LaRon Landry Talks About That Play Last Year
Posted by Matt Terl on September 10, 2009 – 4:32 pm
It was one of the most memorable plays of last season’s opener: first quarter, 2nd and 2, Giants running back Brandon Jacobs gets into the secondary and runs clear over Redskins safety LaRon Landry. For Redskins fans, the memories are not good ones; for Giants fans, it’s still something to bring up tauntingly, even a year later.
And for Landry himself?
“I watched it a lot of times, you know,” Landry acknowledged. “Over the break, right after it happened … [but] I don’t really look at it too much anymore.”
He paused, thought about it for a second. “I don’t need to watch that [stuff]. I don’t need to. I already got it on my mind.”
So, I asked hesitantly, are you using it for motivation for Sunday, then?
“[Forget] motivation,” Landry said flatly. “It’s already on my mind.”
One of the reason that it’s on his mind is that the other members of the secondary have made sure that he doesn’t forget it.
Carlos Rogers was willing to own up to talking to Landry about the play. “Yeah, talkin’ to him,” Rogers said. “Jokin’ on him about last year. YouTubed it to see how they sat him on his butt. It’s been fun, actually — me, him, and Smoot and DHall and Coach Blache actually was joking about it. But, you know, we got something for [Jacobs] this year. Hopefully we can get him back. But he’s a big boy.”
It might seem unusual to be joking about that kind of hit, but to Rogers, it’s just part of the mindset of the defensive backfield. “In our room,” he said, “we joke about everything: the good, the bad … you know, after the fact it happens, happens. Can’t do nothin’ about it. You know, when he ran over Smoot the year before that — when he was already on somebody, he knocked [Smoot] back about three yards, we joked about that.”
(The somebody he was already on was London Fletcher; you can see the painful video, complete with jazzy soundtrack, here.)
There’s one thing that DeAngelo Hall would like to clarify, though: busting on Landry in practice is one thing. Gametime is something else again. “We’ll joke about it,” Hall told me, “but come gametime we’re all out there tryin’ to take his head off. That’s the bottom line. It’s no longer LaRon against him, it’s all of us against him. We’ll joke about it now, but as it starts getting’ close to that game, we know what time it is.”
One person who didn’t see the humor in any of this was safeties coach Steve Jackson. I asked him about the hit, and he gave me a completely blank stare. “What do you mean,” he asked.
I stammered out a clarification. “That happens to everybody,” he said bluntly. “I mean, if you’re gonna tackle somebody, sometimes you get ran over. Sometimes you’re the bug, sometimes you’re the windshield.”
The intrepid Paul Tenorio of the Washington Post tried to ask about the guys giving Landry a hard time, but Jackson wasn’t having any of it. “There’s probably plays that happened that you wouldn’t even believe that DON’T get on tape that he takes more heat for than that one,” he said. “I mean, you know, the guy had a good run. He caught [Landry] off balance and he got him.
“That’s all it is. You get up, you go back out there, and you do it again. The thing that makes him a pro is that you don’t cower down from anybody. Should the situation happen again, come at him the exact same way.”
Which is exactly what Landry and the corners intend to do. “That’s a big boy,” Rogers said, “we just gotta gangtackle him.”
Hall concurred, saying, “We’re gonna ratpack him this time.”
And Landry?
“I’m gonna do the same thing I tried to do the first time,” he said, shrugging, “and however it’s gonna come out, it’s gonna come out. I ain’t gonna shy away from it…. He’s a powerful back. Probably gotta hit him low, but, [shoot], I ain’t gonna shy away from the contact.”
Tags: Carlos Rogers, CarlosRogers, DeAngelo Hall, DeangeloHall, LaRon Landry, LaronLandry, redskins @ giants, Redskins@Giants, steve jackson, SteveJackson
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