Cincinnati – When does the best tight end in the NFL become even more dangerous? When he realizes there’s more to the game than looking out for No. 1.
“Maturity sets in,” Antonio Gates was saying Sunday, not long after his San Diego Chargers had won a 49-41 slugfest at Paul Brown Stadium. “You realize, as a tight end, I’ve done, statistically, basically everything that a tight end who’s ever played this game could do. I’ve scored touchdowns, I’ve caught 80-some passes in a season, I’ve caught passes for 1,000 yards. It’s all good, and individually they were all goals, but collectively, we weren’t getting one thing done.
“It’s one of those things where you have to sacrifice for the good of everybody. I want to win a Super Bowl – it’s the only thing on my mind.”
Which was why Gates was all smiles after a game that should both encourage and terrify the Broncos as they begin their preparations for Sunday night’s showdown at Invesco Field at Mile High. This despite seemingly being the only offensive player for San Diego not to score a touchdown.
As swarms of reporters gathered around rookie Malcolm Floyd from Wyoming, Gates quietly put his equipment into his travel bag, then knotted the tie on his tailor-made suit. (Memo to Larry Coyer: In your haste to double-team Gates or take Keenan McCardell out of the equation, you may want to keep an eye out for Floyd, who’s averaging a team-leading 15.3 yards per catch, with three touchdowns in 13 receptions.)
Gates reflected on an attitude adjustment that, when permeated throughout a locker room, often spells the difference between winning teams and more talented squads that are putting the footballs away come the playoffs.
“Do you want to play well?” Gates asked rhetorically. “Of course you do, but sometimes you understand, you might not play well, but you win the game – and is that more important to you than playing well and losing?
“I look at (Bengals wide receiver) Chad Johnson. He’s a (great) player and I understand where he’s coming from. He wants the ball; I understand that – trust me, I understand. But that maturity has to set in. He got all the stats he needed today, but he didn’t win. You set a single-game team record, you catch bombs, score touchdowns, but then you realize there’s still some emptiness there.
“When you win, there’s no emptiness there. And you know you played a part in it, whether it showed up in the statistics or not.”
At some point, perhaps when New Orleans’ Joe Horn reached for his cellphone and Terrell Owens began shaking a pompom and pulling Sharpies from his socks, receivers supplanted quarterbacks as the NFL’s biggest divas. Earlier this season, when he wasn’t getting the football as much as he thought he should have been, Gates wondered if he too should up his me-quotient.
However, as he looked about the locker room, Gates said he realized the Chargers have a chance to accomplish something special. The feeling reminded him of his days at Kent State, when he starred on the hardwood, not the gridiron.
“The best basketball team I ever played on went to the (NCAA) Elite Eight,” Gates said. “I averaged 15 points, this guy averaged 15, that guy averaged 14. Then the next year I averaged 21 but we didn’t even get into the tournament – now what season would I rather have, the one when I averaged 21 and was breaking all the records, or the other one?
“At the end of the day, you’re only going to look at the winner. You look at the Steelers last year, and you’re going, ‘They don’t have nobody with big-time stats.’ But they were the best team in the league, so somebody had to be doing something. Hines Ward doesn’t catch as many passes as a ton of those guys, but he’d get my vote, because I know he plays a role in what happened with that team.”
At this point, Gates knows his reputation is set, the respect he engenders around the league unassailable. So if that means playing the decoy Sunday night in Denver, next week against Oakland, and all the way to Miami and Super Bowl XLI, that’s OK by him.
“As a young player, you think your stats is the way you affect a game. But that’s not necessarily the case. You look at films and you see how teams may double-team me, but this guy is wide-open, so throw the ball to him.
“That’s how you become a complete player – taking the selfishness away from ‘you’ and saying, ‘This is about us, this is about we.”‘
Staff writer Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
