Patriots Blog: Belichick On Cunningham's Production
FOXBORO (CBS) - Jermaine Cunningham has had all the skill and potential but he has never seemed to reach it. Well finally the Pats are starting to see what they thought was there when they drafted him. This offseason, Jermaine worked and spent most of the time in the gym and on his technique. He won one of the Patriots 2012 offseason training awards and now coach feels he's playing up to his ability. Jermaine has become a match-up nightmare.
"When you move players around, you create different match-ups. You just create a different match-up, get one of our productive players on the field, and fortunately he was able to make a couple big plays for us," Belichick said. "The holding penalty he got on the quarterback draw was a big play, he knocked the quarterback down, got a couple pressures, made a couple plays at end. Try to get our productive players on the field and create some different match-ups for the offense to worry about."
Jermaine has been productive in the preseason games and also in the first game of the season. Bill Belichick believes all the offseason work is finally paying off.
"I think one of the things that affected Jermaine, like it did a lot of players, is not really having the offseason that he had this year," he said. "He didn't have that opportunity prior to the '11 season, and after the '10 season, at the end of the season, he had surgery on his shoulder, and that limited his offseason that year too. One of the things that's really helped Jermaine this year was right from the beginning, leaving at the end of last year when he was on IR, he trained very hard, he worked hard on all the aspects of his physical conditioning, strength, explosion, flexibility, all that. He had a real good offseason, had a good spring, that offseason led into a good spring, a good spring led into a good training camp, good training camp led into some production in the preseason and the first regular season game."
