At the time, it didn’t even register as a footnote in the game summary.
With the already injury-plagued 2009 Houston Texans missing their starting running back, and losing quarterback Matt Schaub on the first series of their Dec. 6 road game against division rival Jacksonville, the status of a rookie corner from New Mexico probably really wasn’t that newsworthy, anyway.
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But that’s the last time that Glover Quin failed to take the field for his team.
He has never missed a start for the Detroit Lions, where the free safety has been an extension of the coaching staff on the field for every one of the 64 games in his four-year tenure.
That dependability and durability is a large part of the reason that the Lions announced they’d signed him to a two-year extension, worth a reported $13 million, at the start of this year’s training camp.
It’s also a little bit of the risk.
But it’s a risk well worth taking, considering how much Quin means to a defense that is extremely young, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
“He’s one of those guys that does everything the right way. He’s outstanding, just in terms of his preparation, his off-the-field — on the field, obviously, he’s tremendous,” Lions head coach Jim Caldwell told reporters after Sunday’s practice sessions. “He’s like having another assistant coach out there on the field. He just does all the little things. Glover’s very conscientious, and sets a great example for the other guys.”
His teammates were ecstatic for him, pointing to the value of his leadership in explaining why the extension was so well-deserved.
“He’s a staple on the defense,” said linebacker Tahir Whitehead, one of just two defenders who has longer tenure on the team than Quin. “He definitely gets guys lined up on the back end, communicates extremely well, able to get everyone on the same page.”
“He’s a great leader in our locker room,” said wideout Golden Tate, who said Quin still “runs around like he’s 23.”
But that’s just it.
He isn’t.
The safety is 31 years old now, and will be 33 by the time the extension runs out.
In NFL terms — especially for a defensive back, where you can only cover up so much declining speed and agility with savvy — that’s positively ancient.
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Quin doesn’t feel that way, at least.
“Body-wise, my body feels good. Playing safety, being able to play smart, being able to use your brain a lot more, cause a lot of times people move to safety later in their career to add a couple years. So to be already at safety and not having to make that move, as long as I can still catch the ball and read and move, I feel like I can play for a good bit,” he told reporters during minicamp, intimating that he felt he could maintain his current high level of play for three or four more years.
“Thirty-one as a safety, you’re kind of probably in your prime because you’re kind of seeing the game like a quarterback now. Quarterbacks really hit their prime 28, 29, 30, 31, cause now they see stuff so much differently. Safety, you’re kind of seeing it the same way.”
Certainly the Lions hope he can maintain that level of play through the length of the new deal.
They’re also probably knocking on wood that his amazing durability continues.
His streak of 116 consecutive starts — dating back to that early December matchup vs. Jacksonville his rookie year — is the longest among NFL safeties, and second-longest among all defensive backs in the league.
Last season, he was one of just three NFL defenders to play every one of his team’s defensive snaps (1,027 in Quin’s case), according to research on ProFootballReference.com, and he’s missed just 140 of a possible 4,149 defensive snaps (3.4 percent) in his four years with the team. No Lion defender has played more snaps over that span.
And the law of averages says that probably isn’t going to last.
At some point, the injury bug catches up to everyone, and that’s increasingly likely the further a player gets beyond the plateau of age 30.
Is it possible that Quin plays quite a bit less during that extension than he’s played so far for the Lions?
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Absolutely. It might even rank as ‘probable.’
It’s a risk worth taking, though, for a team that’s still in transition, still trying to nail down an identity. The Lions certainly haven’t created a championship culture like the one that second-year general manager Bob Quinn came from in New England, but at least they’re a far cry from the undisciplined group that Glover Quin first joined in 2013.
“Oh, man – it’s a complete 180 from the first day I got here until now,” Quin told reporters when veterans reported to camp on Saturday. “The culture around the team, the attitude around the team, the vibe around the team — totally different. Guys are totally different. Put it like that.”
Part of that culture in New England is having a locker room that’s run by the right kind of veterans, guys that do the little stuff, do things the right way.
Like Quin does.
It’s well worth investing in a guy late in his prime — even maybe right on the precipice of beginning the inevitable physical decline — if he can contribute as much to keeping the culture like that, keep it from fracturing like it inevitably did in years past, when the locker room was riven with cliques, run by guys like Shaun Rogers or Ndamukong Suh.
Even if Quin doesn’t continue to play among the upper echelon of safeties in the NFL — or even close to it — the extension will be well worth it, just to keep his leadership skills around.
