Jamar Taylor - 06/30/17 05:32 PM
Jamar Taylor has found a home as a quiet leader in the Browns secondary
By Dan Labbe, cleveland.com dlabbe@cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- When a team trades a player for a seventh round pick three years after picking him in the second round, it tells you all you need to know about how they feel about that player -- he's not good enough. That's what the Dolphins decided when they traded Jamar Taylor to the Browns on the third day of the 2016 draft following a season in which his playing time fell off of a cliff.
It's not the first time, either, that he's essentially been told he wasn't good enough. In fact, back in Pop Warner, when Taylor was just starting to play in San Diego, he says his coach told him, "You're not good."
And, if that's not enough, Taylor's father agreed with that coach.
"He wasn't very good," Taylor's dad, also named Jamar, told cleveland.com in a phone interview. "He was just an average kid on the team."
So when Taylor's dad and his dad's uncle, Raymond Mason, started coaching Jamar, they knew they had to get one of the biggest, tallest kids on the team toughened up.
"We put him at defensive tackle," Jamar Sr. said. "We felt like if we got him down on the line, that would get him a little tougher because he was just average."
Hard work paved the way to Browns for Jamar Taylor
So it's safe to say Taylor's come a long ways since those early days. His NFL.com draft profile from when he came out of Boise State in 2013 described Taylor as "not afraid to get physical with receivers, often redirects their routes with strong hands."
Those early lessons aren't something Taylor has forgotten now that he's entering his fifth year in the league and coming off of his best season as a pro.
"It's something that always resonated with me," Taylor said. "You've got to just work for what you want. Nobody's going to give it to you and if they do give it to you, it's not going to last long if you don't work hard."
They were lessons he carried with him when he arrived at Helix High School in La Mesa, California, a school that has produced a number of future NFL and professional players. It's a place where alums often come back to work out, including one by the name of Trey Young.
Trey Young U Of Montana Highlight
Young, a safety, never played in the NFL, but after his time at Helix, he was part of a Montana team that won 24 games in a row and won a national championship in 2001. He went on to play in both the Canadian Football League and the now-defunct United Football League (UFL).
It was when Young was gearing up to play with the Calgary Stampeders in the CFL that a 14-year-old Jamar approached him in the gym and asked if he could work out with him, something Young said he never had the courage to do when he was at Helix and saw older guys working out.
Mind you, this was a freshman in high school asking a player fighting for his professional football life if they could work out together.
"For me, I take it pretty serious just for the simple fact that this is my big chance to continue playing at the professional level," Young said, "and my dream and goal was to play where he is now, but I had to take the CFL route. I told him that and he said, 'I'm cool with that.'"
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It made sense because, by this time, Taylor was fully focused on football and a future in the game. He had run track, but he gave that up. When asked if he was any good in track, Taylor laughed and said, "No. I was like, this is not for me."
He also wasn't interested in playing anything other than defensive back, even though his dad wasn't exactly thrilled about it.
"Once he got to high school, he didn't want to go both ways," Jamar Sr. said, "and I said, I can't believe this kid doesn't want to go both ways because you always want to stay on the field as a football player, but he decided his craft would be playing defensive back."
So he started honing that craft by waking up at 4:30 a.m. and arriving to his high school gym to do defensive back and agility drills with Young while his head coach blared Temptations songs over the speakers. They would work out again in the afternoons.
"He just treated me like a man from that day forward," Taylor said. "'Do you want it? If you want it, I'm going to come get you, but if you don't, you're wasting my time.' I remember telling him I'm not going to waste your time."
Taylor's dad took notice.
"You can think of a lot of things that a 14-year-old could be doing, so it was unbelievable on how focused he was on football," Jamar Sr. said. "He woke up early. He did his homework. He trained football after that. It was remarkable."
Young and Taylor worked out during that offseason before Young went off to start his four-year CFL career with first Calgary and then Hamilton. It served as the foundation for Taylor getting to Boise State and then the NFL.
"I just felt like I was another piece of the puzzle trying to help and guide him," Young said. "Not to say that I knew everything, but I knew something and I passed it on to him."
Once Taylor got to Boise State in 2008, he kept on working and his dad kept on pushing.
"I believed in him his freshman year at Boise," Jamar Sr. said. "I went up there with him and I made him challenge their senior receivers and I said, Jamar, if you can cover them, you can cover anyone."
