GREEN BAY, Wis. – Jaire Alexander was a second-team All-Pro in 2020. The arrival of Rasul Douglas to the Green Bay Packers took his game to even greater heights.
Alexander sustained a serious shoulder injury in Week 4 of the 2021 season. In desperate need of another cornerback to bolster a roster that was good enough to reach the NFC Championship Game in 2020, general manager Brian Gutekunst made one of the all-time great practice-squad raidings by swiping Rasul Douglas from the Cardinals.
Douglas intercepted five passes in just 12 games, starting with the game-saver in an upset win at then-undefeated Arizona.
Alexander took note. Eventually, a bond was forged between a great player and an unexpectedly great player.
“I came up to him and I said, ‘Man, that was a prime-time play,’” Alexander, thinking back to the Arizona game, said last week. “A few weeks later, he catches a pick-six against the Bears, and I said, ‘You’re a prime-time player, and I respect that.’ See, the thing is, is respect. If you play well, you will gain respect. From Rasul, the way he stepped up that year and played, he gained all my respect, so I couldn’t wait to play with him.”
They played together for one game in the 2021 playoffs, then throughout the 2022 season. While the Packers didn’t reach the playoffs, let alone make a run to the Super Bowl, they combined for nine interceptions.
“I couldn’t wait to be on the field with him, because it’s much more enjoyable to play with somebody who you respect their game,” Alexander said. “He had five interceptions. I never had five in my whole entire career, so I’m like, ‘Damn, how you get five?’ I’m asking him like, ‘Yo, what’d you see? What’d you see on this play? How’d you know this was about to happen?’ Through that, we gained a relationship.”
Well, Alexander had five interceptions last season, matching his career total from his previous four seasons.
“We just started talking over film,” Douglas said of their conversations in 2021. “I’d be like, ‘Ja, this is a dig.’ He’d be like, ‘How in the [heck] did you know it was a dig?’ And I’d be like, ‘Bro, he told us the split and this route means that route.’ He’d be like, ‘You need to show me what you mean by that.’ I’d give him a play and then I’d send him 10 other times they did the exact thing from the same formation.
“He watches film different. Ja, he’s a man-to-man guy so he’s just watching whoever he’s going to be guarding. If it’s Justin Jefferson, all he wants on that tape is Justin Jefferson. He’s not watching [Adam] Thielen or nobody else.”
So, Alexander and Douglas shared how they studied. It worked. Last year, they combined for nine interceptions, with two apiece during the four-game winning streak that got them to the brink of the playoffs. They were the only tandem in the NFL in which each player had at least four picks.
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