Relentless Seahawk Michael Jackson’s fire? It’s from being doubted. And it’s for his kids
This is Michael Jackson.
This is why Pete Carroll loves the relentless cornerback the Seahawks almost have to play.
The 71-year-old coach and former (way back) college defensive back said in the beginning of the summer Jackson was Seattle’s best player during offseason practices.
“Michael Jackson has had the best camp of anybody,” Carroll said in June,, after Jackson had bodied up hulking Seahawks receiver DK Metcalf and stayed with ultra-quick Tyler Lockett. “He had a great (mini)camp.
“He stepped up to the challenge of it, had just a really productive, almost a dominant camp for us.”
Jackson read that. And he seethed.
He was offended.
It was another opportunity for his unique self-motivation.
“Me, I just read ‘almost,’ he said two months later during Seattle’s ongoing training camp. “I didn’t even think ‘dominated.’”
Jackson doesn’t “almost” anything. Everything is to the max.
“Guys on the team, DK (Metcalf), Geno (Smith), (Tyler) Lockett, Riq (Woolen)...those guys dominate,” Jackson said, continuing to explain why his coach’s intended compliment rubbed him wrongly. “So if I want to be on that caliber, the next time he talks about it me it needs to be like, ‘Dominated.’
“Not ‘almost dominated.’”
What fuels the rugged, 6-foot-1, 210-pound Jackson’s constantly burning fire?
In his four seasons in the NFL, he’s been cut four times. That included twice in two months his rookie season by the team that drafted him, the Dallas Cowboys in the fifth round in 2019. The 26-year-old former University of Miami Hurricane has being traded, from Detroit to New England. He’s been on the practice squads of four teams in his first three years, including the Seahawks.
Seattle signed Jackson to its practice squad in September 2021, two days after the Patriots released him at the end of that preseason.
But all that isn’t the catalyst for Jackson’s drive that Carroll rewarded this time last year. The coach made him the surprise starting cornerback opposite eventual Pro Bowl rookie Riq Woolen on last season’s Seahawks.
All that is not why he’s repelling heralded top rookie Devon Witherspoon, the fifth pick in this year’s NFL draft, and everyone else to keep his starting job in this Seattle training camp.
“Honestly, (it’s) my kids,” Jackson said.
“A lot of guys want to make the team for the money to play. Obviously, that’s true. For me, it was like, ‘Make the team so you can be with your kids for a (full) year.
“Last year was the first time I was with my son for a full calendar year since 2018. A lot of people, they don’t know that, they don’t think about that.”
Soon after 5-year-old Michael Jr. was born, Dad went from Dallas to Detroit in the same 2019 season. Then he went from Detroit to New England the following summer. The summer of 2021, he went from New England to Seattle.
Ryann, 2 in September, doesn’t know what her big brother does about Dad’s nomadic career until the Seahawks gave him this chance.
“My daughter, she got the good end of the stick,” Jackson said. “She came and I automatically made the team (last year).
“To me, that’s the best thing. Riding (to the stadium) on game days, I’ve got my girl (Reanna Payne) next to me and my kids in the backseat. Having my family come to the game, that’s the biggest thing.”
Jackson will not yield
After he arrived to the Seahawks in early September 2021, having just been cut by the Patriots, Jackson sat at home on his couch in his new Seattle place. He pondered what would happen if he got cut again.
“Honestly, I remember being here just sitting on my couch thinking, ‘If this doesn’t work, I have to use my degree. I don’t want to use my degree. I want to play football,’” he said. “And I had a family member pass. So I was dealing with a lot.
“’How can I just feel like I’ve accomplished something?’”
So he arrived at the Seahawks’ facility each morning at 5:30 during that 2021 season. He went onto the empty indoor practice field.
“And I just played the game,” he said.
By himself, at dawn on the Seahawks’ empty field, he imagined the formation of the offense Seattle was playing that week. He envisioned the splits the receivers were taking from the formation, whether he was on the line of scrimmage or off. He created down-and-distance scenarios, different pass routes, whether he was in press-man coverage or off in zone. Drive on the dig route. Jump the out route. Body up the fade route.
“I’d been practicing for two years. But I hadn’t played a game,” Jackson said. “So for me, it just felt good. I accomplished something. I came, I got work in. I envisioned me making plays.
“(Then) it finally happened.”
Jackson called it his way to say “even-keeled” and not get discouraged.
“Because being on practice squad,” he said, “it’s tough. ...That was my way to keep working.
“And it worked out.”
Gloriously.
But not until after he got challenged yet again.