Taylor also credits Broncos secondary coach Marcel Yates, now the defensive coordinator for the Arizona Wildcats, with keeping him focused early in his college career. Taylor played as a freshman, but not as much as he'd have liked, so he spent plenty of time imploring Yates to play him more, reminding him that when he was on the field, he made plays.
"When I wasn't playing he made sure I was still in my book and stuff like that," Taylor said. He credits Kyle Wilson, too, a 2010 first round pick of the Jets who is currently with the New Orleans Saints, for doing the same, keeping him sharp mentally and teaching him how to watch film.
In 49 games with the Broncos, Taylor recorded seven interceptions, including four his senior season to go along with 2.5 sacks. He arrived at the combine in 2013 in Indianapolis and ran a 4.39 40-yard dash and bench pressed 225 pounds 22 times. It all led to the Dolphins making him the 54th overall selection.
Things never worked out for Taylor, though, in Miami. According to the Miami Herald story about the trade of Taylor to the Browns, he "battled injuries and inconsistency during his time in Miami; first a sports hernia and then a major shoulder injury.
"He fell out of favor with the former coaching staff late in the season, and hardly saw the field."
Taylor played 33 games in his three seasons with the Dolphins and failed to register a single interception or sack. He went from playing nearly every snap in the middle of the 2015 season to appearing in just one of the Dolphins' final five games that season, playing just 39 percent of the team's snaps in Week 14. He wasn't even active for three of the five games.
"I learned about the business quick," Taylor said. "From being hurt to being like we need you to play hurt because you were a second round pick to you're not going to play today or this guy's going to beat you out because of this. I learned about the business quick and I think it made me mature as a person."
On top of it all, Taylor was going through his time in Miami on the opposite side of the country from Young, whom he calls his mentor, and his family -- not that his dad and his mom, Toni, didn't try their best.
"Me and my wife, we spoke about it and we kept encouraging him and we kept faith in God and I encouraged him not to let one team or one person or anyone stop you from fulfilling your dreams and goals," Jamar Sr. said.
"Being down there by myself, it was like, I had nobody to run to," Taylor said. "I had to grow up. It was one of those things where you can either quit and they can say you were a bust and nobody gives a crap and they're going to talk about you forever, or you can step up to the plate and everybody can talk about it's the greatest story on Earth."
So Taylor and his agent were both ready to move on during the offseason of 2016 and they got their wish when the Dolphins swapped picks with the Browns in the seventh round and threw him into the deal.
Taylor took advantage of the opportunity, first competing at nickel and then playing back on the outside, putting together easily the best season of his career, appearing in 15 games, including 14 starts, intercepting three passes and earning himself a three-year contract extension worth $15 million.
Taylor has quickly established himself as one of the leaders in a young Browns secondary, though it's the kind of leadership that goes hand-in-hand with the approach he's taken to football since those early mornings with Young: show me, don't tell me.
"He's not that guy of many words," linebacker Christian Kirksey said. "He's not going to sit there and talk all day, so when he does say something, it's very meaningful."
"He is (a leader) because he is a worker," defensive backs coach DeWayne Walker said. "He is pretty soft-spoken so he really doesn't say a whole lot. At the same time, you can just see his leadership through his work ethic."
"Leaders come in different fashions," Young said. "You've got the ones that are in your face, the yellers, then you've got ones who just do their work and everybody can follow and I think that's him."
If there's any concern that Taylor might feel like he's made it now -- now that he's found a team and gotten a payday -- there are still those people in Taylor's life ready to push him, ready to keep him working and leading by example.
Young, who now coaches high school football in Seattle, checks in with Taylor regularly once he gets caught up on his most link recent game and says they talk bluntly about the games.
Then there's Jamar's dad, whom he still calls his biggest critic. They watch film together, especially when he's visiting Cleveland.
"I'll go back over the game with him," Jamar Sr. said. "We'll go over grades, what we feel like he had for that game or practice, A, B, C or D -- even F. I don't sugarcoat it. I give it to him."
"If I get out of a game and I feel good about myself, he'll be like, hey, you forgot to do this, or this one play you messed up on your press or where were your eyes at here?" Taylor said. "He's a great, great guy because he always keeps me on my toes."
That's just the type of mentality that allowed Taylor to go from just an average kid in Pop Warner to college-bound star in high school. It's the type of mentality that allowed him to weather the struggles in Miami and salvage his career in a similar down-on-their-luck situation in Cleveland. It's one of the lessons his biggest critic passed onto him back when his dad and uncle put him on the defensive line to toughen him up.
"I always told him all it takes is one coach, one person to believe in you," Jamar Sr. said, "one person to give you that opportunity and you just keep working hard at it and you're going to get it."
