Collins ready for promised Land’
Landon Collins’ next individual goal is to win the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year Award. This season. So excuse him if Tyrann Mathieu’s recent Twitter trash talk about safety supremacy fired Collins up. The Giants’ first-team All-Pro, reigning defensive player of the year finalist told the Daily News on Wednesday that he has a long memory of slights that drive him “every day” on his rise to the top.
And he intends to put the Arizona Cardinals’ Mathieu on his list of doubters who were wrong.
The list already includes voters who placed Collins a distant third (nine votes) last season behind Defensive Player of the Year Khalil Mack (18 votes, Oakland Raiders) and runner-up Von Miller (17 votes, Denver Broncos). It includes the teams that didn’t select Collins in the first round of the 2014 NFL draft (all of them).
And it even applies to voters who named Louisville corner Gerod Holliman the 2014 Jim Thorpe Award winner as the nation’s top defensive back ahead of Alabama’s Collins, the runner-up.
“It’s very realistic,” Collins, 23, told the News of becoming the NFL’s best defensive player. “It’s a dream of mine. It’s a goal of mine. I was shut out of it in college. I was mad about that, with the Thorpe Award. They gave it to some kid, wherever he came from, and I don’t think he’s doing nothing now in the league. I rightfully should have won it then, and at the same time I feel like I was robbed last year. So it’s another chip on my shoulder, just like when I came in from my rookie year, being drafted in the second round. It’s big for me.”
Holliman is not, in fact, on an NFL roster. Collins, on the other hand, is a rising star with nearly unrivaled confidence. And that’s why he started spouting off at the Cardinals’ Mathieu on Saturday night. It turns out The Honey Badger started it by implying Collins wasn’t in his class with a tweet he since deleted.
That prompted Collins to tweet “Hold all that noise” and “Better yet I’ll show you week 16,” referring to the Giants’ scheduled Christmas Eve visit to Arizona, starting a Saturday evening war of words.
“A reporter tweeted both of us and he was really giving us both props at the same time, telling Honey Badger that he has somebody — because he says he’s the best safety — chasing after his position,” Collins said Wednesday. “I didn’t think any of it, didn’t retweet it, but Honey Badger saw the tag and he tweeted both of us saying: “Man, please.” He deleted (the tweet). But I took offense to it, saying what he said like I’m not gonna take his spot (or) I’m not someone he thinks is close to him. So I was like, cool.”
Collins qualified Wednesday that “it’s all a lotta love” still between him and Mathieu because both grew up in Louisiana, where football and trash talk are second-nature, and because “I know where he’s coming from.”
“He’s just saying he’s done a lot to get in his position, and I’m gonna have to do a lot to come get his position,” Collins said. “So when we play the Cardinals, I’m gonna have to show him who’s gonna be one of the best safeties up and coming.”
But Collins and Mathieu both play defense, so the only way they could go head-to-head in Week 16 is if the versatile Mathieu stepped back to receive a punt or kickoff.