Last year, the Seahawks drafted major college football’s top cornerback, 2021 Jim Thorpe Award winner Coby Bryant from the University of Cincinnati. They signed veteran cornerback Artie Burns, a former Pittsburgh Steelers first-round pick. They drafted the freakish, raw Woolen, a college wide receiver a few years ago, from the University of Texas-San Antonio. Two of those three appeared to be destined to be the Seahawks’ starting cornerbacks for 2022.
Jackson crashed those plans. He started all 17 games.
They were the first 17 starts of his career.
“For me, it was big, because it just showed ‘Bruh, you can play in this league,’” he said.
“Being on the practice squad all those times I really prayed, ‘Man, just give me a chance.’ Then when I got my chance, I did it. The biggest thing I love, as the season went along you just saw my confidence go from ground zero to the sky.
“I feel like I need to build on that.”
This offseason, the Seahawks passed on mammoth needs on the offensive and defensive lines and drafted the brash Witherspoon, regarded as one of the top two cornerbacks in this year’s draft. He, not Jackson, was immediately anointed around the Pacific Northwest and league as the Seahawks’ new starting cornerback opposite Woolen for 2023.
After all, they wouldn’t use the fifth pick of the draft, a generational choice and their highest of the Carroll/general manager John Schneider era, on a cornerback yet not start him.
But Jackson keeps changing their plans. He’s remained Seattle’s starting left cornerback, opposite where Woolen will be once he fully returns from his arthroscopic knee surgery in May.
Jackson’s been so good, Carroll moved Witherspoon inside to nickel match-up defensive back in June minicamp and again in this training camp. It’s to see if that could be an option to get the top rookie and Jackson on the field together.
Witherspoon didn’t move Jackson. Bryant last year didn’t move Jackson.
Since Jackson won the job 12 months ago, no one has.
His reaction to the Seahawks drafting the hot-shot Witherspoon?
“He a dog. We’ve got another dog in the room,” Jackson said.
“That’s what I love, because, for me, you don’t want to look in the room and be like, ‘I’m the only dog in here.’ This is not basketball. If you have a dog at one corner, and the other three spots are weak links, we are going to be very bad and you aren’t going to be making plays.
“So you want dogs in the room. I loved it.”
Jackson’s soaring confidence
Coaches say this is the most confidence Jackson has shown in his three years with Seattle.
It’s more than a coincidence this is the most threatened he’s been since he got his starting job before last season.
“I mean, the approach that he takes to his work and his craft is second to none. He comes to work, every day, with a chip on his shoulder,” said Karl Scott, the Seahawks’ senior defensive assistant coach and defensive passing game coordinator.
“He plays like his job’s on the line. That’s the mindset he’s taken — whether it is, or not. You don’t tell him that, because that’s a good thing.
“He wants to be perfect. He wants to be challenged. He accepts challenges. That’s what you love about him.”
Scott was also Seattle’s defensive backs coach last season in his first year on Carroll’s staff. Asked what he saw in the summer of 2022 that made him see the three-year practice squad player as the team’s new starting cornerback, Scott grinned.
“See, the beautiful part about that is, those three years, I have no recollection of that,” Scott said. “Obviously, coming in here, (I was) giving an open-door challenge, he was definitely one of the guys who stepped up and took it.
“He’s definitely a guy who’s taken advantage of his situation, and not worried about anything else but: ‘How can I get better? How can I improve?’”
Jackson’s self-motivation techniques
For Jackson, Carroll’s mantra of “Always Compete!” isn’t just a sign he and his teammates tap each time they pass it going through the door from the team’s locker-room hallway onto the Seahawks practice field.
It’s his way of sticking in the NFL. How he’s been since he was growing up in his native Birmingham, Alabama.
“That’s just the number-one thing. “When you start playing this game as a little kid, whether it was running sprints after practice, you just want to win,” Jackson said. “I feel like that’s still the number-one thing, even though we’ve gotten to this level: Just have fun and compete.
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“I’m just staying true to me.”
Jackson says he plays a little game within his mind to keep his edge and competitiveness in every drill in practice. And we mean EVERY drill.
It also involves his family.
“It was a trick I learned in high school, “ Jackson, Class of 2015 at Spain Park High in Hoover, a Birmingham suburb, said. “I noticed I’m one of those people that if you tell me go run 10 sprints for me, I’m going to run them and it’s going to look good. But if you say (to yourself), ‘All right, first sprint for your grandmother. Second one is for your uncle...,’ break it down like that, (those sprints) are going to be way harder.
“It might be a drill where it, ‘All right, this drill’s for Ryann. This drill’s for (Little) Mans. Even though I may be dead tired and I covered my man and they throw it opposite corner, I’m sprinting to the hash(mark), for my daughter.
“Because at the end of the day I am playing this game for them, to make their life better.
“It’s about my dream. But it’s more important for them.”
This story was originally published August 9, 2023 at 5:01 AM.