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By Dan Labbe, cleveland.com dlabbe@cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- When a team trades a player for a seventh round pick three years after picking him in the second round, it tells you all you need to know about how they feel about that player -- he's not good enough. That's what the Dolphins decided when they traded Jamar Taylor to the Browns on the third day of the 2016 draft following a season in which his playing time fell off of a cliff.
It's not the first time, either, that he's essentially been told he wasn't good enough. In fact, back in Pop Warner, when Taylor was just starting to play in San Diego, he says his coach told him, "You're not good."
And, if that's not enough, Taylor's father agreed with that coach.
"He wasn't very good," Taylor's dad, also named Jamar, told cleveland.com in a phone interview. "He was just an average kid on the team."
So when Taylor's dad and his dad's uncle, Raymond Mason, started coaching Jamar, they knew they had to get one of the biggest, tallest kids on the team toughened up.
"We put him at defensive tackle," Jamar Sr. said. "We felt like if we got him down on the line, that would get him a little tougher because he was just average."
Hard work paved the way to Browns for Jamar Taylor
So it's safe to say Taylor's come a long ways since those early days. His NFL.com draft profile from when he came out of Boise State in 2013 described Taylor as "not afraid to get physical with receivers, often redirects their routes with strong hands."
Those early lessons aren't something Taylor has forgotten now that he's entering his fifth year in the league and coming off of his best season as a pro.
"It's something that always resonated with me," Taylor said. "You've got to just work for what you want. Nobody's going to give it to you and if they do give it to you, it's not going to last long if you don't work hard."
They were lessons he carried with him when he arrived at Helix High School in La Mesa, California, a school that has produced a number of future NFL and professional players. It's a place where alums often come back to work out, including one by the name of Trey Young.
Trey Young U Of Montana Highlight
Young, a safety, never played in the NFL, but after his time at Helix, he was part of a Montana team that won 24 games in a row and won a national championship in 2001. He went on to play in both the Canadian Football League and the now-defunct United Football League (UFL).
It was when Young was gearing up to play with the Calgary Stampeders in the CFL that a 14-year-old Jamar approached him in the gym and asked if he could work out with him, something Young said he never had the courage to do when he was at Helix and saw older guys working out.
Mind you, this was a freshman in high school asking a player fighting for his professional football life if they could work out together.
"For me, I take it pretty serious just for the simple fact that this is my big chance to continue playing at the professional level," Young said, "and my dream and goal was to play where he is now, but I had to take the CFL route. I told him that and he said, 'I'm cool with that.'"
ADVERTISING
It made sense because, by this time, Taylor was fully focused on football and a future in the game. He had run track, but he gave that up. When asked if he was any good in track, Taylor laughed and said, "No. I was like, this is not for me."
He also wasn't interested in playing anything other than defensive back, even though his dad wasn't exactly thrilled about it.
"Once he got to high school, he didn't want to go both ways," Jamar Sr. said, "and I said, I can't believe this kid doesn't want to go both ways because you always want to stay on the field as a football player, but he decided his craft would be playing defensive back."
So he started honing that craft by waking up at 4:30 a.m. and arriving to his high school gym to do defensive back and agility drills with Young while his head coach blared Temptations songs over the speakers. They would work out again in the afternoons.
"He just treated me like a man from that day forward," Taylor said. "'Do you want it? If you want it, I'm going to come get you, but if you don't, you're wasting my time.' I remember telling him I'm not going to waste your time."
Taylor's dad took notice.
"You can think of a lot of things that a 14-year-old could be doing, so it was unbelievable on how focused he was on football," Jamar Sr. said. "He woke up early. He did his homework. He trained football after that. It was remarkable."
Young and Taylor worked out during that offseason before Young went off to start his four-year CFL career with first Calgary and then Hamilton. It served as the foundation for Taylor getting to Boise State and then the NFL.
"I just felt like I was another piece of the puzzle trying to help and guide him," Young said. "Not to say that I knew everything, but I knew something and I passed it on to him."
Once Taylor got to Boise State in 2008, he kept on working and his dad kept on pushing.
"I believed in him his freshman year at Boise," Jamar Sr. said. "I went up there with him and I made him challenge their senior receivers and I said, Jamar, if you can cover them, you can cover anyone."
Taylor also credits Broncos secondary coach Marcel Yates, now the defensive coordinator for the Arizona Wildcats, with keeping him focused early in his college career. Taylor played as a freshman, but not as much as he'd have liked, so he spent plenty of time imploring Yates to play him more, reminding him that when he was on the field, he made plays.
