Cameron Wake – November 30, 2018
Download PDF version
Friday, November 30, 2018
DE Cameron Wake
(In the last two weeks, you’ve played against Aaron Rodgers and Andrew Luck. Now, you get a rookie quarterback. The team has six interceptions against rookie quarterbacks this year in Sam Darnold. Are there things that you can take advantage of with a rookie that you can’t with a veteran and how will we see that? Is it just in turnovers or looks? How do you do it?) – “I think it’s a double-edged sword. You don’t fear what you don’t know. Rookies get in there and they have no idea what they’re doing and they might throw into double coverage, and ‘who cares what the look is?’ They’re just gunslingers. They can go out there and have a tremendous day. Vice versa, obviously veterans maybe have a little bit more sense of what’s going on in the game and specifically try to attack things. Usually if you let it fly, it can be great or it could be terrible. As a front or as a team, we just have to do what we have to do as far as staying where you’re supposed to be, being on the man you’re supposed to be on. Obviously, he’s in the NFL. He’s a talented player. He’s a competitor, so you don’t want to take anything away from him being a rookie, but you want to take advantage of the areas where you should have an advantage. I’ll say that.”
(We talked to DE Andre Branch on Wednesday. He said he’s going to start pulling a Vlade Divac – flopping to get holding calls.) – “That would be interesting. The game would be very different, I’m sure. I don’t know if it will work. He’s not in here. I’ll tell him to his face.”
(You’ve been held a bit in your career.) – “A bit? You think? It’s every day. (laughter) You just play the play, hope the refs see it and if they don’t, it didn’t happen. You have to move on.”
(It’s not often when it’s the play of the game where it’s egregious and if there’s a hold there, the entire outcome of the game can be different.) – “That happens as well. I feel like I have no investment in that being something that I’m going to get, is a holding call. It’s like a bonus that you weren’t expecting. ‘Oh, okay, well fine, good.’ I would say with the o-linemen – they’re also not here – more often than not, there’s holding. Obviously, it’s not called that way. You just have to go with the mindset that it’s not going to be called and I’m going to do my job anyway.”
(If you were to put a percentage on it every time you pass rush…) – “A lot.”
(60, 70?) – “The goal, because you know it’s going to happen, is to eliminate the possibility of allowing it to happen. A lot of times, my goal is to not let them have a chance, if you get my idea. If I go in there and I was rushing different, they’d probably hold me 80, 90 percent of the time because you’re going to allow them to. Now, if you defeat their hands or power or do other things we do to not give them the chance, which wouldn’t give them the chance to not throw the holding call, it plays in your favor. Don’t even put them in that position to do it because then, now you’re hoping that they’re going to make the right call and that’s probably not going to happen.”
(You treat it as a move then? That’s one of their moves is that they’ll hold you, so you’re treating it almost like a strategy to counteract it.) – “If you’re an o-lineman and you can have a sack or a holding call, which one are you going to do?”
(Holding call. The quarterback doesn’t get destroyed.) – “Exactly. You’re going to lose yards either way. My quarterback doesn’t get hit, maybe fumbles or something.”
(And you have a chance to get away with it.) – “And you have probably an 80 percent chance to get away. I think that’s probably better. Not our line – of course not our offensive line. (laughter) Every other offensive line. It’s risk/reward.”
(Do you sense at all that there’s some momentum going for the defensive line? I know you guys weren’t where you wanted to be as far as sacks and things like that. Do you feel like you’re starting to kind of get the ball rolling?) – “Momentum is a relative term. I don’t really believe in it. I just feel like if you go out there and continue to do what you’re supposed to do, good things will happen. You can’t get discouraged as a pass rusher or a d-lineman or a football player, period. Probably more so as a pass rusher. You have to have a 20-second memory. You got the sack or you didn’t get the sack or whatever the play was, as soon as that play is over and dead, it’s erased. You have to go back out there with the same mindset that this is the play I’m going to get a sack. It could be 500 plays in a row where you don’t. That 501st play, you still have to have that mentality – this is the play, it’s going to happen. That’s kind of how it works. The next play, you get a sack and then you erase it and start all over again. Momentum starts every 20 seconds and then you have to start all over.”
