I'd take me some Adalius Thomas at SOLB. That guy is a good player.
Plus... he went to school here in Hattiesburg at Southern Miss.
Here's a recent article from SI about him.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/the_bonus/11/21/thomas/index.html
Quoth the Raven
Baltimore's Thomas most versatile defender in NFL
By Peter King, SI.com
Last November, when the Ravens and Bengals met in Baltimore, Cincinnati wideout
Chad Johnson jogged out from the huddle, the only receiver split right in the formation. Johnson has seen a lot of strange sights on football fields, but none stranger than this. Walking up to cover him: 6-foot-3, 270-pound defensive lineman
Adalius Thomas. Not in double-coverage. Yes, there was a safety 12 yards behind Thomas, shading the center of the field. But make no mistake about it: Thomas, squatting there in bump position like
Deion Sanders, was going to cover a Pro Bowl wide receiver.
"What the hell's your fat *** doing out here?" Johnson asked.
Thomas can turn and run with a receiver and not be embarrassed; he runs a safety-like 4.53 in the 40-yard dash. But that's not why he was man-to-man on Johnson. Before the game, Baltimore defensive coordinator
Rex Ryan told Thomas he'd probably be lined up on the shifty Johnson once or twice when the Ravens thought that quarterback
Carson Palmer would be looking for him.
"Knock him into the Gatorade," Ryan said. "That's your job."
As the ball was snapped, Johnson tried a little shake-and-bake move to leave Thomas in the dust. Thomas, Alabama's prep basketball player of the year 10 years ago, moved like the small forward he once was, getting his hands on Johnson a yard off the line, pushing him sideways for eight yards. If there had been Gatorade three yards off the sideline, Johnson would have been knocked into it.
Last month, Ryan, sitting at the desk in his darkened bat cave of an office outside Baltimore, chuckled with pride as he watched the Johnson play on his big digital-video screen. "Look!" he yelped. "He blocks him right into the Gatorade, just like he was supposed to!"
Ryan showed more plays from 2005, when Thomas became the NFL's most versatile player. At right end against Pittsburgh, he dropped into coverage on a zone blitz and picked off a
Ben Roethlisberger pass. At defensive tackle against Cleveland, he muscled through the line to sack
Trent Dilfer. At strongside linebacker against Houston, he came in unblocked to sack
David Carr. As a Carr-spying, line-roving defensive lineman in the same game, he mirrored Carr's movements and was in the right place at the right time to collect a deflected pass and return it for a touchdown. At middle linebacker against Minnesota, he fought through traffic at the line and chased
Brad Johnson from behind, forcing a fumble that ensured a Ravens win. At weakside linebacker against Green Bay, he rushed in a bunch package from the left, recovered an
Aaron Rodgers fumble and ran it in for a touchdown. Also in that game, he had three havoc-wreaking plays at strong safety.
Secret weapon
A 270-pound man with safety speed and a running start who moves well laterally ... well, it's a weapon Ryan has never had before. "There's nobody in the league like him," said Ryan. "We're not doing this to say to everyone in the NFL, 'Hey, look how smart we are.' We're doing it because he's a destructive force no matter where we put him, and he handles every job we give him so well. It's amazing to me he's still so far under the radar."
That happens when you play on the same defense with all-world players such as linebacker
Ray Lewis and safety
Ed Reed, enter the league as a sixth-round pick, and don't have one position to call home. Thomas has played end, tackle, all three linebacker spots, cornerback and strong safety in the same game several times since Ryan began deploying him all over the defense when Lewis and Reed simultaneously missed five games with injuries last year.
"This sounds crazy," Ryan told his defensive staff last October, and then detailed to the coaches how wanted to use Thomas as a hybrid safety/linebacker (he called it "Steeler Backer" in the game plan before an Oct. 31 contest at Pittsburgh) to take advantage of the speed and physicality they were missing with Lewis and Reed out.
Necessity may have been the mother of invention for this back-to-the-NFL-in-the-'50s plan, but it's turned out to be brilliant. In the 13 games since Thomas began playing all over the defensive landscape, he has 119 tackles, 14 sacks, three interceptions (one returned for a touchdown), eight pass deflections, three forced fumbles and three fumble recoveries (two returned for touchdowns).
