Entering contract year Shaquill Griffin says he wants to stay with Seahawks ‘forever’
Suddenly, at the elderly age of 25, Shaquill Griffin is the longest-tenured member of the Seahawks’ post-Legion of Boom secondary.
Now it’s about time for him to get paid like one of his predecessor stars in Seattle’s defensive backfield.
Griffin is coming off a season in which the rest of the NFL respected him so much they often quit throwing at him late in 2019. He earned his first selection to the Pro Bowl.
Over the last half-dozen years, coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider have given Richard Sherman plus fellow Legionnaires Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor new, rich Seahawks extensions with a year still remaining on their existing deals. That’s where Griffin is now.
Thomas is in Baltimore. Chancellor is retired. Sherman is long gone, too, to San Francisco.
His protege’s rookie contract with Seattle expires at the end of this 2020 season.
Friday, Griffin said no one from the team has talked to him about that. Not yet, anyway.
“Spoke about it with my agent, but I feel like that was a very short subject,” he said before the Seahawks’ third practice of training camp. “I never want to get to a point where I play ball (for) the money, so I didn’t want to keep that focus on that.
“It’s going to play itself out.”
Maybe so. Yet there’s no doubt what Griffin wants.
He wants to remain a Seahawk for as long as he can envision.
He wants to stay home.
He wants to remain with the team that drafted him in the third round in 2016 out of Central Florida—then drafted his twin brother Shaquem. Shaquill and Shaquem, Seattle’s backup outside linebacker, have been inseparable pretty much since birth.
“Everybody knows—the 12s, the coaches, the organization, the owners—they know I love Seattle. I love being here. It’s been a wonderful time so far,” Shaquill said.
“I’d love to be here, forever. But some things, it’s just out of your control. At the end of the day, I know it’s a business. And I can only focus on the things that I can focus on. That’s playing great and helping our teams win ball games and go to the Super Bowl.”
All signs are the Seahawks see Griffin as a centerpiece to their defense for years to come. He’s still young, and excelling at one of the most difficult positions to play in sports. NFL rules are basically written against cornerbacks, and for the quarterbacks and receivers who relentelessly attack them.
There is a generations-changing amount of money at stake here for Griffin.
The five richest players at cornerback, one of the highest-valued positions in the pass-happy NFL, earn $14-16 million per season. The richest cornerback deal is Darius Slay’s with Philadelphia: three years and just over $50 million, with $26 million of that guaranteed.
Slay reset the cornerback market with his new deal in March. He is 29, four years older than Griffin. He is an All-Pro. He has been selected for two more Pro Bowls than Griffin has played.
A true home
Griffin has found a home in Seattle he never imagined while growing up with Shaquem in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“I stayed in Florida my whole life,” he said. “Went to school at UCF. And it didn’t go as well as I thought it was going to go.”
Griffin and his brother signed with Central Florida in Orlando. Then-UCF coach George O’Leary was an old-school, in-your-face task master. Among other things, he told Griffin he had to cut his dreadlocks out of his hair.
O’Leary was also 0-8 to start Griffin’s junior season at UCF, in 2015. That’s when he resigned.
“I had some really rough coaches. Had a really rough past coming from my college days,” Griffin said Friday.
“And I came here, and found everything that I was looking for.
“At UCF, Scott Frost (now leading Nebraska) came my last year, showed me a different insight into how coaches work. Not more the call you out (by) your name. He is more of a players coach. I’d noticed I’d always been a guy growing up if you just tell me what I did wrong, I’m going to get it right. You don’t have to yell. It’s nothing like that. And Scott Frost showed me that for the first time.
“And then coming here, I felt that same vibe—just from an older coach. Pete Carroll showed me that. The love that I got out here was something that I was always looking for. You know, when you go to college you always say you are looking for a home. I found my home in Seattle, before I did in college.
“That’s why I say I love being here, because Pete Carroll and his organization is everything that I needed. I came here, the first thing he said was, ‘Be yourself. Show your personality. Let it show. You don’t have to hide it.’...