(Rather than momentum, has it been better? The last couple games, have you seen that you guys are making more headway?) – “I think we have had more production. I think that’s not just with us. I think it has a lot of other factors that we spoke before when we weren’t having production, that it’s not just us alone. I’m not a guy who’s like ‘when we’re doing good it’s all us, and when we’re doing bad it’s everyone else.’ When we’re not playing where we want to play, it’s usually a team or a defensive collaboration. When we’re doing well, it’s probably the same thing where we have other players in other positions helping us along and we’re all getting more production.”
(When Jason Taylor played here, he was an incredible player, Hall of Fame player but not a ton of team success. Kind of that script has followed a little bit for you, too.) – “It’s JT’s fault. Tell him I said that. (laughter)”
(Do you worry that that might kind of be your legacy, that you never got to where you wanted to get to?) – “I hope not. I kind of put that in the same vein as what I spoke with per plays. You kind of have to do the same thing season to season, year to year. Every year, reset, work as hard as you can to do your job, do whatever you can to help everyone do theirs and be confident that the other guys are going to do their job as well, and the season will go hopefully in a positive direction.”
(I understand, but that has to be frustrating.) – “Every time you don’t get where you were supposed to get, whether it’s play by play or season by season, it’s frustrating; but the old adage is you control what you can control. If you do everything you possibly can and I can go home at night and look at myself in the mirror and say ‘did you do what you were supposed to do to the best of your ability?’ If I can look myself in the mirror, look my peers in the mirror, look at my teammates, coaches, loved ones, I could live with that for the rest of my life. The hard part is when you didn’t do this, should’ve done that, should’ve went to sleep, should’ve woke up – all the should’ve, could’ve would’ves – that will burn you forever. So far to this day, I can look myself in the mirror knowing that I gave everything I got. I came from where I came from, reached this point. As of now, I’m completely able to look at my production.”
(When you were running scout team early in your NFL career, how much pride did you take in making plays against the starters? Did you take mental notes of that?) – “That actually meant more than anything in my football world. I tell a lot of young guys now, I probably wouldn’t have ever made it to the active roster had I not done the things I did on scout team. I think a lot goes obviously to the guys who play on Sunday and the guys in the bright lights but I was inactive for the first five games of my career, so I was on scout team every play, every rep. I never played on Sundays. It used to be Thursday was my Sunday. That was my game day. I’m playing against, in my mind … It was Vernon Carey at the time. That was my opponent. I have to show – not only my teammates but the coaching staff – that against a quality top-tier offensive lineman, I can make plays. At the same time, hopefully I’m making him better as well. That was what … I loved every minute of it. That, and I hope you can ask them, gave me confidence to say ‘All right, we can put this guy in the game on Sundays.’ It was the only thing that mattered to me. That was my Sunday. They hated it, of course. ‘Slow down! C’mon man! This, that … Scout team player!’ All of the adages but at the same time, I’m trying to make the team. You’ve already made it. You’ve got millions of dollars in the bank. I’m just a guy coming off the street. I took tremendous pride in getting that done.”
(Does anybody stand out through the years that you’ve gone against or that you’ve even observed on scout team, whether it is quarterback, offensive tackle, center, that you said this dude needs a shot?) – “Well, I think you see it every year. It happens. Guys go in and most people don’t know who they are and then all of a sudden you see them pop up on the active roster. Most people don’t understand but for us, we know. We’ve watched him in practice. We’ve seen him going against starters or players who are going to be playing on Sunday making plays and doing things. Then they go in, they get moved up, active roster, and then they end up playing actually in the game on Sundays. We’ve had guys moving up from practice squad to active roster throughout the years and you’ve seen them show up on Sundays and make plays. To single somebody out, I would be missing someone else. But we’ve had guys doing that and I think that’s a tribute to them and it helps us when we go out there on Sunday.”
(You’re closing in on 100 career sacks. What does that milestone mean to you?) – “Right now, it’s not going to mean much. At the end of February after we win the Super Bowl, it’ll be something that I’ll probably take time to look back on and kind of reminisce. During the season, I just take it day by day. Sacks don’t really mean as much as far as numbers; but when the season is over, that’s my time to kind of reminisce back on the year, the accolades, the numbers and things like that. It’ll be something that I can probably enjoy later on down the line; but for now, it’s just another sack.”
