National Football League

Patriots CB Christian Gonzalez isn't what draft evaluators think he is. He's better

Published May. 18, 2023 11:28 a.m. ET

Christian Gonzalez made a business decision to finish his college career. Knowing he would declare for the 2023 NFL Draft, Gonzalez told Oregon coach Dan Lanning that he would not play in the team's bowl game. But that wasn't quite the end of Gonzalez's career with the Ducks.

Lanning has a policy to let draft prospects train on their own, which also means not bringing them to the bowl game. Opt-outs have historically brought distractions to the rest of the team. But that wasn't the case with Gonzalez, who remained committed to his teammates. In fact, he did something Lanning had never seen before in his time at Oregon, Georgia or Alabama: The cornerback attended every single practice, meeting and workout.

Gonzalez went so far as to serve as the honorary assistant cornerbacks coach for position coach Demetrice Martin. When it came time to organize the trip to play North Carolina in the Holiday Bowl, a thought crystallized for Lanning. So he pulled aside Gonzalez.

"'Christian, I'm taking you to the game,'" Lanning told him. "'You've earned it. You've been here supporting your guys like 20 days straight of showing up with everything.'"

Gonzalez attended the Holiday Bowl essentially in his role as an assistant to the coaching staff.

"He actually did a pretty good job of making some adjustments," Martin said. "Talking to me about some of the stuff that he's seen out there."

Maybe Gonzalez is a bit misunderstood. Because while he did what was best for him, he did everything that was best for the team after that. Maybe NFL evaluators docked his draft stock for a lack of competitiveness after skipping the bowl game.

But that would be just another example of the evaluators getting Gonzalez wrong.

Certainly, there was a sense of surprise when Gonzalez ended up being the third cornerback off the board during the first round last month. He was widely rated in the media as the No. 1 prospect at his position. And yet the New England Patriots were able to trade back from No. 14 to No. 17 and still land Gonzalez. It seems that Gonzalez baffled a few NFL teams, leading to the selections of cornerback Devon Witherspoon (No. 5) and Emmanuel Forbes (No. 16) ahead of him.

Being overlooked isn't new for Gonzalez. It started when he was coming out of high school. Martin, who was an assistant with the Arizona Wildcats at the time, had to beg head coach Kevin Sumlin to take a look at Gonzalez in person.

"I don't think he's fast enough," Sumlin told Martin.

For those who know Gonzalez, well, you're probably laughing at the comment. For those who aren't as familiar with the cornerback, Gonzalez ran a 4.38-second 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine. He's fast enough for the NFL. So he was definitely fast enough for college. He was, in fact, one of the best pound-for-pound athletes in the entire 2023 draft.

[Bill Belichick had never had a CB prospect quite like Christian Gonzalez]

But overlooking Gonzalez wasn't necessarily Sumlin's fault. He was working off bad numbers — an old set of results from track and field races. While Martin pushed and pushed, Arizona elected not to extend a scholarship. Instead, Gonzalez picked Colorado over schools like Alabama, Ohio State, Miami and Arizona State. He also committed to and then de-committed from Purdue.

When Colorado turned over staff, Martin coincidentally landed there for Gonzalez's freshman year. "Coach [Karl Dorrell] believed Gonzo was a hamburger away from being a safety," Martin said. But just like Martin had pleaded with Sumlin to offer Gonzalez a scholarship, Martin pleaded with Dorrell to let Gonzalez play corner, even with his 6-foot-1 frame (a bit tall for a prototypical corner). By the opening game of the season during Gonzalez's freshman year, the cornerback group dealt with enough injuries that Dorrell granted Martin's request. Gonzalez started at cornerback in his very first college game.

And while you'd think that Martin and Gonzalez were best of friends by that point, they weren't.

"Gonzo wasn't really too fond of me at first because I was always on him," Martin said. "[He] was thinking, ‘Why is the corner coach harassing me every day on the field?'"

OK. But actually, why?

"I knew that he had a lot of greatness in him and things had been coming easy to him and he just didn't know how great of a player he could be," Martin said.

While Gonzalez managed to elevate his play in Colorado, the situation grew murky behind the scenes. Martin got a job at Oregon under its new head coach, Lanning. And Martin wasn't the only coach to exit Boulder. As Martin put it: "Things just starting to kind of fall apart." So Gonzalez was among a number of players who put their names in the transfer portal to see where they might land. And — shocker — the person who made the best pitch was none other than Martin.

