"I like the number 2, because it gives me a whole lot to do," Justin Tryon said. "I can duck under, I can stay inside of the wedge, I can hit the wedge ... I just have options. I like to keep my options open."

Lorenzo Alexander, one-man-gang and special teams ace, has a lot of strong opinions about this kind of thing, and he was explaining them to me during open locker room. "I've played the 5 and the 3," he said. "I like the 3 a lot better because the 5's get doubled in traffic, and at 3 I'm mostly gettin' manned. Most of the time I'm bigger and stronger than the guy, so I can use my athletic ability to get him off me, throw him away."

"I like the 4," Blades -- who has the locker next to Alexander -- chimed in.

Alexander pointed at Blades. "I'll tell you what he likes: he likes to let me and Mike [Sellers] run down so he can make all the plays. That's what he likes about the 4."

"Hey, I beat my one-on-one man and then hide behind Big Mike," Blades clarified. "But I do gotta beat my guy Then just follow these two."

Fred Smoot's locker is in this corner as well, and usually this is the point in the story where he would end things with some kind of amusing, "I'm-from-Mississppi" rambling. But Smoot's still not speaking publicly, so it was Devin Thomas who spoke up from a few lockers away.

"If you wanna know who the real hero of the kickoff return team is," he said, "it is I. Because when these guys get double-teamed and held, I have to make the heroic tackle to save the day. I'm the 1."

Alexander rolled his eyes. "He's the safety," he said.

"The last defender!" Thomas proclaimed.

Blades clarified: "Those are the fast unphysical guys," where by "unphysical," he can be understood to mean "not as hit-crazy as a linebacker."

"The 1 has the most dangerous job," Thomas said, sticking to his guns.

Alexander was incredulous. "Dangerous?"

"I'm talking about, you're comfortable, everything is good, until you see that returner break loose," Thomas said. "That's when things get hectic."

"You sound just like [special teams coach Danny Smith] right now," Alexander said. "'Everything is cool until it pops.'"

"Until it pops," Thomas repeated. "And when that thing breaks, you gotta be there, and you gotta make the tackle. You're the last line of defense. I don't come up on the coverage stat sheet too much, and when I do, it's not good. It's not good when I gotta get a tackle."

For example: one of the crucial plays in Sunday's game against Carolina. Immediately following Clinton Portis's third quarter touchdown run, Panthers return man Kenny Moore fielded Shaun Suisham's kickoff at the 5-yard line and took off, weaving his way a momentum-swinging 55 yards before narrowly being forced out of bounds by Thomas.

I asked Thomas to take me through the play from his point of view.



"We'd seen the same return earlier," he said, "but this time he acted like he was gonna go across the field, so guys started biting in and he busted back outside. Once he was back outside, guys got sealed; they double-teamed a couple of guys -- there could've been a couple of calls on the play, but they didn't call anything." He shrugged as if to say, hey, this kind of thing happens and it's our job to deal with it.

"I'm on the backside," he continued, "so my job is just to keep everything from inside out. I can't let anything get outside of me. Since the ball was kicked to the opposite side from me, I make the field half and half and keep the returner back on my left. When I saw him wiggling and going back to hit the sideline, I just had to cut him off and knock him out."

And believe it or not, despite tilting both the momentum and the field in favor of Carolina, this play showed up as a positive grade for Devin Thomas.

"I did exactly what I was supposed to do," Thomas said, without any of his characteristic bravado. "I got, you know, commended for it when we studied the film. Sometimes you have to slow up to keep everything in front of you, but when something breaks, man, it's like you against the world."