Inside Virginia Tech CBs mentor Derek Jones’…

Derek Jones has prolonged been thought of 1 of the most revered DB coaches east of the Mississippi from his highly thriving tenure at Duke where lots of imagined he could be the successor to David Cutcliffe. Jones is again on the East Coast after a pair decades at Texas Tech as the Hokies’ cornerbacks coach in what is certainly a adjust of surroundings.

On the other hand, what has not transformed is the cheetah mentality that he has carried with him from Durham to Lubbock and now to Blacksburg engraining that into the players he coaches and setting up a fraternity of types of all the DBs that he is coached, a great deal of whom have reached the NFL.

So what particularly is the Cheetah mentality, and the model & fraternity that it is turn out to be? Derek Jones spelled out it to me a short while ago in the course of Media Day starting with his insights on the cheetah and his fascination with his beloved animal from childhood.

“Cheetah has usually been my most loved animal. When I was a child, large amount of persons had been observing cartoons on Saturday morning and I was making an attempt to observe Countrywide Geographic. Usually fascinated with the animal and as I received into the coaching job, a great deal of the features of a cheetah are incredibly similar to the attributes of a defensive back again. The velocity, the adjust of direction techniques, the eyesight. And even when you glimpse up the makeup, defensive backs are not the sizing of lions and tigers, they are far more the dimension of cheetahs,” Jones reported.

“In all probability the most intriguing portion about is it’s both equally predator and prey. It has to hunt in purchase to endure, and it’s quite equivalent to remaining out on an island by yourself, you both make plays or you will not, and if you present any indications of weak point, they are heading to come at you yet again. Extra than anything at all, just the mentality of the animal is a thing that has fascinated me.”

The cheetah manufacturer commenced when he arrived at Duke as the DBs mentor back in 2008 when the Blue Devil program was in terrible condition to say the minimum.

“So when I obtained to Duke College, they had won, I feel, 10 games in 8 decades. There was no one who experienced performed in the secondary, or far better nevertheless on defense, that was in the NFL. So I desired to build some thing to give the men an…