Teicher: Chiefs have failed to turn a corner...

[DaWolf]

Chiefs have failed to turn a corner

Drafting and converting safeties has met with little success

By ADAM TEICHER
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The Kansas City Star

The top four Chiefs cornerbacks have something in common other than sharing a load of criticism after allowing one big pass play after another last season.

Each in some point of his career played safety. So perhaps it's not coincidence with free-agency set to begin next week the Chiefs are desperate for competent corners.

They are almost certain to sign a cornerback in free-agency to be a starter. The Chiefs also may draft one in an early round in April.

William Bartee, Dexter McCleon and Julian Battle all played poorly last season. Eric Warfield was the only corner the Chiefs could count on, and even he took a long time to develop after playing exclusively as a safety in college at Nebraska.

It's been the subject of some discussion at Arrowhead Stadium recently and takes on a new dimension now that Randy Moss has been traded to Oakland and will play twice against the Chiefs next season:

Is it time for the Chiefs to find cornerbacks to play cornerback?

“What you'd like to do is have corners that have played corner,” said Lynn Stiles, the Chiefs' vice president for football operations. “That's something I've discussed with (defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham). We've talked about it in depth. Just because a guy has the physical attributes to possibly play the corner position, it doesn't happen overnight, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all.”

Much has been made of the Chiefs' inability to grow their own quarterback, but their cornerback drought is now becoming prodigious, too. The last cornerback to be drafted by the Chiefs and go on to a good career was Dale Carter, their No. 1 pick in 1992.

Carter played mainly safety in college at Tennessee. Perhaps emboldened by that success, the Chiefs began drafting a flurry of college safeties with the intent of making them into NFL cornerbacks.

It started with Jerome Woods and Reggie Tongue, their top two picks in 1996. Both flunked the test and were returned to their more natural positions.

The trend continued with Warfield and later Bartee and Battle. Each split time between corner and safety in college, Bartee at Oklahoma and Battle at Tennessee. At the time they were drafted, some NFL scouts believed the Chiefs made a pair of steals. Others thought both players would make better NFL safeties.

McCleon was signed as a free agent two years ago after playing a lot of safety for two seasons with the Rams.

This may be at the root of the Chiefs' problem.

“It's really hard to get a guy to switch and have him learn a new position in the NFL,” said Russ Lande, a former scout with the Browns and the Rams who now runs an Internet scouting service at www.gmjr.com.

“When I was with the Rams, the rule of thumb was that if you were projecting the guy to switch positions in the NFL, he was really a second-day pick, unless he's the rare guy who is an awesome athlete, and there are very few of those. It's such a risk. You're basically taking a guy and telling him to learn a new position while trying to cover one of the top 60 wide receivers in the whole world. That's hard to do.

“It's a big jump to take a kid who (in college) just played deep and had to help over the top and then ask him to play man to man and jam a guy in the face and stick with him and run.”

Woods can speak for that. The Chiefs' No. 1 pick spent his entire rookie season, by his term, “lost'' at cornerback even though he played a little of the position in college at Memphis.

“I still remember my first meeting with (then-coach) Marty Schottenheimer,” Woods said. “He said my body frame reminded him so much of Albert Lewis. He said he didn't care if I got beat every down because he was going to leave me at corner.”

The Chiefs gave up on the experiment the next year, and Woods went on to be a solid free safety. But he remembers the difficulty of trying to learn a new position in the NFL.

“If you're going to make that transition, it's going to take you three or four years,” he said. “Dale Carter is one of the exceptions, but anybody else, it's at least three or four years.

“At safety, you're always taught to look at the quarterback. You can get good breaks on the ball that way. At corner, they tell you to always look at your man. You can't look at the quarterback. If you're looking at the quarterback, it's going to be a long day.

“That was the hardest thing for me to do. It's a hard habit to break. It's a process. You won't break it overnight.

“I have admiration for Eric Warfield because he did it. But look how long it took him to make that transition. He took a long time breaking those old safety habits. The coaches used to remind him all the time not to look back at the quarterback. He finally mastered the technique.”

