhaps more often than he would have liked and to maybe do things that might not have made the best use of his talent.

“A lot of guys were changing around me,” he said. “It over-consumed me and I was trying to dig my way out.”

While Collins had safeties coach Dave Merritt and Spagnuolo himself to lean on, when it came to the finer points of learning the defense, Collins went outside the box for help.

“I turned to my linebackers because I thought since they were the oldest vets with experience,” he said.

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One veteran whose brain Collins routinely picked was Jon Beason, a three-time Pro Bowl linebacker known for his meticulous preparation and experience in navigating through a change in defensive coordinators throughout his career.

“I talked to Jon because he’s gone through a system change before,” Collins said. “He knew the defense. He’s smart and he knew what was going on. Guys like that, you try to get under their wing.”

When he wasn’t spending time breaking down film with Beason, Collins was working with Merritt, a former NFL linebacker who spent three seasons as a player before crossing over to coaching.

“(Merritt) was very helpful to me because, while I knew run concepts and gap schemes and stuff like that, he helped me with more of the back-end stuff—making the right calls and the position we had to be in and what to do in certain situations.”

Collins ultimately started to see the shoreline, though he admitted, “not as fast as we all expected or wanted.”

Whereas some guys might have become frustrated, Collins kept his eye on the prize.

“I’ve been through the worst. I knew time would tell, and I had to keep on moving with it,” he said.

By the time his rookie season ended, Collins finished as the team’s leader in total tackles with 108, including five tackles for a loss. He also recorded one interception, broke up nine passes and forced one fumble.

Despite making baby steps toward improvement, it was his big drop of a potential game-sealing interception thrown by New England quarterback Tom Brady in a Week 10 game that allowed the Patriots to drive downfield toward a come-from-behind 27-26 victory.

In the blink of an eye, that one moment seemed to wipe away an otherwise-impressive showing by Collins that included five tackles and a pass defense on the first snap of New England’s final possession. However, that one play didn’t crush the will and determination of Collins. Instead, it motivated him to show the Giants just what he was made of.

Man on a Mission

A team knows it truly has something special in a drafted player when that player takes a massive jump from his rookie season to his second year. Collins, who is always striving to get better to this very day, was determined to make that leap, even though he knew it wouldn’t be easy.

When the offseason came around and he had taken a couple of weeks off to let his body heal, he immediately threw himself into a renewed dedication to his craft by taking the lessons he learned as a rookie and moving forward.

One change he made was his approach to studying the game, something he had learned from watching film with Beason and Merritt. The veteran and his positional coach taught him how to dig deeper into the film to find little things that a college player might either miss or rely on his coach to tell him.

Then there was the weight issue. Like many people, Collins had a sweet tooth, his vice being vanilla Oreo cookies. By swearing off the cookies and paying closer attention to what he put into his body, Collins lost 12 pounds, dropping from 228 to 216 pounds.

The other thing he sought to improve was his man-to-man coverage, a part of his game that, in his rookie season, he felt could improve.

These changes have certainly paid off. Collins is not only more confident with what he’s doing—confidence alone can enable one to play faster—but he’s also physically able to keep up with what he’s processing in his mind as a play unfolds.

Through the Giants’ first seven games, Collins again leads the team in total tackles with 57. He is also the team leader in sacks with two, is tied with corners Janoris Jenkins and Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie for the team lead in interceptions (2), and is second in tackles for a loss (4).

His Week 7 performance against the Los Angeles Rams was one for the ages. He not only returned an interception for a touchdown, but his second interception of that game set up the Giants game-winning scoring drive, capping a performance that earned him NFC Defensive Player of the Week honors.

“It’s not too big for him. It never was at the beginning, and it isn’t now,” said Spagnuolo. “The one thing I really like about him is [that] when he makes a mistake or something doesn’t go well, he’s the kind of guy [who] can shake it off really quick.  And he works every day. We’re always doing ball drills; he’s always talking about the scheme. He’s done a great job.”

Spagnuolo smiled when it was pointed out that Collins is holding up well, despite once again dealing with a revolving door in the defensive secondary due to injuries,

“He wouldn’t say that it bothers him because you just play with the guy that’s there, but there’s something to [having continuity],” he said. “It’s like anything else; when you get a little bit of chemistry with somebody, it makes you feel more comfortable [during] the game. I’m sure he’s been working through that.”

Spirit in the Sky

When Collins arrived at New York, it was important for him to acquire jersey number 21—a number worn by Rodgers-Cromartie last year. That number, which Giants fans usually recall as having belonged to running back Tiki Barber, was also worn by Sean Taylor with Washington during the 2005-07 seasons.

There’s rarely a day that goes by that Collins, who sometimes makes a hand gesture toward the sky, holding up his index, middle and pinky fingers to form “21” in honor of his fallen idol, doesn’t pause to remember Taylor.

He smiled when asked what he thought Taylor, a man he never met, might have to say to him if he were alive today to see him play.

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“I think I would want him to say I’m playing like an animal,” Collins said with a smile. “I’m playing with a lot of intensity and playing with a lot of fierce in my heart and a chip on my shoulder. That’s the way he played the game, the way a lot of us like to play the game, because this game could be here and gone in a matter of seconds or minutes.”

Collins smiled again when asked what he’d like to ask Taylor.

“My biggest question,” he said, pausing to think it over for just a bit before responding, “would be how he finds the passion to play the game every day.”

Collins quickly clarified that he, too, has passion for the game of football, but that Taylor’s passion for the game was like none other he’s ever seen.

“The guys I talked to that knew him and played with him—(running back) Clinton Portis and (linebacker) LaVar Arrington—said he was like a different breed, given the intensity and mindset he had. He was the best; dudes were telling me that he would leave his car at practice and jog home. It’s amazing to hear about him doing stuff like that.”

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Between his college pedigree and his survival during a rough rookie campaign, Collins hopes to become a Pro Bowl safety and be recognized annually as an All-Pro. He believes he’s still scratching the surface.

“There’s plenty more,” he said when asked if fans have seen the best he has to offer. “It’s a long season, and as the season goes on, you’re still getting better.

“I’m still learning a lot of things, and I think by my fourth season, it’s going to be the Landon Collins everyone saw in college.”