"When I wasn't playing he made sure I was still in my book and stuff like that," Taylor said. He credits Kyle Wilson, too, a 2010 first round pick of the Jets who is currently with the New Orleans Saints, for doing the same, keeping him sharp mentally and teaching him how to watch film.
In 49 games with the Broncos, Taylor recorded seven interceptions, including four his senior season to go along with 2.5 sacks. He arrived at the combine in 2013 in Indianapolis and ran a 4.39 40-yard dash and bench pressed 225 pounds 22 times. It all led to the Dolphins making him the 54th overall selection.
Things never worked out for Taylor, though, in Miami. According to the Miami Herald story about the trade of Taylor to the Browns, he "battled injuries and inconsistency during his time in Miami; first a sports hernia and then a major shoulder injury.
"He fell out of favor with the former coaching staff late in the season, and hardly saw the field."
Taylor played 33 games in his three seasons with the Dolphins and failed to register a single interception or sack. He went from playing nearly every snap in the middle of the 2015 season to appearing in just one of the Dolphins' final five games that season, playing just 39 percent of the team's snaps in Week 14. He wasn't even active for three of the five games.
"I learned about the business quick," Taylor said. "From being hurt to being like we need you to play hurt because you were a second round pick to you're not going to play today or this guy's going to beat you out because of this. I learned about the business quick and I think it made me mature as a person."
On top of it all, Taylor was going through his time in Miami on the opposite side of the country from Young, whom he calls his mentor, and his family -- not that his dad and his mom, Toni, didn't try their best.
"Me and my wife, we spoke about it and we kept encouraging him and we kept faith in God and I encouraged him not to let one team or one person or anyone stop you from fulfilling your dreams and goals," Jamar Sr. said.
"Being down there by myself, it was like, I had nobody to run to," Taylor said. "I had to grow up. It was one of those things where you can either quit and they can say you were a bust and nobody gives a crap and they're going to talk about you forever, or you can step up to the plate and everybody can talk about it's the greatest story on Earth."
So Taylor and his agent were both ready to move on during the offseason of 2016 and they got their wish when the Dolphins swapped picks with the Browns in the seventh round and threw him into the deal.
Taylor took advantage of the opportunity, first competing at nickel and then playing back on the outside, putting together easily the best season of his career, appearing in 15 games, including 14 starts, intercepting three passes and earning himself a three-year contract extension worth $15 million.
Taylor has quickly established himself as one of the leaders in a young Browns secondary, though it's the kind of leadership that goes hand-in-hand with the approach he's taken to football since those early mornings with Young: show me, don't tell me.
"He's not that guy of many words," linebacker Christian Kirksey said. "He's not going to sit there and talk all day, so when he does say something, it's very meaningful."
"He is (a leader) because he is a worker," defensive backs coach DeWayne Walker said. "He is pretty soft-spoken so he really doesn't say a whole lot. At the same time, you can just see his leadership through his work ethic."
"Leaders come in different fashions," Young said. "You've got the ones that are in your face, the yellers, then you've got ones who just do their work and everybody can follow and I think that's him."
If there's any concern that Taylor might feel like he's made it now -- now that he's found a team and gotten a payday -- there are still those people in Taylor's life ready to push him, ready to keep him working and leading by example.
Young, who now coaches high school football in Seattle, checks in with Taylor regularly once he gets caught up on his most link recent game and says they talk bluntly about the games.
Then there's Jamar's dad, whom he still calls his biggest critic. They watch film together, especially when he's visiting Cleveland.
"I'll go back over the game with him," Jamar Sr. said. "We'll go over grades, what we feel like he had for that game or practice, A, B, C or D -- even F. I don't sugarcoat it. I give it to him."
"If I get out of a game and I feel good about myself, he'll be like, hey, you forgot to do this, or this one play you messed up on your press or where were your eyes at here?" Taylor said. "He's a great, great guy because he always keeps me on my toes."
That's just the type of mentality that allowed Taylor to go from just an average kid in Pop Warner to college-bound star in high school. It's the type of mentality that allowed him to weather the struggles in Miami and salvage his career in a similar down-on-their-luck situation in Cleveland. It's one of the lessons his biggest critic passed onto him back when his dad and uncle put him on the defensive line to toughen him up.
"I always told him all it takes is one coach, one person to believe in you," Jamar Sr. said, "one person to give you that opportunity and you just keep working hard at it and you're going to get it."
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