MAKING HIS MOMENT LAST
5-foot-8 Jaret Patterson starred in Friday’s preseason win. He’s doing everything he can to become an inspiration.
Every football summer has a Jaret Patterson, a player ignored for being too short or too slow, blazing across the field determined to run and run and run until he has proved everybody wrong. There was the Washington Football Team’s undrafted rookie running back in Friday night’s 17-13 preseason victory over Cincinnati, just 5 foot 8 and 195 pounds, diving into the smallest spaces, churning through tackles, streaking under the FedEx Field lights as if stopping would kill his NFL dream forever.
“An inspiration,” he would later say of what he wants to become, comparing himself to Darren Sproles, Ray Rice and Maurice Jones-Drew, former standout backs who were smaller in stature.
“[A] short, compact guy, that’s me. He runs hard and can make guys miss,” he said of Jones-Drew.
“Ray Rice, the same,” he added. “I feel like I can play like all three of those or even better.”
It’s a great story, the kind everyone loves. The tiniest player, overlooked in college until he made everyone notice and unwanted by the NFL, where he shoves his way up from the bottom for his childhood professional team, dazzled in his first big chance in the stadium not far from where he grew up. At FedEx Field, he rushed for 71 yards in about two quarters of work and even scored what proved to be the winning touchdown.
Patterson has had his moment. Now comes the hard part: making it last. Every training camp is filled with August stars shining in the second halves of meaningless preseason games only to be September’s cuts when the reality of being a little too short or a bit too slow interrupts their dreams with a thud.
After Friday night, after a promising camp, after many impressed nods from his teammates, how does
Jaret Patterson become something more than just another happy late-summer night in a mostly empty stadium?
Patterson, who played at St. Vincent Pallotti High in Laurel, said he runs hard “for a lot of different reasons.” He said he runs from all the voices “saying he’s too small.” He said he runs, too, from “always hearing the negative.” That’s why he wants to be an inspiration for all the other unknown, overlooked, discarded players who don’t fit some NFL scouting chart.
These things probably will serve him well. The thing is, Washington doesn’t need Patterson. It has its running back of the near future in Antonio Gibson, who has the hardto-find combination of size and strength and speed. It also has J.D. McKissic, a dependable third-down back who can make tacklers miss.
There’s also Peyton Barber, a rugged back gifted at plunging through the line when a yard or two are desperately required.
But Patterson is the kind of player who forces coaches to make hard choices. Washington could easily get by with three running backs at the start of this coming season, saving an extra spot for maybe another wide receiver or linebacker or cornerback. Keeping Patterson almost makes for a crowd in the backfield, leaving the team thin somewhere else.
And yet if he keeps running the way he did Friday and makes himself too useful as a special teams player, he might be impossible to cut because sometimes those wonderful August stories do continue into September and October and beyond. Washington’s coaches recently started having Patterson return kicks in practice. On Friday, he returned his first NFL kickoff for 37 yards, scampering around the defenders thundering down the middle of the field and making tacklers miss.
“Pretty dynamic,” Washington coach Ron Rivera said about the return.
Late Friday night, another unwanted, undrafted player who has had a couple of NFL moments of his own and seems to have found a home in Washington was talking about Patterson. Quarterback Taylor Heinicke said he can relate to Patterson as someone who has been told he’s “too short, too slow and didn’t have a strong enough arm.”
Heinicke admitted that he kept peeking after handing Patterson the ball, wanting to see what the little back would do. He could hear the buzz in the crowd each time Patterson ran and could see it in the eyes of Washington players who seemed to love the way the tiny back has shoved his way into a roster fight.
“Guys rally around undersized or overlooked guys that keep producing,” Heinicke said. “He’s one of those guys. Every time in practice or games when he’s in there, guys perk up and want to see what he can do.”oach Ron Rivera said about the return.
Rivera also said “you’ve got to be able to do it consistently” when talking about Patterson. He mentioned this not as an expression of doubt but as someone who has seen a lot of big nights in the preseason from little men.
After Friday’s game, Patterson went through a fast version of old slights: the college recruiters who never called; the fact he had to grayshirt, sitting out his freshman fall at the University of Buffalo; and how after leading all Football Bowl Subdivision backs with an average of 178.7 rushing yards per game and tying an FBS record with eight rushing touchdowns in a game, he went undrafted. It’s clear these are his fuel.
“I feel like you go through certain stuff in your life and it helps you grow as a person,” he said. “I had to learn from everything. I’ve had a lot of adversity in my life and I just had to learn from it, embrace it.”
Now, with everyone watching, the days before the final preseason game and subsequent last cuts might be the most important of Jaret Patterson’s career. The littlest back has already come further than the rest of the NFL expected, so close to forcing Washington to keep him around. He has a week to make all those picking in the draft look foolish.
The chance is there to take a great summer story and make it last. All he has to do is keep running as hard as he can.