Ultimate competitor: Ten quintessential Julian Edelman moments
Julian Edelman was, in many ways, the ultimate Patriot. Over the course of his 12-year career he embodied that which Bill Belichick has long wanted his program to be about: toughness, versatility and championship-level performance in championship moments. Now he's retiring as a Patriot and Belichick has dubbed him "the ultimate competitor."Of course, the championship moments are the ones that will be remembered most vividly. But they don't tell the entire story of Edelman's career and his remarkable rise to stardom. There were countless other snapshots in time -- in some cases, more mundane snapshots in time -- that helped define his Patriots tenure.Let's have a look at 10 of them here...
When Edelman was drafted out of Kent State, he fit what has become the prototype for a Patriots slot receiver. He was smart, tough and lightning quick with a 6.62-second three-cone time and a 3.92 short shuttle at his pro day. But he played quarterback in college. So at the time Belichick readily admitted he didn't know where Edelman was going to play.
What Belichick said after taking Edelman in the seventh round foreshadowed exactly what would make Edelman so valuable to the Patriots for so long: He'd do just about everything there is to do on a football field for them.
Belichick gave Edelman the title of "quintessential throwback player" in his tribute after the Patriots wide receiver announced his retirement.
Curran: Edelman hangs them up with nothing left to prove
It took some time for Edelman to establish himself as a wide receiver (more on that in a minute), but he burst onto the scene in his rookie preseason debut with a punt return for a touchdown against the Philadelphia Eagles.
In that moment he flashed the vision and short-area quickness that would make him such a tough cover for such a long period of time. But the brief sideline conversation between Belichick and Wes Welker -- even though Edelman was nowhere within earshot -- gave a little perspective on Edelman's mentality as a draft-day afterthought looking to carve himself a niche however he could.
It's not that Welker wasn't competitive. And Belichick knew that. Anyone with Welker's career accomplishments, coming into the league as an undrafted free agent, has to be a competitive maniac himself. But at that point in Welker's career, he was established. He'd caught 100 passes for two straight years and would be named an All-Pro less than a year later. So Edelman could have that punt-return gig if he wanted it, as far as Welker was concerned, so long as he was going to make plays like that.
For Edelman, desperate for whatever role he could earn, it was a brief indication that he had a penchant for making the most of his opportunities. Later that year he had 103 yards receiving after Welker suffered a torn ACL. After Welker's departure in 2013, Edelman became a go-to target. We know about how he rose to the occasion time and again in the postseason. We saw a little bit of that grab-the-bull-by-the-horns approach as early as August of his rookie year.
After his rookie season in 2009, Edelman took his commitment to another level. He'd heard that Tom Brady worked with Patriots receivers out in Los Angeles. Edelman wanted to be out there, too. Just in case Brady needed him.
He was a Northern California guy who hadn't been to Southern California other than to go to Disneyland as a kid, he'd later say, but he didn't care. He just wanted to be available.
He was. Brady just didn't call on him all that often. "All that often" meaning once. Maybe twice.
"Tom, I think, knew I was in town and called me, like, twice that year," Edelman later said. "Then we go to Year Four and we were going three days a week. Then I was going to get lunch at his house. Four years."
Remember Sterling Moore's pass breakup on Lee Evans in the end zone? The one that led to Billy Cundiff's shanked field goal? The one that led to the Patriots going to that year's Super Bowl? Of course you do.
Remember Edelman being on the field as a defensive back for that pass breakup? You might not. But he was out there throughout that drive, covering Baltimore's best receiver, Anquan Boldin. Edelman played 25 snaps that game and was actually credited with a tackle and a forced fumble on Boldin.
He played a whopping 120 defensive snaps that season, including playoffs, seeing as many as 40 snaps as a defensive back against the Bills in Week 17. The more you can do.
The name that Edelman tried to give to one of the most indelible moments of his career -- "Edels to Dola" -- never stuck. Shocker. But it was a quintessential Edelman moment nonetheless.
Nothing ever came easy for Edelman. It took him four years before he solidified himself in the Patriots' offense. It took the college quarterback one more year before he was finally allowed to throw a pass in a meaningful moment. And the team waited until it was on the mat in the Divisional Round against the Ravens to let him spin one. No pressure.
It was a play that the Patriots had initially unearthed for Edelman four or five years before he was ever asked to execute it.