“That’s all I could ever ask for...any home where you can be yourself, that’s truly a home. That’s what I’ve found here in Seattle.”
He is more at home than any other member of the Seahawks’ remade secondary.
He is the only assured starter in the Seahawks’ secondary in 2020 who began last season as a starter. Tedric Thompson is gone, now with Kansas City, replaced by Quandre Diggs in Seattle’s trade with Detroit in October. Bradley McDougald is now with the New York Jets; the Seahawks traded him and two first-round picks to New York for All-Pro Jamal Adams last month.
Tre Flowers was again the starting cornerback opposite Griffin in Friday’s practice. But that’s only because Quinton Dunbar has yet to practice for the first time with Seattle. He was finishing the NFL’s COVID-19 testing protocol after arriving Sunday from Miami following prosecutors dropping all charges against him in his armed-robbery case. Dunbar is likely to practice for the first time with the Seahawks on Sunday, after a players day off Saturday.
The Seahawks didn’t trade with Washington in March to get Dunbar to have him sit on the bench. Coming off a career season in D.C., he’s likely to replace Flowers as the starting cornerback opposite Griffin for Seattle’s opening game Sept. 13 at Atlanta.
Dunbar’s contract is up after this season, too.
“We’ve been looking for the best secondary,” Griffin said, “and I feel like we’ve finally found that.
“We’ve got all the guys that we need. ...This defense is going to stand out this season.”
A standout 2019
The analytics folks at Pro Football Focus has a statistic they call “forced incompletion percentage.” The idea is to trim a cornerback’s statistics such as yards allowed per coverage snap and passer rating allowed by excluding passes dropped by the covered receiver and off-target throws. Forced incompletion percentage is, in theory, less dependent also on the effectiveness of the opponent, and more of the cornerback himself.
In 2019, PFF rated Griffin third in the NFL with a forced incompletion percentage of 21.4% (15 forced incompletions on 70 targets). Tampa Bay’s Jamel Dean and Philadelphia’s Rasul Douglas were the only players in the league with a higher percentage. Both of them were targeted fewer times than Griffin.
Officially, Griffin broke up 13 passes last regular season. That was up from eight in 2018.
Thing is, by the middle of the season opposing play callers and quarterbacks began avoiding Griffin and throwing to the other side of the Seahawks’ defense at opposite cornerback Tre Flowers, instead.
Griffin was on the field for 633 coverage snaps last season. Quarterbacks targeted him only 70 times, or on just 11% of all plays.
Of all the plays Griffin made on balls, particularly early last season, he did not have an interception in 2019. He has three in his three-year career.
Goals for 2020
Being in the right position and knocking down passes isn’t enough for Griffin. Nor is it enough for a Seahawks secondary that wants—needs—to seize turnovers to win.
“Now, I want to get to the point that the same passes I’m breaking up, I’m catching them,” he said. “You know, I’m not dropping them. Just making the most out of my opportunity, shall I say. So when the ball comes to me I need to be able to catch it.
“I can’t even tell you how many passes and balls I caught all this offseason. But I am hoping it comes and it shows.
“It’s cool to have more than 15 pass breakups. But you have 15 pass breakups and three or four interceptions...”
Griffin smiled and shrugged.
“...that’s a really good year.”
Another of Griffin’s goals for this year was to report to camp with better physical stamina, “to be more consistent in my press coverage.” Consistently staying in the faces of receivers and running with them off the line of scrimmage for 60, 70 plays a game as Carroll demands of Seattle’s cornerbacks requires another level of fitness. It’s a level Griffin says he needs to get to in 2020.
“So when I do get fatigued my technique starts to stand out a lot more, so people see that,” he said.
So it’s the technique, the details, the conditioning, the team winning—everything but the money for Griffin in 2020?
“I’ve seen a lot of players get caught up in, ‘I want to get paid a lot.’ And they don’t play the same,” he said. “You don’t play this game for the money. You play the game because you love it.
“So my main focus is on playing this game for the same reason I started. I love this game so much. It’s the reason why I play it.
“And I love winning.”
This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 5:55 PM.
