Peppers adds spice
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – To many people outside the Carolina Panthers, nothing Julius Peppers does is good enough.
Carolina’s standout defensive end never has enough sacks, never gets enough pressure, never makes enough big plays to satisfy his critics. So, by many counts, this season has been subpar.
“It’s so hard for Pep because once you start to do big things, the expectations keep growing and growing and growing,” defensive end Mike Rucker said Thursday. “It gets to the point where the expectations are unreal. He had a good year, but people always want more.”
Peppers will get a chance to turn it up a notch Sunday when the Panthers play the Chicago Bears in the NFC divisional playoffs. He’ll be playing on a bigger stage, with a larger audience and have the opportunity to prove if he’s one of the best defensive ends in the NFL.
His teammates insist that he is. They also marvel at a level of athleticism that they predict will one day revolutionize the position.
But Peppers’ rivals seem nonplussed. A week ago, the New York Giants’ Osi Umenyiora said Peppers and Rucker weren’t any more than the second-best defensive end tandem in the NFL behind Umenyiora and Michael Strahan.
Peppers said he doesn’t care what others think.
“I feel like I am the best anyway, regardless of what anybody else says,” he said. “That’s just how you’ve got to be. It doesn’t matter what everybody else says.”
Statistically speaking, Peppers wasn’t the best this year. His 10 1/2 sacks this season tied him for 11th best in the NFL, and was his lowest total since he had only seven in 2003.
It still earned him a trip to the Pro Bowl – an honor partially voted on by fans – but he missed out on the All-Pro team after making it in 2004. Dwight Freeney of Indianapolis and Umenyiora both beat him for All-Pro.
“There’s only two spots for All-Pro and there are guys out there that had numbers better than mine,” Peppers said. “If that’s what makes All-Pro, just stats and things like that, then I guess two other guys had better numbers than I did.”
Peppers is a firm believer that too much emphasis is placed on sacks, and few people outside Carolina’s locker room recognize the other things he does for the defense.
He still had 70 tackles, 34 quarterback pressures and four pass deflections while playing for part of the season with a cast on his hand and a sprained ankle. But because he went six games before notching his first sack, he spent the first two months of the season hounded by criticism over a perceived lack of production.
“Sacks are such a little part of what we do,” Rucker said. “Anybody could put up double-digit sacks if all your defense does is bull rush the quarterback on every play. But that’s not what we do and that’s not what we ask of Pep.
“There’s so many things that people don’t see. They didn’t see him in Eli Manning’s face over and over against the Giants, forcing him into bad throws. All people see is sacks and that’s just not something we spend a lot of time focusing on.”
Carolina defensive coordinator Mike Trgovac noted that Peppers is still young – this was only his fourth season in the league – and that he has to fight through double and triple coverages to get to the quarterback.