Seahawks’ DK Metcalf: ‘A young man who is committed to being one of the best of all time’
DK Metcalf now swims, thanks to Russell Wilson.
He golfs, too. This summer, the receiver and his quarterback took breaks from their private football workouts and swim lessons in Mexico and San Diego. Wilson kept calling the 22-year-old Metcalf “Little Tiger.” As in, Tiger Woods. That was for Metcalf’s prodigious drives. His short game, though, isn’t legendary.
They also shot hoops. Metcalf was a dunking basketball player at Oxford High School in Mississippi.
Metcalf also has been ... a blocker on kickoff returns?
It’s true. The Seahawks don’t want to think where Metcalf, Wilson and their No. 1 offense in the NFL might be right now had Metcalf never been a blocker on kickoff returns.
It’s created the chip Metcalf is carrying on his massive shoulder while he bulls through the league.
Seattle’s freakishly athletic wide receiver is wowing the NFL — and dominating defensive backs — in his second season. At age 22, he and teammate Tyler Lockett share the league lead with seven receiving touchdowns. Metcalf is second in the NFL in yards per catch (18.9). He’s fourth in yards receiving (680) and yards per game (97.1). He’s by far the least-experienced among the league’s top five receivers statistically through eights weeks of this season.
Metcalf enters Sunday’s test for his NFC West-leading Seahawks (6-1) at AFC East-leading Buffalo (6-2) coming off the best game of his career: 12 catches in 15 targets by Wilson, for 161 yards and two touchdowns.
It came a week after Lockett had a career-best 15 catches in 20 targets from Wilson, for 200 yards and three touchdowns. That was because Arizona decided to have their best cover cornerback, Patrick Peterson, shadow Metcalf.
“They really have to pick their poison,” Metcalf says of opposing defensive play callers.
Indeed, Metcalf is a (literally) large reason Wilson and Seattle’s passing game are becoming so difficult to defend.
“He’ll be able to do it all,” Wilson said Thursday of what’s ahead for Metcalf in his career. “I think he’ll break records. ...
“He’s one of the best receivers in football (already), without a doubt.”
The motivation
How did all that production by a physical marvel who runs a 4.3 40-yard dash and jumps out of stadiums last through two full rounds of the 2019 NFL draft?
Back to those kickoff returns.
Two years ago, Metcalf was not just a star receiver for his hometown University of Mississippi. He was also on the Rebels’ kickoff-return team. During a kickoff at Arkansas on Oct. 13, 2018, he suffered a cervical fracture. His head snapped back while blocking for a teammate’s return.
“I got hit under my chin,” Metcalf said Thursday.
In the hours and days after the injury ended his college career, a doctor told Metcalf his NFL career was over, too—before it ever started.
He had a scary brace strapped around his immobilized neck. He had an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. Intravenous tubes and wires crisscrossed into and around his chiseled, previously NFL-bound body.
“I cried,” Metcalf said last year. “Because football was taken away from me at that moment.”
So that was it. He’d dominated the Southeastern Conference for years at Ole Miss. He had been expecting to be a top draft choice in the NFL. He’d thought he was about to follow his dad, Terrence Metcalf, an offensive lineman who played 78 games for the Chicago Bears from 2002-08.
He spent the next week contemplating life without football for the first time.
“I was just going to focus on getting my degree and finishing school,” he said.
Then he got a second opinion. Noted neurosurgeon, Dr. Kevin Foley, based in Memphis, told Metcalf he could play football again — but only after a tricky surgery to repair his neck.
Six months later, some teams had him way down or even off their draft boards because of the surgery.
Yet he was a first-round talent. He had an Incredible Hulk physique, with next to no body fat. He was a pre-draft internet sensation for workouts — and shirtless pictures.
He famously walked into a meeting with Coach Pete Carroll and the Seahawks’ decision-makers at the NFL’s annual scouting combine in Indianapolis in early 2019 with his shirt off, after being asked.
Carroll famously matched him.
More than advertised
The Seahawks, with Doug Baldwin about to retire, couldn’t believe their fortune to find Metcalf still available at the bottom of the second round in the April 2019 draft. They eagerly traded with New England to get back in Round 2 and select him.
He was supposed to be a one-dimensional receiver. Ole Miss used him primarily on go routes to out-jump overmatched college defensive backs; his teammate A.J. Brown, now with the Tennessee Titans, got the NFL-style game tape full of various routes and roles. But in Metcalf’s first NFL minicamp he floored Seattle’s coaches with his polished routes and nuanced moves on cornerbacks.
He impressed Wilson with speed and agility and his fiendish work ethic, a daily desire to get better. He incessantly asked questions, seeking to learn more.
“But, ultimately, at the end of the day, you have to have want-to,” Wilson said. “If you have the work ethic every day and the mentality every day, then great things are happening, especially if you match that up with his kind of ability.
“I’m glad we’re teammates and also friends. Because I love who he is as a person, too.”
Coordinator Brian Schottenheimer said the biggest growth in Metcalf’s game from year one to two has been his advanced knowledge of Seattle’s offense. It’s allowing Schottenheimer to use him in varied roles all over the field.
That makes him nearly indefensible.
His size makes him a perfect “X,” split-end receiver on the line. But Schottenheimer also puts Metcalf off the ball as a flanker. He’s sometimes in the slot. He’s been in bunch formations. He’s often the lone receiver away from three receivers to the other side, drawing man-to-man coverage.
In other words, he’s become a match-up nightmare beyond his 6-foot-4, 229-pound body.
“What’s different from this year to last year is our ability to move DK around,” Schottenheimer said.
“We can do so much more with DK now.”
Metcalf believes his settling and rise in Seattle was by design. He believes his falling to the bottom of the second round, after the entire league chose 63 other players instead of him, is a design by a higher power.
“Looking back? It was a blessing in disguise, as I like to describe it,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to go in the first round for a reason. Probably because I wasn’t going to work as hard if I’d gotten drafted in the first round or earlier in the second round.
“It allowed me to come in here with a chip on my shoulder and just to realize what it felt like to be an underdog in the NFL.”
He said getting drafted in the first round might have changed more than just his approach to football.
“But probably my approach to life,” he said. “I probably would have taken this opportunity for granted.
“It was just a blessing in disguise. God put me in this position. He made me wait until the 64th pick just to be placed in this organization. With Russ. With Pete. With Tyler. Duane (Brown). Bobby (Wagner). All the great players and great people who are in this organization.”
He not only plays beyond his years. He talks like it.
Yet just when the Seahawks believe Metcalf can’t be still just 22, he pulls boyish tricks — like the one he did following practice Thursday.
Schottenheimer was conducting his weekly Zoom call with the media just off the team’s indoor field. Metcalf was walking past. He began messing with and heckling his play caller from off screen.
The coach stopped a response, mid-sentence. He turned to his right.
“DK,” Schottenheimer said, playfully while throwing his hands up, “I’m doing a meeting right now. Leave me alone.”
It sounded like a father who was reminding his young man he was, in many ways, still a boy.
Yet on the field, he’s far beyond that.
“All I’ve ever seen,” said Schottenheimer, who began coaching in the NFL 24 years ago, “is a young man who is committed to being one of the best of all time.”
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 6:46 AM.
