Trapped inside their own 5-yard-line, Haines City coach Jake Chapman was out of options. His starting quarterback was injured. His backup wasn’t ready. As Chapman saw it, he had one choice. Give Derwin James the ball, and trust he’ll make something happen.
James had a long track record of such wizardry in Haines City, Fla., where his peewee football team once went seven years without a defeat. It was obvious even then that James was a natural with the ball in his hands, bursting at the seams with raw talent. But Chapman had already considered carefully every option for how to deploy his star senior. He decided to keep James at safety, where Florida State had recruited him. He wanted to be fair to the kid. He didn’t want to put too much on his plate.
But as the season wore on, James forced his way onto the field at other positions, his role constantly shifting and expanding with the game plan. It didn’t seem to matter where he played or how many roles he was given. “He always just knew what to do on the field,” Chapman says.
This ever-changing role would be a promising precursor to the positionless future that awaited him in the NFL, where he has had made his mark all over the field in just his first season, catapulting into Rookie of the Year contention on a Chargers defense that has weaponized his versatility.
As the Chargers face the Chiefs on Thursday in a crucial AFC West showdown, James leads all NFL safeties in sacks (3.5), while also leading the Chargers in tackles (88), interceptions (3) and pass deflections (12). In a banner season for offenses across the league – the most prolific of which resides in Kansas City – James has already checked all the boxes of the prototype modern defender, a 215-pound, heat-seeking missile complete with shutdown-cover skills, capable of impacting the game at every level.
For James, the boundaries of standard positions have never seemed to apply. On any given night at Haines City, he might man a deep zone, play in the box, rush the passer, or cover a team’s best receiver 1-on-1, all while returning kicks and punts. Sometimes, when they needed a big play on third down, James would even prod Chapman to let him play wideout. “I’ll go up and get it, Coach,” he’d tell him, and Chapman usually obliged, knowing James was often his best option.
Still, to Chapman, quarterback always felt like a bridge too far. “He cannot throw to save his life,” jokes Ryan Pynes, a childhood friend and former Haines City quarterback. “It’s one of the only things he can’t do.”
But on this particular night, James didn’t wait for Chapman to ask. He sidled up next to his coach, apparently reading his mind. “Coach, I’ll go out there for you,” he said.
Moments later, James stood in a shotgun set, his toes creeping just over the end zone line. He didn’t know the plays, but it didn’t matter. As James took the snap, he hesitated, looking right, then left, before taking off as if fired from a cannon. He juked one player, then another. He shrugged away arm tackles and high-stepped down the sideline, as if he was floating across the grass. After almost 50 yards, James was finally pushed out of bounds.
It still wouldn’t be enough to save Haines City, as his brief cameo at quarterback came up short of the goal line. (He did, however, complete a pass, he points out.) But years later, in his first training camp with the Chargers, the tape of that night would resurface in the defensive backs meeting room, offering his teammates a glimpse of what everyone in Haines City had already known. It didn’t matter where you put Derwin James. His presence would be felt.
***
At heart, he’d always been a running back. That’s where Robby Pynes first deployed him all those years ago, when James joined the Haines City Rattlers at the youngest age allowed. Even then, his instincts were preternatural. Toss him the ball, give him a sliver of open field, Pynes recalls, “and he was gone, pretty much every time.”
Pee-Wee rules dictated that no player score more than twice in one game, so coaches made contingency plans for James’ dominance. “Pooh Bear,” as he’s known around Haines City, would often score twice in his first couple carries. “We’d still give it to Pooh,” says Ryan Pynes, who quarterbacked the Rattlers, “but every time, they told him to just run the ball out of bounds at the 5-yard line.”
He always seemed to have a ball in his hands. Every morning before school, James and his friends would try to squeeze in a quick game during the spare few minutes they had at the bus stop. Routinely, it was James who would convince their bus driver to wait until the next touchdown was scored before leaving.
“We were late a lot,” James says, grinning.
