Oregon junior safety T.J. Ward effectively introduced himself to Duck fans with a 10-tackle, two-forced-fumble performance Saturday against the California Golden Bears.
Of course, with a team-high 61 tackles on the season, a team-high three forced fumbles and second-best six pass breakups (to Jairus Byrd’s nine) and an interception, you should probably have been familiar with him already.
Still, many weren’t, and understandably so, as Ward is the newcomer in a defensive secondary full of big names and highlight-reel plays.
But Ward was the highlight reel Saturday, and his impact on the defense can no longer be ignored.
He came like a battering ram and with perfect timing, to separate Cal wide receiver Verran Tucker from his helmet and the ball, came streaking in from behind to strip speedy Jahvid Best of the ball at the end of a long run, and combined with senior rover Patrick Chung and senior linebacker Jerome Boyd on a hit that would send Cal quarterback Kevin Riley to the sidelines wondering where, and who, he was.
And that was just the first quarter.
“I thought his game at Cal was maybe the most physically dominant game I’ve seen here in a long, long time. I don’t know if we’ve seen those kind of hits, those kind of separating people from the football and difficult tackles … He struck people and knocked them to the ground,” said Oregon head coach Mike Bellotti in his weekly press conference.
“T.J. has played well all year. He just had the opportunity to make a lot of plays and he made them,” said secondary coach John Neal. “I’m not surprised at all. T.J., almost since the day he came in, has been a playmaker and a really good football player.”
Don’t feel too bad if you were one of those who hadn’t sensed this performance coming from Ward, though. Ward said even his dad, a former NFL safety for the 1980 NFC Champion Philadelphia Eagles, was surprised.
“Sometimes I think I surprise him a little bit with my play. After the game he was like, ‘I knew you were good, but wow,’” Ward said. “I got that from a lot of people, though, after this weekend. I guess it was an eye-opener.”
But you didn’t need to be Ward’s position coach or his father to know something was coming, as he was outstanding last season in his role on kick coverage teams. He was almost always first to the ball and often came flying toward it with reckless abandon.
“T.J. Ward was one of the best special teams players in the conference last year. He led our teams in tackles. He was a guy people had to double-team every time and he still made tackles,” Bellotti said. “He’s now been able to transfer that to defense. Early on he was the question mark of the defensive backs in that he had not played a great deal.”
Despite his newcomer status to the starting lineup, whether Ward could make the transition from special teams standout to secondary stalwart was something Neal had no doubts about.
“He was one of the best kickoff cover guys I’ve ever seen,” Neal said. “When you can make plays on a kickoff cover team you’re going to make a lot of plays on defense. That’s a really hard skill, to figure out all that stuff with all the people and space that’s involved and the bodies flying around. When you’ve got a knack for that you’ve got a knack. That’s something that’s a gift, like having great hands or something. It’s been there, it really has, and now it’s coming out.”
And that gift for sniffing out the ball and making the big hit would have probably made him a household name already were it not for the repeated injuries to his left knee Ward has had to overcome, Neal said.
Ward walked on to the team his freshman year after not being recruited at all out of high school because of a knee injury suffered just three games into his senior season in California’s vaunted De La Salle high school football program. He had been to Eugene several times for track meets in high school and several of his high school teammates were coming to Oregon to play football, so he took a leap of faith in his ability to walk-on at Oregon and it paid off.
Unfortunately, the knee injury continued to haunt him, setting him back twice more in his time as a Duck before coming into this season fully healthy for the first time since high school.
“He’s never given up. He’s endured when a lot of people wouldn’t,” Neal said. “We’re talking about a guy who has overcome three major knee injuries. To play at the level he’s playing at is a testament to the kind of courage and will that he has.”
Now, as Ward begins to step into the limelight, he and his coach can put those setbacks into perspective.
“I told him four years ago that he would be the best player of that (De La Salle) group,” Neal said. “I reminded him of that on the sideline at the Cal game when I saw him starting to play like I expected him to play and we laughed about it. It was pretty cool.”
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