Now this is where yet another misconception enters Gonzalez's story. During the draft process, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin asked Gonzalez why he left Colorado for Oregon, hoping to hear something about how he wanted to step up in competition. Instead, per Sports Illustrated, Gonzalez said he intended to follow Martin to the Ducks. And given what happened to Colorado (which started the season 0-5 and fired Dorrell), it's hard to blame Gonzalez for finding a more stable situation. And it's also easy to understand why he didn't want to burn Colorado in front of Tomlin.

And then there's the other misconception about Gonzalez, that he's not an alpha. It's one of those expressions that lacks a concrete definition. He was the Ducks' CB1. He matched up against top-tier receivers. He has every physical and mental tool he needs to excel in the NFL. And yet after Gonzalez slipped out of the top 10 and all the way to New England at 17, the cornerback faced anonymous criticism. An NFL scout told the Boston Sports Journal's Greg Bedard that "Christian isn’t an alpha. … He may not be a killer."

That sort of sentiment rubbed Martin the wrong way.

"That was a question that I got all the time [during the pre-draft process]," Martin said. "You could classify him as not being an Alpha Dog. But you can't say that he's not a dog. He's a dog. But what is your definition of alpha?"

There’s this thought that cornerbacks have to talk trash, like Jalen Ramsey and Sauce Gardner do. CB1s are supposed to have big personas. But Gonzalez mostly keeps to himself.

"I like it when the corner is backing up his talk. But I also like it when a cornerback doesn't say nothing and he's backing that up, too," Martin said.

There's something understated about Gonzalez's presence.

"You won't be able to tell that he's being hard on himself because of his demeanor — being a soft-spoken type of guy," Martin said. "Gonzo's an effortless athlete. And I think it can make people think that he's not working hard — or that he's not going as fast as he could go or should go."

During Gonzalez's final college season with Oregon, he worked in Lanning's pro-style defensive system. Much like offenses are simplifying in college — which results in a lack of translatable skills to the NFL — the defenses are responding similarly. But that's not true of the Oregon defense, derived from the Georgia defense that churns out first-round picks.

"You can watch a lot of college football right now and not see people play a variety of techniques," Lanning said. "[But] we're going to ask these guys [at corner] to do a lot of different stuff, whether it's press right, whether it's bail, whether it's squat corner. You're going to have a checklist of all the techniques on film."

It's a checklist that impressed the Patriots.

Not only did Gonzalez play on the outside, he also played inside when that was the opponent's biggest threat. The clearest example was against Arizona, where the team's biggest threat, Jacob Cowing, played in the slot. Gonzalez took the top option, even if that meant moving into a position he didn't always play. Consider what the Patriots did with perimeter corner Stephon Gilmore: New England once asked Gilmore to shadow Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce for an entire game.

The more you can do, right?

Patriots director of player personnel Matt Groh lauded Lanning's system and Gonzalez's execution in it. It's a big part of what drew New England to the defensive back.

"That experience, that knowledge, that education, will only speed his development here to the NFL," Groh said after Day 1 of the draft. "But for all these guys, it's a big jump. It'll just be upon Christian to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Looking forward to working with him and helping him do that."

There's a clear comparison for Gonzalez: Gilmore, a man who lets his play do all of the talking. Gilmore is so soft-spoken during press conferences that he's occasionally inaudible in a scrum. And yet he has put up multiple Pro Bowl seasons and has a Super Bowl ring. Ramsey is one hell of a cornerback, and his trash talk makes him better. Gilmore is one hell of a cornerback, and his silence makes him an assassin.

Gonzalez is a smooth operator, even when things get difficult. Look no further than draft night. As the cornerback sat in the green room backstage and other players went off the board, Martin began to panic. But Gonzalez wasn't sweating.

"He just gives me that little look and he whispered, ‘Don't worry, I got you,'" Martin said. "When they made the pick, he came up to me and was like: ‘We're going to make them pay. We're going to make them pay.'"

Those words sound like that of an alpha.

Prior to joining FOX Sports as the AFC East reporter, Henry McKenna spent seven years covering the Patriots for USA TODAY Sports Media Group and Boston Globe Media. Follow him on Twitter at @McKennAnalysis.

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