JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- We all know the scenario. You're dozing off late at night on the couch, the television on in the background. You're fighting sleep, and your significant other nudges you, jarring your senses:
"Get up and go to bed." That's not what Maurice Jones-Drew hears when he's nudged.
His goes like this: Get up and go to the chamber.
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| Maurice Jones-Drew lacks only a classic NFL running back body. (US Presswire) |
It's part of the regimen that makes Jones-Drew, the Jacksonville Jaguars running back, one of the game's best. He spends his nights breathing pure oxygen, which he said helps in a big way.
"You feel extra energy when you get up after sleeping in there," Jones-Drew said. "You can sleep five, six or seven hours and you feel so revived."
And how does his significant other take sleeping alone?
"She's been with me since I was first playing," he said. "She knows I do what I can to make sure I'm doing my best."
That's not all he does. Jones-Drew uses yoga, massages and cold tubs, and he brings his own food to the team facility every day to help keep him going. It's always fish and vegetables. No red meat. No sweets. Not fatty garbage.
"I know what it takes to keep this body going," he said.
And, believe this, it's going. Jones-Drew is having a Pro Bowl season. He is tied with Carolina's DeAngelo Williams for fourth in the league in rushing, each with 860 yards. Jones-Drew also has 12 rushing touchdowns and 32 catches and is tied with Minnesota's Adrian Peterson and San Francisco's Frank Gore for second in 40-plus rushes with three. Tennessee's Chris Johnson leads with six.
That program he uses to sculpt his body should have a name like this:
How a Little Man Plays a Big Game, Thanks to Dedication and Discipline.
Translated: He loves the game.
Jones-Drew plays it with a passion. After Seattle blew out the Jaguars 41-0 on Oct. 11, Jones-Drew went off in the locker room to the media. He challenged his teammates. He also said the team needed to run the ball more. Some took it as his asking for the ball more, which would have been OK. He is the team's main offensive threat. When he said it, he didn't come off as a me-first player, because he isn't that but some took it that way.
"If you look at the story, it said we need to run the ball more," Jones-Drew said. "Not me run it more."
Maybe so, but I think he meant himself, and that's what you want from the great competitors.
This is indeed one. He has to be, being undersized in a league of players who seem to keep getting bigger and bigger.
Jones-Drew is listed at 5-7, but that's on his tiptoes. I see eye-to-eye with him and I'm not 5-7. That's what makes him so endearing to fans and the many kids who send him loads of letters saying he is a role model for them, especially the smaller ones.
That size might also be what makes him so good. It's hard to get good hits on him. He's short, but at 210 to 215 pounds he's also powerful. You don't see square hits on him, and that leads to him popping out of piles for big gains, many times playing now-you-don't-see-him to now-you-do as he waltzes in for a score or rips off a big gain.
"You never want to get hit flush," he said. "You don't want in-your-face hits."
For three seasons, Jones-Drew was a backup to Fred Taylor. There were questions whether he could be a feature back. Was he a third-down, spot-back novelty or a guy who could handle being a 20-plus-carry back?
We know now. He has 169 carries, including a 33-carry game against St. Louis one week after the Seattle loss. He also caught five passes that day, giving him 38 touches, the most for any player in a game this season.
But when the Jaguars gave him a four-year contract extension for $31 million last spring -- which included a $17 million signing bonus -- doing so even though he had one year left on his deal, it opened the team up to criticism. Why now?
That led to this exchange between Jones-Drew and me last spring during an interview.
Me: I would have made you wait to see if you could do it as a feature back before giving you the extension.
Jones-Drew: They were smart. It would have cost them more if they waited.
He was right. I was wrong.
He is every bit the feature back.
"I knew what my role was here with Fred," Jones-Drew said. "I got the chance to learn from one of the greats of all time. Do you know how many guys would like that chance? I took everything I learned from him and applied it to what I'm doing now."
He is a little man football-wise, but he carries a big chip on his shoulder. It wasn't as obvious during our latest interview, but it's there. The reason he wears jersey No. 32 is because all 32 teams passed on him in the first round. That's built-in anger.
The Jaguars took him in the second round, No. 60 overall, after four backs went in the first round. Those four were Reggie Bush (Saints), Laurence Maroney (Patriots), Williams (Panthers) and Joseph Addai (Colts). LenDale White went at No. 45 overall.
Jones-Drew has more total yards (7,083) and touchdowns (52) than any of them. He is second in rushing yards among those backs with 3,393 yards, which trails Williams (3,593).
"We're all trailing Joseph Addai," Jones-Drew said. "He has the [Super Bowl] ring."
That's what Jones-Drew wants most. But you can also tell he wants the acclaim. Bush got most of it in college when they were cross-town rivals, Bush at USC, Jones-Drew at UCLA. Bush went second overall; Jones-Drew went late in the second round.
Jones-Drew brushes off the talk of a rivalry between the two, but it's evident it's there. Doesn't it have to be? When Jones-Drew went on his locker-room rant earlier this season about the team not running it more, he said he was the second-highest paid "decoy" to Bush. Zing.
"People who compare us don't realize that we're not the same kind of back," Jones-Drew said. "We have completely different styles. We do different things."
Yeah, he can run inside and outside. Bush runs outside, and barely at all inside.
That ability to power inside has helped make Jones-Drew a touchdown machine. His 52 touchdowns are second most to LaDainian Tomlinson's 66 since the start of the 2006 season. But he scored once every 16.9 touches, while Tomlinson scored once every 18.9 touches.
"Touchdowns are more important than yards, aren't they?" Jones-Drew said.
They count more. He's fine in yards, too. His 5.1 per-carry average this season is impressive. And his 22.1 average when he ran for 177 yards against the Tennessee Titans on Nov. 1 is the highest in the last 50 seasons (minimum eight carries). It's the touchdowns that make him a fantasy football favorite.
That's why he apologized after last Sunday's victory over the New York Jets for taking a knee at the 1 instead of scoring a touchdown late, for clock management reasons. The Jaguars opted to run the clock down to three seconds and kick a field goal, rather than score a touchdown and play defense.
Don't fret, fantasy owners. He'll get you more. His style of running is perfect for scoring touchdowns. His in-game demeanor helps. He talks a big game and admittedly turns into a different person, a nasty one.
"It's a violent game and you have to play it violently," he said. "When I was playing Pop Warner, I helped a player up. My coach told me not to do it because he was your enemy. You can be sportsmanlike, but I don't help the opponent up and I don't want them helping me up."
If scoring touchdowns is an art, he is a heck of a portrait painter.
"Does he have a great knack for scoring touchdowns? Yeah, more than any guy I've ever been around," Jaguars offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter said. "I went to my son's game, who is 10. He's running for the corner of the end zone and here comes the guy at the angle right at the cone, and my son stands straight up and the guy blasts him 20 rows up. The knack is if a guy's got the right angle on you, you're either going to go down low or you're going to go over the top; you're going to find a way."
You'll see Jones-Drew disappear into a hole, pop out and then score, following that up with one of his many dances. He's been finding a way to the end zone since he first donned pads. Along the way, he's heard plenty of talk that he wouldn't be able to do it because he was too small.
He can't. He can't. He can't.
Those words were a constant beat in his head -- a motivating tune.
"At first you hear it so many times you get sick of it," he said. "But the reality is they can't do it, so they wonder how I can. They don't have the want-to that I have. I've shown I can do it."
In the process, he's proven those who questioned him wrong -- including some of us who weren't sure he could be a feature back.
