OCTOBER 28, 2017 Dolphin Digest 7Tell that to quarterback Matt Cassel. Alonso sepa-
rated Cassel from his helmet and the ball in the Titans
game, allowing Reshad Jones to coast 38 yards for a
touchdown with the recovery.
The defensive stats from that game are the ideal
model for this unit: Timmons, Alonso and Jones shared
the team lead with seven tackles. Maualuga was right
behind with five.
What do you get when you put that together? Line-
backers, not defensive backs, making tackles. Far
closer to the line of scrimmage. Or, better yet, behind
the line of scrimmage. The kind of plays that yank fans
out of their seats.
“I just think it’s a sense of urgency here,” Maualuga
said. “People want to do great. Obviously, last year
they struggled in certain areas on defense and every
year people try to make short-term goals. One of our
goals is to make most teams one-dimensional and
we’re doing good at stopping the run. I just think over-
all we have the right people to do the job.”
Where there were once question marks, there are
now exclamation points. Maualuga was a late addition,
on Aug. 19. He took weeks to overcome a hamstring
injury and get in shape enough to handle practice.
There were questions of whether he’d ever make an
impact. Ditto for Timmons after his disappearing act
in California. There were fewer questions about
Alonso, certainly, but he was still fighting to return to
his pre-injury form as a rookie, when he made 159
tackles for the Bills.
The Titans game marked the trio’s first together.
Not that you’d know it.
“Rey has been in the room,” Burke said. “It’s not
like he’s been in a cage on the side somewhere. Rey
has been in the room and they kind of built a rapport al-
ready. Again, they’ve all seen a lot of ball. It doesn’t
take much for veteran linebackers to look at each other
and go, ‘Hey, we’re doing this here,’ or this or
that. So those guys are starting to get a con-
nection, I think.”
Their skills complement one an-
other.
“Lawrence surprises me every
day with the way he runs,” Burke
said. “ ... He’s however old he
is, I don’t even know, but he does
it in practice every day. To watch
Lawrence Timmons, literally he
runs like that in practice.”
At 6-2 and 258 pounds,
Maualuga brings the brawn.
“He’s somewhat typecast,”
Burke said. “He’s a big, big Mike
(middle) linebacker. Rey has a really,
really, really good feel for the game.
He’s played a lot of football. He’s been
a linebacker most of his career, most of
his life probably. He’s very nuanced in
just getting reads. He reads play-actions
really quickly. So whatever he may — he’ll
get mad at me — may lack in some speed, I
mean, he’s really quick off the spot. He diagnoses
plays really, really quickly. It gets him off the spot.
He gets from Point A to Point B faster than you
think because he’s so good at diagnosing plays.”
Alonso?
“Kiko’s just such a unique player for a line-
backer,” Burke said. “ ... We match him up on
receivers sometimes, backs, tight ends. He
can run.”
Maualuga takes a philosophical ap-
proach to how they arrived at this junc-
ture, eschewing any temptation to place
a chip on the cold shoulder he received
after eight seasons in
Cincinnati.“We all understand that things happen for a rea-
son,” Maualuga said. “It’s a blessing for someone to
be at a club for more than five or six years, so I’m just
thankful I was there for eight years. ... We’re all just
grateful to be here.”
There is, however, satisfaction to showing they can
still play at a high level after all these years.
“You reach that 30-year-old mark, people tend to
think that you’re getting old, your ability at playing
football goes down,” Maualuga said. “But hey, no
harm, no foul.”“Lawrence surprises me every day with the
way he runs ... He’s however old he is,
I don’t even know, but he does it in
practice every day. To watch
Lawrence Timmons, literally
he runs like that in practice.”
- Matt Burke
Kiko Alonso
Lawrence Timmons
Digest Photo/Steven Murphy