Pete Carroll, Seahawks owe one to Frank Wilson, the coach who moved Tariq Woolen to corner

Why stop here?

That’s what Tariq Woolen’s thinking.

Three years after his college coach turned him from a seldom-used wide receiver into a cornerback, the Seahawks’ instant rookie starter and ball thief is the NFC defensive player of the week.

That’s after the NFL’s co-leader in interceptions grabbed his fourth in four games, plus recovered a fumble, in Seattle’s 19-9 throttling of Kyler Murray and the Arizona Cardinals last weekend.

“You know player of the week, I want to be player of the month. Player of the year,” Woolen said.

He didn’t mean rookie of the year. He meant the best defensive player in football this season.

“That is just one stepping stone to reach even more goals,” he said.

Seahawks don’t have many of these

For all coach Pete Carroll’s renowned success playing rookies right away in his 13 years leading the Seahawks, the team has had relatively few honors like that Woolen just won.

He is Seattle’s fifth conference rookie of the week in the 13 seasons Carroll and general manager John Schneider have run the team. The others: punter Michael Dickson in 2018, Tyler Lockett on his way to being an All-Pro kick returner in 2016, Russell Wilson in 2012 and Doug Baldwin for wide receiver and special teams in December 2011.

They Seahawks have had only one rookie of an NFL month in the last 18 years. That was Wilson in December 2012.

Woolen is challenging Seahawks records and becoming one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL, just six games into his career. It’s just three years after he first played the position, after switching from wide receiver at Texas-San Antonio.

Turns out, being 6 feet 4 with 4.26-second speed in the 40-yard dash beats experience. Even in the NFL.

“That’s an incredible recognition,” Carroll said of Woolen as NFC player of the week. “I don’t know if anybody has produced more than he has.”

And not just this season. In recent Seahawks history.

Woolen became the first Seahawk to intercept a pass in four consecutive games since Brandon Browner in 2011. Woolen’s just the third rookie in the NFL do that since 2000. He co-leads the league in interceptions through six games with Buffalo All-Pro safety Jordan Poyer.

Woolen has in his first six NFL games doubled his total number of interceptions for his entire college career at UTSA.

“It’s crazy,” Woolen said.

Carroll and the Seahawks need to thank Frank Wilson for this.

All of this.

Frank Wilson knew ‘the prototype’

Frank Wilson was Woolen’s college coach. He and his staff recruited a tall, lanky wide receiver and all-district basketball player. Woolen ran 10.5 seconds in 100-meter track at Arlington Heights High School in Fort Worth. He wound up at the University of Texas-San Antonio, a 4 1/2-hour drive south from Woolen’s home.

Wilson had been a high school head coach in New Orleans in the early 2000s when Nick Saban was running the powerhouse up Interstate 10 at LSU. He visited the Tigers’ program often. He saw how Saban converted former wide receiver Corey Webster, former star high school quarterback LaRon Landry and others from offense to defensive back.

Landry became the highest LSU defensive player taken in the NFL draft, sixth overall to Washington in 2007. Webster was a second-round pick by the Giants in 2005. He won two Super Bowls as a Giants cornerback.

After Saban won a national title at LSU he left for the NFL’s Miami Dolphins and then to lead Alabama. Wilson became LSU’s running-backs coach and top recruiter from 2010-15.

When Ed Ogeron, a former assistant under Carroll at USC, returned home to coach LSU he took Wilson and other Tigers assistants to study Carroll’s coaching and schemes with the Seahawks. That’s how Wilson knew the way Carroll had taken converted long, Stanford wide receiver Richard Sherman and made him an All-Pro, Super Bowl-champion cornerback for Seattle at that time. He knew Carroll’s prototype was like Saban’s: tall, long cornerbacks with speed and a receiver’s background.

In 2016, Wilson was named head coach at UTSA. In 2017, Woolen redshirted his freshman year there.

He was six feet, four inches tall with a soaring vertical jump of 42 inches. Yet he barely played his first two college seasons. He had just 24 receptions his first two years.

“I wasn’t getting any playing time as receiver,” Woolen said this week. “I remember every practice I would snap at receiver and was like, ‘Dang, why am I not getting any playing time?’”

Wilson told The News Tribune Thursday Woolen was a go-route specialist, because of his blazing speed. But defenses took that away from him and the Roadrunners’ offense by playing deep, umbrella coverage with safeties over the top against UTSA.

Woolen, in Wilson’s eyes, was a one-trick greyhound at receiver — and that lone trick didn’t work against those defenses.

Late in the 2019 season, Coach Wilson took Woolen aside following a UTSA team meeting.