He was only moonlighting on defense then, but contact was something he already seemed to welcome. After one late night of playing football, a young James was riding back on his bike when he collided with a car at an intersection. He would need staples in his head, but remained undeterred. It was the first of three occasions James was hit by a car on his bike – twice, by the same car. Each time, he brushed it off, no worse for the wear.
As he grew older, the Rattlers grew into an unstoppable Pee-Wee powerhouse, winning Super Bowl after Super Bowl. Before long, word spread of how electrifying James was with a ball in his hands. “All the little kids then, all they’d talk about was how they want to run the ball like Pooh Bear,” Ryan Pynes said. The raves barely registered on his radar. “You could’ve put him at center, and he would’ve been happy.”
Still, nobody would’ve guessed then that James’ football future would take him away from the ball. But that trajectory changed before eighth grade, when he moved to Jacksonville with his father for the summer.
He didn’t know anyone in Jacksonville. “All I had were weights and the beach,” James says. So every day for those three months, he used the old weight set in his father’s garage and ran mile after mile through the sand, pushing himself unlike he ever had before.
By the end of that summer, when James stopped by the Pynes’ house, he looked considerably different than he did just months earlier. “He seriously had a man’s body with a baby face,” Ryan says.
He recalls James pointing to their bench press, where 200 pounds were on the bar. That was easy, James told him. Pynes, who was a year older, laughed. “Add another hundred,” James said, smiling.
No part of him believed his friend could even lift the bar off his chest. But there he was, barely in the eighth grade, bench-pressing 300 pounds to prove a point. To this day, as James has skyrocketed to stardom first at Florida State and now in Los Angeles, that moment is still seared into his memory. As he set the bar down, James smiled. The awe on his friend’s face was all the confirmation he needed.
***
It wasn’t until the Chargers were officially on the clock with the 17th overall pick in last April’s draft that the defensive coaches gathered in Gus Bradley’s office began to truly believe that James had fallen into their laps. But since he was hired as a quality control assistant just two months earlier, Addison Lynch had prepared them for the slim possibility, anyway.
America, meet Derwin James.
(And RETWEET to give him your #ProBowlVote) pic.twitter.com/kPg7eNooNv
— Los Angeles Chargers (@chargers) December 3, 2018
Lynch had spent the past seven years in Tallahassee, the last few of which meant a front row seat to James’ rise. He watched closely as Florida State brought him along slowly, even as he forced coaches to create special defensive packages to use him. That slow development, as he saw it, allowed James to flourish in ways he might not have otherwise – like, as a pass rusher. “Then, once he got ahold of everything, we just let him loose,” Lynch says.
In Los Angeles, the Chargers planned to follow a similar approach, bringing him along slowly, trying him at several different positions, before unleashing the versatile weapon they’d envisioned. They were certain James could do everything he’d done at Florida State.
“We’re thinking, ‘Well, he can fit this role, but he can also fit this role and this role and this role and this role,’” Lynch said. “It kind of spiraled. We just had to hold ourselves back, to try and spoon-feed him and not give him too much too fast.”
But naturally, James accelerated that timeline on his own, as he has so many times before. Since working his way into the starting lineup before the season opener, James has excelled in every position the Chargers have put him – of which there have been quite a few. He’s played at least 40 snaps in five different positions, according to Pro Football Focus, and his dominance is hardly contained to the role listed on the Chargers roster. As a pass rusher, his productivity rate is the highest in the NFL, regardless of position.
“This guy, he’s got different tools than a lot of players do at this level,” Chargers defensive backs coach Ron Milus says.
With so many tools, the question has always been how best to use them and when, but now, as James enters the final weeks of his rookie season on a statistical pace equal to some of the great safeties to ever play in the NFL, perhaps, it’s time we put those concerns to rest, once and for all.
His transition has been smoother than anyone might’ve imagined. As the final stretch of the season approaches, there is no holding James back any longer, as every Sunday, his role changes, based on matchups, and still, James thrives, just as the Chargers predicted, just as those in Haines City had seen years ago.
“I’m like a coach’s best friend, man,” James says. “Wherever you need me to go, I’ll go.”
