One of the things fans respect about pro athletes is their unwillingness to resort to excuses. Even when an excuse is obvious, most athletes will avoid it like the plague and blame themselves for not getting the job done.
In the case of veteran Minnesota Vikings cornerback Antoine Winfield, his return from a foot injury surely hasn’t gone as planned. He has morphed from a shutdown cornerback to a guy who looks tentative in man coverage and doesn’t have the closing speed he had before his injury.
To his credit, however, Winfield isn’t pointing the finger at his foot for his recent troubles. At least, that’s not what he wants you to think he’s doing.
During an interview with Vikings’ radio voice Paul Allen Tuesday on KFAN-AM in Minneapolis, Winfield said the foot is not 100 percent, and he also admitted it probably won’t be without having time to rest it this offseason. However, Winfield also called himself out.
“I’m not going to say it’s the foot,” Winfield told Allen. “It’s just me. I’m just not playing good football right now. If you turn on the film you can tell the difference in the way I played early in the year and the way I’m playing now. We don’t have enough time to play like that. I have to correct my game, get my game back right and make plays that I’m used to making.”Watching Winfield the last two weeks, it’s clear that something isn’t right. Carolina’s Steve Smith is a great receiver, and Chicago youngster Devin Aromashodu obviously has plenty of talent. That said, neither is capable of torching a healthy Winfield the way they just did.
Credit the player for not saying something along the lines of “I’m trying to play before my foot is healthy,” but it’s hard to imagine that potential NFC playoff opponents haven’t noticed this precipitous dropoff in Winfield’s level of play since he returned.
He doesn’t appear quite as physical when dealing with players in space, and his coverage is well short of his previous standards. A good example of Winfield’s struggles are three plays in Monday’s game. On two of them, Aromashodu ran right by Winfield to get open deep. Safety Tyrell Johnson was able to break up a slightly underthrown pass on the first of these plays, which happened in the second quarter. Johnson was nowhere to be found on the overtime touchdown pass from Jay Cutler.
Another telling example came on the first play of overtime, when Aromashodu caught a 33-yard pass from Cutler on a play where Winfield gave way too much of a cushion off the line of scrimmage. He wasn’t even close to being able to recover in time.
