Cameron Wake – September 7, 2018
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Thursday, September 6, 2018
DE Cameron Wake
(Different thought for you going into this regular season game than maybe the preseason for you?) – “Not really. For me, if there’s an opponent across from me, he’s wearing a different color and they’re keeping score, it’s all gas, no brakes. It doesn’t matter whatever it is. I don’t care if it’s ping-pong, badminton, preseason, Super Bowl, I’m trying to kill you.”
(How has DE Robert Quinn helped you on the other side?) – “He’s a tremendous asset to the team. Obviously, he’s a great football player (and a) tremendous pass-rushing force. Anytime you have to make decisions when it comes to the offensive side of the ball … of course, that would probably be a great question to ask one of those guys on the other side, but how are you going to dispense your attention? There’s only so many guys you’ve got to use and hopefully the more that we can occupy, the better it is for the team in its entirety – whether it’s DBs, linebackers or the guys up front. I think everybody is going to benefit from other guys making plays, not only him. We’ve got other guys also doing the same thing, but I look forward to all of us causing problems and having good output as far as production is concerned.”
(You’re a guy who picks his spots when he has a message for his teammates, is there anything this week that’s come to mind you felt the need to share?) – “Sure; but what I’ll share is probably, I mean, it’s just a long offseason. I think April 25th-ish, we came back and pretty much everything we’ve done from that day until now is focusing on Sunday. All the drills, the conditioning, weights, studying, preseason, 9-on-7s, 1-on-1s, all of that stuff has kind of come to this moment. I think everybody kind of is ready. It’s time. All the talk, whatever I’m going to say now, doesn’t mean anything. Whatever I say tomorrow is not going to mean anything. What’s going to mean something is going to be when you put those pads on and you do your job on Sunday.”
(There’s been a lot of talk about changing the culture after what happened last season and some of the ups and downs there. What have you seen this year relating to that, and do you buy into changing the culture in the offseason?) – “Words have never solved a problem. It’s always come down to actions. It has to happen. It’s not something that we can just go out and say. It’s not something that you can speak into existence. Speaking something into existence is not a thing. You have to act it into existence. We can go out there and rah-rah-rah all we want, whether it’s culture, stop the run, get to the quarterback, score points, all of that. It sounds good. It makes good T-shirts; but you have to bleed. You have to do it and that becomes who you are. Whether you want to say I’m a rah-rah guy or I’m a tough guy, if you don’t go out there and be tough, what difference does it make? So Sunday will show what this the situation is, who you are individually, unit, team, so on and so forth.”
(You’re now in Year 10. What drives you? What’s your motivation?) – “Cameron Wake. Every day I look in the mirror. Being better than him. I’ve always been a guy I’ve never cared about stats particularly, somebody else, what he did, what he does, what the other guy on the other side of the league is doing. I have a very, very competition in myself and outdoing me, being better, being smarter. All of those things, keep stepping that bar up. That’s kind of the way I make my way across improving and I think if I continue to do that, then hopefully I can help this team. If I can help this team, then we can get more wins, and so on and so on. It’s just going to trickle down and trickle across and be contagious. If that’s not how you approach it and you’re worried about somebody else, what he’s doing, what he’s doing, I think you’re behind the 8-ball already. I just focus on being the best me I can be and I can look in the mirror every day and live with that. I think I’ll be all right.”
(Can you quantify what outdoing the 2017 DE Cam Wake would look like?) – “It’s hard. It’s hard. I think especially you guys, looking at this paper here, there’s all kind of numbers and probably statistics and what not; but that’s not always the picture that you’re going to be able to get from football. There’s so much more to it that goes into being a good football player or a good teammate or a good pass rusher, so on and so on and so on. A lot of it … Some of it is on the paper and some of it isn’t. To be a better me, I would be here for 30 minutes talking about that; but some of it is statistical, quantifiable, tangible stuff and some of it isn’t. I think if you are honest with yourself and only you know that, I think you’ll be able to look in the mirror again and say ‘Yes, I did,’ or ‘No, I didn’t.’”
(I think you guys have seen the Titans the last two years. One was when QB Marcus Mariota was healthy and one when he was not. That 2016 game with him, he had some success. What did you guys learn from that game?) – “That’s ancient history at this point. I think it doesn’t really matter. I think now the guys we have to deal with now is the team we’re going to play. Of course they’ve got a lot of new pieces, a new scheme, new this, new that. So it’s probably less about what they are going to be doing and it’s more about what we’re going to do. If I punch you in the mouth, I really don’t care about what you’ve been doing or not doing. It’s just the nature of the business. I don’t really care, I’m going to go out – I’m going to say we – we don’t really care. We’re going to go out and do what we do, play our technique and if we do that we’re going to go out and be successful regardless of what happened in 2013, ‘14, ‘20, ’22, whatever.”
(Speaking of your individual matchup on the edge. What do you see in T Taylor Lewan and T Jack Conklin and if they’ve got to play T Dennis Kelly and how you can fare in those matchups?) – “I’m pretty consistent on how I look at guys. I study like anybody else. I see weaknesses and strengths and things like that. You try to line those up with what you’ve got. You line their weakness up with your strengths. At the end of the day, it’s a guy I look at as an opponent. He probably thinks he’s better than me, I think I’m better than him, and on Sunday it’s going to be pass or fail. I look across our line and I feel we have the guys to get the job done; but, again as I’ve told you before, T-shirts, rah-rah and speeches is good for TV maybe, but it doesn’t win games. It doesn’t change the outcome of how your season is going to go. You have to put on the pads and put in the work. On Sunday, that will be very evident one way or another.”
(You spend 349 days getting ready for 16 games, what’s that like? All that work and if you’re not on that day, it feels like a failure probably.) – “Yes. Again, you guys have asked … The people and of course those last however many days – I don’t know how many days from the last game until Sunday – but people don’t see that. There’s no SportsCenter highlights. There’s no TV shows about it. The majority of what goes on, no one sees. Everybody sees Sunday at one o’clock until 3:30 or four o’clock – whatever – and that’s all they know; but there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes. I think, again, that’s why this is the greatest team sport in the world because there is so much at stake. You don’t get 100 games to figure it out. You have, like you said, 16 chances. You work the rest of the year for those 16 chances. And it’s probably going to come down in the NFL as we saw last night to one play. Just one. You don’t know which one. It could have been the third one, the 15th one. Everybody think’s it’s the last play of the game, but it got decided good or bad somewhere along the line of the game. A game of inches. All of those sayings and all of those thing, it’s the reality. It’s heavier than you can probably express to somebody who hasn’t been on this side doing it. It’s some of the greatest highs and some of the lowest lows. That’s why we go through what we go through in order to achieve that six hours of joy and pleasure of winning a game and to avoid those 16 or so hours of sorrow. Again, it’s heavier than I can explain to you until you put some pads on.”