One more positional oddity: Not satisfied with playing seven defensive slots, Thomas has been lobbying coach
Brian Billick to line up at tight end, one of the three positions he played in high school. "I'm thinking about it," Billick said earlier this season. "If we have an injury there, there's a chance I could do it."
A quick study
In this NFL age of specialization -- five NFL teams carry two kickers, one for kickoffs, one for field goals, at least half the teams employ a run-stuffing defensive tackle who might only play on first downs -- Thomas is certainly the most versatile defensive player in football. He led all NFL defensive players with 1,162 snaps played in 2005, including special-teams downs.
In recent years, two offensive players come to mind that match his versatility: New England's
Troy Brown, who played cornerback and wideout for the 2004 Super Bowl Patriots; and
Kordell Stewart, the former Pittsburgh quarterback who doubled as a running back and wide receiver. And though many players have been hybrid defensive ends and outside linebackers in recent years (Cleveland's
Willie McGinest and
Greg Lewis of the Cowboys are among any to shift seamlessly between end and 'backer), no player lines up across from the left tackle and the wide receiver ... on the same series.
Recently, Thomas sat in a Baltimore steakhouse and considered the confluence of events that led to his stature as the toughest player to define in football. There were the injuries to Reed and Lewis and free safety
Will Demps last year, the outside-the-box thinking of his defensive coordinator (son of the iconoclastic
Buddy Ryan), and the fact that Thomas is a classic tweener-always thought to be too big for outside linebacker, too small to be a full-time defensive end.
Thomas now sees the irony of his football lot in life. When he lasted till the sixth round of the 2000 draft out of Southern Miss, being a tweener hurt him. Now being a tweener has made him one of the most valuable players on maybe the league's best defense. "It's fluky," he said, and then put his steak knife down. He hadn't thought about it like this before. "Just fluky. Ed and Ray get hurt. Opportunity knocked. Who's going to open the door? When I broke into football, my attitude was, 'The more I can do, the longer they'll keep me.' Now that's really helped me. I feel like I'm preparing to play every position every week."
Here's an example of how Thomas prepared for an Oct. 1 game against San Diego. Usually, Thomas will spend about 90 minutes home-schooling himself Wednesday through Friday -- studying his linebacker responsibilities on Wednesday, safety duties on Thursday, defensive line stuff on Friday. He tweaked that a little bit for this game, because the game plan had him focusing so heavily on tight end
Antonio Gates and the Chargers' running game. He spent 90 minutes Wednesday night studying video on his portable DVD player at home, preparing to play the three linebacker spots, studying Gates in particular because Ryan planned to have him jam the all-pro tight end often during the game. "He's a great route-runner, and you won't have success against him unless you jam him," Thomas said.
On Thursday, he studied the Chargers run game from the linebacker, strong safety and defensive tackle spots -- the three places in this game plan he was likely to line up on run downs. "They count on number 86 [288-pound tight end
Brandon Manumaleuna] for a lot of help in the run game, and use two tights a lot," he said.
On Friday, Thomas studied
LaDainian Tomlinson for nearly two hours. "What I learned is how physically strong he is, and how the only way teams stop him is by gang-tackling," he said.
"We call him 'The Coordinator,'" said Ryan. "Because he knows everything about our defense. He knows every position. Nobody in the league is asked to do as much as he is."
The game plan worked brilliantly against San Diego as the Ravens stifled the Chargers' explosive offense, holding them to 284 yards in a 16-13 victory. Thomas had five tackles and Gates was held to four catches for 41 yards and no touchdowns.
It's fitting that Thomas, a married father of two, does nearly as much off the field. "I love learning," he said.
A chess neophyte when he got drafted by the Ravens, he embraces the game now and hosts an annual tournament for Baltimore-area students at the Ravens' practice facility each year. He's adopted an elementary school and makes weekly appearances there, mentoring at-risk kids. He's rehabbed homes in Baltimore for Habitat For Humanity. He interned with U.S.
Rep Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) in 2001; he's politically alert, and not afraid to express his views, which makes his a rarity in the NFL.
"What's the Iraq war all about?" he said, his voice rising. "If it's about oil, just say that. Don't give us this Weapons of Mass Destruction crap when all you find is three firecrackers."
"You get a little fired up about that," he was told.
"We all have brains," he said. "We should use them."
In life, and in football, Thomas gets a lot of use out of his.