“It was more of, we would throw it out there every once in a while in practice and if we executed it properly or if we got the look or if that defense did that, we were going to use it,” Edelman told WEEI after the fact. “We’ve had it for a little bit and the coaches dialed it up.”
With 2:20 left in Super Bowl XLIX, the Patriots turned to Edelman again in a critical moment. Unlike his cameos on defense or his perfect-passer-generating toss a few weeks prior, his game-winner against the Seahawks was classic Edelman. Whip route. Front corner of the end zone. A subtle push as he made his break toward the sideline to help him gain an extra measure of separation. The quickness. The detail in the execution of the route.
He may have only been in his second season as a staple in the Patriots' offense, but it was the kind of thing he'd been refining for five years. And it came after getting his clock cleaned by Kam Chancellor over the middle of the field. It wouldn't have meant much if not for Malcolm Butler's heroics soon thereafter, but the Patriots don't win Lombardi No. 4 without Edelman, either.
Edelman came strolling out of the Patriots locker room at NRG Stadium with a cigar in his mouth and sunglasses on. He was one of the last to leave. It was late. He was exhausted after playing 90 snaps offensively in his team's miraculous overtime win in Super Bowl LI.
Just a few hours earlier he'd told teammates that it would be a "helluva story" when they came back to beat the Falcons. Now that that story had been written, he took a quiet moment away from the hullabaloo to chat with a reporter, to take a breath, and he kept coming back to another mantra of his that day. "Gotta believe."
No kidding. Without that trademark belief in himself, there is no circus catch at midfield. There is no comeback. There is no fifth Lombardi for the Patriots. He'd believed his way into climbing from seventh-round underdog to multi-time champion and one of the faces of the most accomplished professional franchise in modern sports history.
Emotions were high, but they always were with Edelman. Helmets went flying. Eventually two of the team's best players -- one fresh off a second ring ceremony, one fresh off signing a multi-year contract with his new team -- were kicked out of practice. And not simultaneously, to ensure that the beef didn't continue during the long walk back to the locker room.
Edelman had very little to prove at that point, but that didn't mean he was above getting into it with new high-priced teammate Stephon Gilmore early in training camp. That's just who he was. There was no amount of winning that would flip that switch to the off position.
As one veteran Patriots defender said following the scuffle: "That stuff tends to happen whenever [No.] 11 is involved."
"Kent State... Quarterback... You can't make it up," Matthew Slater told Julian Edelman as they stood on a podium in Atlanta waiting to finish their season by hoisting a trophy for the third time in five years. Edelman was about to be Super Bowl MVP after catching 10 passes for 141 yards. Yet another improbable moment for a player who had stacked them for the better part of a decade at that point.
But what he told Belichick on that same podium gave some insight into how he felt about the coach who he'd aimed to please for so long.
"Coach, I appreciate it, man," Edelman said. "It was a long year. I appreciate you coach... Through all the downs and everything, man. The way you treated me through that whole thing, it was awesome. Like a fatherly figure."
Edelman was suspended the first four games of that season due to a violation of the league's performance-enhancing drug policy. It was a mistake. One that hurt the team. The Patriots lost two of those games Edelman missed to the Jaguars and Lions.
But it wasn't the kind of mistake that was going to put Edelman in Belichick's doghouse for long. He'd built up a certain level of cache to that point, whether Edelman knew it or not. "You earned it, buddy," Belichick said. "You earned it."
Edelman's legs were bad. His shoulders were shot. And yet somehow he went to Seattle in Week 2 of the team's first season in 20 years without Tom Brady, working with a new quarterback in Cam Newton, and put on a show that nearly carried the Patriots to a win no one thought likely.
Routinely beating All-Pro safety Jamal Adams down the field, Edelman finished the game with eight catches for 179 yards. It was more yards than he had in his other five games played that season combined.
On New England's final drive, he couldn't haul in a pass sent just beyond his reach over his head at the goal line, one last-ditch effort in a season that didn't last much longer for him. And when Edelman was out, even at that late stage of his career, any chance his team had of marked success seemed to go with him. That's how important he remained, even at 34 years old.
Safe to say it would have been hard to envision that kind of scenario when Edelman got his draft-day call from Belichick, the man who plans meticulously, and was told there was no set plan for him.
