BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Brandin Cooks averaged 16.6 yards per catch this season but about 32.6 yards per pass interference drawn. So what is his real aim when he breaks the huddle and toes the line of scrimmage?
Is it to make the big catch or is it catching a defender in the act of committing Cooks-induced mayhem, beating him with a referee’s flag more than with his own soft hands?
In some ways the answer is both. The emphasis is always on the former of course because Brandin Cooks is here to make plays but some of Cooks’ biggest this season have not been receptions. They’ve been plays like the 32-yard pass interference call he drew on Jacksonville Jaguars cornerback A.J. Bouye with 77 seconds left in the first half that handed the Patriots offense the ball on Jacksonville’s 13-yard line. Soon after the score had gone from 14-3 to 14-10. It was the beginning of the end of Jacksonville’s Super Bowl hopes.
Cooks at times seems more a master of slowing up just enough to force a defender to collide with him when Tom Brady takes a deep shot downfield than of blowing by those defenders and catching the ball on the run. To be fair, Cooks has done enough of the latter to post his third consecutive 1,000-yard receiving season and his first with the Patriots but still you wonder at times as he seems to put the brakes on and cause a collision if he’s as much about guile as glue fingers.
His 1,082 yards and 16.6 yards per catch average for a receiver new to the Patriots system has been, in Brady’s view, admittedly unusual and a welcome occurrence, though. In fact, Brady himself pointed that out yesterday during a Super Bowl media session.
“What he’s done for our team in his first year is really incredible,” Brady said. “I haven’t seen it very much from anybody (in their first season in the Patriots system) to come in and make the kind of contribution that he’s made in his first year. He does it in his own style too. He’s not trying to mimic anybody. It’s just him.”
Actually, Cooks admitted it isn’t just him. From the moment he first arrived from New Orleans after posting back-to-back 1,000-yard receiving seasons working with Drew Brees, Cooks was all ears as much as he was all hands.
He would sit with Brady and watch film, run patterns for him after practice, ask questions more often than offer opinions. That is not always the case with deep threat receivers. In general they have a diva way about them, a self-absorbed quality that often leaves them seeing things on a route the quarterback does not.
Cooks may have, at times, felt the same way early in the process of evolving into what he has become this season but from the start he understood what many of his predecessors like Joey Galloway and Chad Johnson did not. Perhaps in other places the divas sing but here they listen to someone else’s music making first.
“It was important my knowing what he wants,” Cooks said of adjusting to Brady. “Where he wants his guys to be. I wanted him to know he can trust me.”
One way to accomplish that is to make the kind of plays that give you a 16.6 yards per catch average and draw the kind of game-changing penalties Cooks has. But there is another way. One that is perhaps equally as important as making plays and being available after practice to put in the extra time that creates a syncopation between quarterback and receiver.
Maybe much of the time you just have to be quiet and listen.
“I just listen to him,” Cooks said of Brady. “If he sees it one way then that’s the way it is.”
As their connection has grown Brady has more and more seemed to take random downfield shots, lofting throws up to Cooks not only when he’s behind the defense but when he’s in position to lure that defender into the kind of critical mistake that can change a game without the ball ever ending up in his hands.
Is this happenstance or not? Cooks smiled broadly as he considered the question yesterday before saying, “It’s just all part of the game. I don’t really pay attention to (flags). Things happen so fast it’s not like you go out there and purposely try and do that.”
Perhaps so but when asked if he’s surprised when the flag comes out and the Patriots have picked up large chunks of real estate without having actually hit a chunk play on the defense, Brandin Cooks smiled again. Broadly.
“No,” he said. “I ain’t surprised.”
After one game less than a season working with Cooks, neither, it seems, is Tom Brady.
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