The day after the Seattle Seahawks 31-27 win over the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC championship game, Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald said Devon Witherspoon’s pass breakups late in the fourth quarter were “some of the best plays in our team history.”
Macdonald had a legitimate argument. If the 2019 Pine Forest alum doesn’t break up two passes in the end zone with under 5 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, the Seahawks would’ve needed to score again to advance to Super Bowl 60 against the New England Patriots, which kicks off at 5:30 p.m. CT Sunday.
But former Pine Forest football coach CJ Washington had a different thought when seeing those two plays.
“It’s just Spoon being Spoon,” Washington said. “Because he’s always came up making the play that makes everybody say wow. The guys that know him, we just laugh because that’s him being him.”
Spoon being Spoon has helped him go from a late summer enrollee at the University of Illinois to top-five NFL draft pick to a three-time Pro Bowl cornerback who will play a key role in whether the Seahawks win their second Super Bowl on Sunday at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
If the Seahawks win, he’ll be the first Pensacola area Super Bowl champion since Gulf Breeze alum Doug Baldwin helped the Seahawks win their lone Vince Lombardi Trophy in 2014.
It’s a journey that almost didn’t happen if not for some prodding from those close to him.
A return to the gridiron
Witherspoon has always stood out.
First in baseball, then little league football. By high school, basketball had his heart.
“Once he got to high school, he just wanted to hoop,” Washington said. “That’s all he wanted to do. He just wanted to play basketball.”
Witherspoon made the varsity squad as a sophomore. Guarded the opponent’s best handler and sat at the top of a full-court press or zone defense to wreak havoc. According to Washington, he could’ve played college basketball too.
But Washington and Marquette Oliver, who coached him in AAU basketball for Pensacola Elite, wanted him to give football another try. Both were also Pine Forest football coaches.
“Basketball was his thing,” Oliver said. “He was good at that but size wise he’d have a better opportunity to play at the next level with football.”
But one person pushed more than others. Witherspoon’s mom, Rhasheda Bickley.
A single parent, Bickley did whatever she did to make sure her kids were involved in sports. Witherspoon’s two older siblings played high school sports, too. And she wanted him to give football another shot.
According to Washington, Bickley has a way of “manifesting things.” When he went to Jacksonville to watch the Seahawks play the Jaguars on Oct. 12, she told him the team could get to the Super Bowl if they got healthy.
Back during the spring of Witherspoon’s sophomore year, she was trying to guide him back to football. She continually bugged him about it and got Oliver and Washington to try to slip in some suggestions here and there too.
Right before spring football started leading into his junior season, Bickley’s persistence paid off. Witherspoon decided to give the sport another try. At the time, he said it was to help increase his conditioning and athleticism for basketball season.
“She knew her baby more than anybody,” Washington said of Bickley. “She just wanted to see him play and see what happened with that, just as much as basketball. He could’ve gotten a scholarship to play basketball, but she in her heart of heart knew he was going to be able to go far and do some things in football.”
A star is born
As soon as Witherspoon told Washington he was going to play football, he ran to defensive coordinator Lee Burt and said he was about to add one of the best defensive backs he’d ever seen.
It didn’t take long for that prediction to come true. Pine Forest was doing passing drills in its first spring practice, and Witherspoon had a couple of interceptions. That was all Eagles head coach Jason McDonald needed to see.
“He told me that’s our starting safety right there, what size cleat he wear?.” Oliver said. “For that point on, it was no turning around for him.”
As a junior, Witherspoon finished with 65 tackles, four interceptions, nine pass deflections and a sack. His senior season, recording 74 tackles, seven interceptions, nine pass deflections, a sack and a forced fumble. The PNJ named him the area’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2018.
Playing in a position group with future NFL defensive backs Martin Emerson and Mac McWilliams, Witherspoon quickly became the alpha. Some of it was athletic ability. But a lot of it was tenacious work ethic.
Like his mom, once Witherspoon puts his mind to something, he’s all in. He put extra time in the weight room and held others around him to the same standard. Burt remembers watching Witherspoon doing a workout on the track in the pouring rain the summer before his senior season. The weather didn’t faze him one bit.
“They didn’t want to leave the track because they were working so hard,” Burt said. “Small stuff like that in the offseason, it was just huge for them.”
Pine Forest knew they had a next-level talent on their hands, an extremely competitive player who refused to be outworked. If Witherspoon had an athlete in space, he would close and hit hard. If you beat him one time, it was hard to beat him again.
But that wasn’t enough, initially. His slight 6-foot,161-pound frame was a drawback.
“Some coaches were like he’s a little too small,” Burt said. “And we were like he’s a ballplayer. His ball skills, his tackling and everything, if you can just get him on campus, he’s going to make you look good.”
Witherspoon thought he would be spending his freshman college season at Hutchinson Community College in Hutchinson, Kansas. One day after arriving in Kansas, he received SAT scores that qualified him for NCAA Division I football.
He enrolled at Illinois four days before the start of fall camp.
One more goal to go
It didn’t take long for Burt’s prediction to come true. The same mentality Witherspoon had at Pine Forest translated to Illinois and the Big Ten.
He played in all 13 games his freshman season, which included contributing to a goal line stop in a 24-23 win over then-No. 6 Wisconsin.
Two years later in 2021, he was named All-Big Ten honorable mention by the media. In 2022 he was a consensus All-American and a finalist for the Jim Thorpe Award, which goes to the nation’s best defensive back.
The Seahawks selected him with the fifth overall pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, and he has made the Pro Bowl all three seasons. This past season, Pro Football Focus graded him as the best cornerback in football.
Kadetrix Marcus, Witherspoon’s defensive backs coach at Pine Forest, saw Witherspoon play in person for the first time in high school when the Seahawks played at the Atlanta Falcons on Dec. 7. He said he played the same way he played in high school. Witherspoon didn’t flinch, no matter what happened.
After being beat early in the NFC Championship, he made the two plays Macdonald said will go down in Seahawks lore. On third-and-4 at the Seahawks 6-yard line with 5:06 left, he broke up a pass intended for Konata Mumpfield. Then on fourth down, Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford looked his way again and Witherspoon broke up a pass intended for Terrance Ferguson.
On the final play of the game, Stafford found All-Pro wide receiver Puka Nacua for a 21-yard gain that put the Rams into Seattle territory. As Nacua lunged to his left to try to get out of bounds, Witherspoon tackled him in bounds by inches. The final seconds rolled off the clock to send the Seahawks to the Super Bowl.
Marcus still talks with Witherspoon and attends the same church as the family, St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church. As a person, Marcus said Witherspoon is the same on and off the field. Humble but willing to work for what he wants.
This summer, Witherspoon texted his former coach with goals. This year he wanted to be an All-Pro. He was named Associated Press second team All-Pro on Jan. 10.
Now on Sunday, he gets the chance to check off the ultimate goal.
“He knows what he wants out of life and knows who he wants to be,” Marcus said. “Anything that you can tell the youth, tell them to persevere and everyone has their own story.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Devon Witherspoon almost didn’t play football. Now he’s in Super Bowl
Reporting by Justin Fitzgerald, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