“Coach Wilson came to me and pulled me to the back of a meeting room and was like, ‘I know you are not happy with your playing time, but would you like to play corner? A couple of our corners are banged up right now and I feel like we can use your athletic ability on the field and not just have you sitting on the sidelines. Plus, I think you would like to play more,”’ Woolen said.

Woolen’s response?

No way.

“I was like, ‘No coach, I’m a receiver. I’ve been playing offense my whole life,’” Woolen said. “I didn’t how to really tackle anybody. I never wanted to tackle anybody and then I was always just an offensive-minded person.”

Ever the recruiter — he’s now back at LSU as the Tigers’ top one for former Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly — Wilson put a sales job on Woolen.

“We’ll do both wide receiver and cornerback,” Wilson told Woolen. “We’ll have you on defense on a couple of occasions, to play the deep ball at the end of games. It’s not a wholesale role change.

“Which, of course,” Wilson said Thursday, laughing through the phone from Baton Rouge, “wasn’t true.”

“He’s upset. He says he only knows how to play receiver. His mother, his high school coach, they are calling me saying ‘Riq’s concerned.’

“I said to him, ‘Do you trust me?...Your size, you speed, you are the prototype corner.’

“It was very conscious and strategic.”

Wilson remembers the first practice Woolen had at cornerback, the day after he told him of the switch. It was late fall 2019.

“We didn’t do any individual position or skill drills,” Wilson said. “We just lined ‘Riq up and said ‘Go cover that guy.’ It was one on one. A go route.

“He was stride for stride. The receiver looks up. ‘Riq turns back, looks up, knocks the ball down.

“We were like, ‘Yup. That’s what we thought.’”

Whatever. Woolen still didn’t want to do it.

“Whenever I went to the receiver drills, he’ll tell me to go to the DB drills,” Woolen said. “And I’ll try to go back to the receiver drills and then he’ll tell me to go back to the DB drills.”

The last game of UTSA’s 2019 season was Woolen’s first at cornerback. The Roadrunners’ tall number 3 was credited officially with two tackles in a 41-27 loss to Louisiana Tech in Ruston.

“I was just following. Wherever the guy went, I would go,” Woolen said of his first games at corner. “If it was a Cover 3, I was just bailing anywhere, not knowing if it was in a zone and I would just do it.”

Wilson told his UTSA assistants at the end of that 2019 season: “If he buys into this, he’ll be a pro.”

“Now, did I think he’d be starting year one in the NFL and possible be a candidate for rookie of the year?” Wilson said Thursday.

“No, I can’t say that.”

But Wilson said he knew Woolen would “blow away” NFL scouts and teams at the league’s scouting combine in Indianapolis after his final UTSA season. That was this past March.

He did. Woolen ran the 40-yard dash in a jaw-dropping 4.26 seconds.

Carroll couldn’t believe it. He’s since said, about 10 times, he’s never seen a man so tall run so fast.

Speeding to interceptions

The speed is why Woolen is co-leading the NFL with four interceptions. Two of the picks have come when he’s left his man he was covering outside to steal the ball from unknowing receivers inside.

This month at Detroit he raced the other way with an interception for a touchdown. Two games ago Woolen broke onto an outside, comeback route by New Orleans’ Tre’Quan Smith faster than quarterback Andy Dalton could throw the ball to him. Smith had a look of shock when Woolen zoomed in front of him to pick off that pass.

Last weekend, on fourth down in the fourth quarter of Seattle’s game against Arizona, Marquise “Hollywood” Brown tried to do what the fastest veteran Seahawks DK Metcalf and former U.S. track Olympian Marquise Goodwin could not do on any day of training camp this summer: beat Woolen deep on a sprint, go route.

It was like the one he did on his first rep at corner at UTSA.

It was like Sherman has been mentoring Woolen to defend during the legend’s visits to the Seahawks’ mock-game scrimmage in August and practices last month.

Like Metcalf and Goodwin, Brown failed. Woolen ran with the Cardinals’ receiver, leaped over him and intercepted the pass from Kyler Murray. That sealed the Seahawks’ 19-9 win — and added to the legend of the freakish rookie the Seahawks call “The Avatar.”

“He’s special,” Seahawks defensive coordinator Clint Hurtt said.

Woolen still texts and talks regularly with Wilson. Wilson is again the running-backs coach and assistant head coach for an LSU team that is 5-2 and hosting seventh-ranked Mississippi on Saturday.

“I thank him,” Woolen said. “And I’m just thankful for the whole position change.”

Wilson is enjoying his Sundays watching from LSU as Woolen wows the Seahawks and the NFL, at the position the ol’ UTSA coach saw all along.

“I’m tickled about the success that he’s had,” Wilson said. “I see Richard Sherman shouts him out. And I see ‘Riq is still so...innocent. He’s just always smiling.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” his former coach said, laughing.

“He doesn’t know how hard this is to do what he’s doing.”