RENTON, Wash. — Richard Sherman is embracing all of the attention, eating up the spotlight and basking in the unexpectedly humbling support from the likes of baseball titan Hank Aaron.
The brash Seattle Seahawks All-Pro cornerback also understands he is getting a full film inspection from Super Bowl opposition Peyton Manning.
“It’s as if he’s an offensive coordinator out there,” Sherman said during a scattershot media session at Seahawks headquarters Wednesday. “At any given time, he can change any play, any protection, any scheme.
“Schematically you kind of notice what a team is going to do in the first couple of drives in a game. Teams don’t just change their offense in the second half and run totally different plays now. They may run a play that they have found successful multiple times, but with Peyton, he’ll find a weakness in a defense, he’ll attack it in four, five or six different ways.
“He’ll attack it with the curl, the dig, he’ll throw an out to Wes Welker, and they’ll attack the out and up. He finds so many different ways to attack you, so once he finds a crack in the armor, he continues to nick at it until he makes it a hole.”
Quarterbacks aren’t attacking Sherman much at all this postseason. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the San Francisco 49ers avoided throwing in Sherman’s direction all day until the ill-fated pass into the end zone in the fourth quarter of last week’s NFC Championship Game, which Sherman batted away for an interception.
Outside the team facility, Sherman might look like an easy target. He invited the heat, he confesses, for his postgame tirade to FOX sideline reporter Erin Andrews. Sherman said he could have shown more maturity.
He also believes strongly that the thousands of people offering opinions — some directly to Sherman — on his antics could take a bit of their own advice.
“This was on a football field. I wasn’t committing any crimes or doing anything illegal,” Sherman said. “I was showing passion after a football game. I didn’t have time to sit there and contemplate about what I was going to say, but the people behind computer screens had all of the time in the world to contemplate everything that they wanted to say and articulate it exactly how they wanted to. Some of it, I’m sure they’re pretty embarrassed about.”
In terms of on-field preparation, Sherman realizes the challenge Seattle’s top-rated defense, and top-rated pass defense, face in Manning’s Broncos. Denver owns the No. 1 offense, a record-setting group that averaged 37.9 points in the regular season and smacked the New England Patriots in an AFC Championship Game many predicted would be tightly contested.
Broncos Pro Bowl wide receiver Demaryius Thomas is as unique a package as Sherman and his fellow Seattle defensive backs. Thomas led the team in receiving and has size, speed and power in excess. The Broncos have another big receiver with wheels, Eric Decker, and slot receiver Welker can be an impossible one-on-one matchup.
Denver utilizes a bunch formation — two receivers at the line of scrimmage and one at least 1 yard behind. The tactic can be effective in getting receivers into their routes without being jammed at the line of scrimmage by hyper-aggressive coverage defenders. That accurately describes the entire crew in the Seahawks secondary.
“Wellm there are different ways that you can counter it,” Sherman said. “A lot of the times the middle linebacker will go bone speed is what they call it, which is pretty much he’ll look up the Wes Welkers of the world or Demaryius Thomases just to combat that if we’re running man coverage. That’s what the Patriots did from time to time, that’s one of the ways you could do it or sometimes you just have to slip screen and fight.
“Sometimes it’s just a battle. You’re going to win some and you’re going to lose some. It’s a race, it’s a battle, that’s how football is. Man to man, that’s all man to man is. You go out there, they’re running a race route, and it’s a race route. You’re racing, they’re racing, you have to stay away from the pick and still make a play on the ball. This is football.”