The slow pace of development for Bartee and Battle has been similarly frustrating for the Chiefs, Both are good athletes with the necessary skills.

Bartee is many times in position to make a play but often fails to react to the ball.

“Had he played another couple of years at corner at Oklahoma, it would have helped him in the process of making that transition,” Stiles said. “It's not something that you snap your fingers and it happens overnight. It takes time and sometimes it may never click. You just don't know.”

Battle has made little if any progress since joining the Chiefs two years ago. He tends to use his hands rather than rely on his athletic ability in coverage. His performance was so disappointing to the Chiefs that a lot of his playing time last season went to Benny Sapp, a rookie free agent.

The Chiefs don't want to give up on Battle too early and watch him blossom for another team.

“We have to be careful to take into account that process he's going through,” Stiles said.

***

In one sense, it's difficult to blame the Chiefs if they've overreached to find good cornerbacks. They're hard to find, and the best go early in the draft.

Lande predicted among this year's cornerback crop that only Adam Jones of West Virginia, Antrel Rolle of Miami (Fla.) and Carlos Rogers of Auburn are capable of playing well as rookies and only seven or eight will eventually become solid NFL starters.

All will be snapped up within the first two rounds. So, particularly if they sign a veteran cornerback, the Chiefs may go the safety route again in the draft.

“It all depends on what the need is,” coach Dick Vermeil said. “If you need a guy now, you'd better not take that approach. If you have a solid starting core and you need to rebuild for the future with youth to play a year or two down the road, then you can consider the ability of the athlete in the draft and project a safety going to cornerback.

“If there's a shortage at any one position, you'd have to say it's great corners. The rules have made it tougher to be evaluated as a great corner. They haven't changed the rules but they're calling them different.”

That's a complicating factor as the Chiefs determine exactly how to proceed. The NFL's crackdown on illegal contact downfield changed the nature of the cornerback position. Coverage was made more difficult, and Vermeil said illegal-contact penalties were up 58 percent from the season before.

“It's a lot harder to be the shut-down corner that everybody talks about, a guy who gets up in a receiver's face and presses him all over the field,” Stiles said. “(Denver's) Champ Bailey is arguably one of the best shut-down cornerbacks in the National Football League. Yet certain teams had pretty good success against him one-on-one. Eddie Kennison did for us.

“It's really a dilemma these days how to use your secondary and specifically your corners because of the new contact rule. There's the old theory of bend and don't break, where you play your secondary like an umbrella and you can cover the whole field that way, but they're going to complete some passes on you if you do. You can try to come up and hit those receivers and knock the ball loose. It probably works in favor of having fewer penalties, but it may not be as efficient in terms of shutting the offense down.

“I'm not sure exactly what the answer is.”

It may mean that getting the elite cornerback is not as essential as it once was. The rules emphasis might have leveled the field, making a cornerback with lesser skills almost as valuable as a premier player.

Given the way their corners were burned and the way Cunningham prefers to play coverage — in the receiver's face all over the field — the Chiefs have a hard time believing that.

“There's no substitute for having great corners,” Vermeil said. “Everybody plays more than one coverage. If you're (predominantly) zone, you still play some man. If you're (predominantly) man, you still play some zone. Sooner or later, you're going to play some man-to-man coverage. The more skilled your cornerbacks are, the more you can do.

“Press coverage has been challenged by the new emphasis. That's something we like to do. We got burned sometimes and got called for penalties sometimes.”

***

The Chiefs aren't the only NFL team to try converting safeties into cornerbacks. Many starting NFL cornerbacks played at least some safety in college.

But the best cornerbacks have always been cornerbacks. So the Chiefs may be guiltier of the practice than most.

“Organizations tend to fall in love sometimes with athletes,'' Lande said. “They see a guy working out and running fast and jumping high, and they start believing they can teach him to play cornerback rather than relying on what they see on film or what he did in college. That's usually a pretty big risk.”