A perfect pick for Swanson
10/20/2011 4:00:00 PM | Football
Attacking the Sam Houston secondary this season has been an absolute headache for opposing offenses.
The ball hawk nature of safeties Darnell Taylor and Robert Shaw create havoc. Defensive back Kenneth Jenkins seems to be everywhere on the field, as one of the unit's most effective players. Bookie Sneed, at cornerback, is almost always as fast as the receiver he's covering.
Then there are the blanketing cover skills of Daxton Swanson, a 2010 transfer from Toledo who while there, led the team in pass break ups with seven for the 2009 season.
It's partly because Swanson brought those skills to Sam Houston that the Kats easily have the most efficient pass defense in the Southland Conference.
"He's just a great cover guy," defensive coordinator Scott Stoker said over the phone. "We play a lot of man coverage and those corners are out there on an island. He's got great feet, can really run. He's a natural 'man' corner, the kind we're looking for here."
Swanson leads the team with three interceptions and four pass breakups on the season. Subsequently, he leads the team in passes defended, which is a combination of break ups and interceptions.
Only one player in the conference in each of those statistical categories is outdoing Swanson, but that player isn't on one of the best defenses in FCS competition.
Curing homesickness
The western end of Lake Erie, right on the Ohio/Michigan border just wasn't the place for Dax. He's a Waco kid, but also the son of a single parent and older brother of a young teenager.
Football wasn't enough. He said he was homesick and it wasn't his "type of environment up there." He could have just as easily said it was too cold.
"I knew I was ready to come home. I was just trying to find somewhere to (play football)," he said.
Fortunately for Sam Houston, Dax's high school teammate and Bearkat veteran linebacker Will Henry had just the idea for him. Henry convinced Swanson of how much he would love it at Sam Houston with a brand new team and an opportunity to play right away.
And right away, he played.
Toledo didn't release Swanson until less than a week before the Bearkats' first game of the season, a matchup against none other than Baylor in hometown Waco. It was the perfect chain of events, except not being able to practice and get acclimated to what the team was doing over the summer.
But Dax wanted to come home, which in this case, meant playing more than 20 snaps against Baylor in front of a Waco crowd and just three days after stepping foot on the SHSU campus.
"It was a little difficult at first," he said. "They threw me in that first game and I played quite a bit. Just trying to get things down for a whole different system, it took me a while - basically the whole year. I got it down good now."
Not new anymore
He has it down so well that he's already superseded his interception total of last season. Even when he's not picking the ball off, Dax is a turnover waiting to happen.
Recall the most recent Battle of the Piney Woods at Reliant Stadium, the one where Sam Houston owned Stephen F. Austin 45-10.
Dax had already intercepted a pass that was deflected by Shaw in the first quarter. The Bearkats weren't up by five touchdowns yet, but well on their way.
In the second quarter, Dax gave the crowd a slight indication of how that battle was going to play out. SFA receiver Cordell Roberson caught a 10-yard pass from Brad Attaway and seemed to be working his way up the left sideline when he lost grip of the football.
"We knew coming in they had ball security issues so we were trying to strip the ball all game," Swanson said of forcing the fumble.
Roberson was the player in last season's BOTPW press conference who was amused that the Bearkats would dare defend him with single coverage. Roberson didn't realize at the time he had just gone up against two All-Southland Conference Honorable Mention cornerbacks who were both in their first year in the system.
It may have even been overlooked that Roberson had one of the most successful quarterbacks the conference had ever seen in Jeremy Moses. Roberson isn't amused anymore. It's not uncommon for blowouts to damage one's sense of humor.
But if you see Daxton Swanson around campus, or around town, he'll more than likely be smiling or laughing - as most would if they owned a certain portion of the football field on Saturdays.
