IN JUNE OF 2018, a gaggle of the NFL’s most talented defensive players gathered at Big Cedar Lodge, a luxurious resort in Missouri’s Ozarks. Von Miller led the group. Bradley Chubb and Bud Dupree were there, as well as legendary sack masters such as Bruce Smith and Warren Sapp. The men ate big steaks and drank. They raced go-karts. They went bowfishing in the middle of the night, firing arrows into the black waters of Table Rock Lake.
They also dissected pass-rushing techniques as if they were science textbooks. Stutter steps and cuts, arm-locks and power — they discussed it all. If he takes two steps this way, you go three that way? But what about coming back inside? Or just putting your head into his chest and flattening him like fresh asphalt? They laughed.
One afternoon, Chuck Smith gave a presentation. Smith is a former defensive end and a pass-rushing guru who trains many of the league’s biggest stars. Standing on a field near the hotel, he explained a rush technique called the cross-chop. Smith asked for a volunteer to help him demonstrate. Shaquil Barrett stepped forward.
At the time, Barrett wasn’t a star on the Buccaneers, wasn’t the reigning NFL sack leader or a linchpin in Tampa Bay’s high hopes for this season. In his first four years in the league, Barrett had recorded 14 total sacks — or slightly more than his teammate Miller averaged every season. Barrett was mostly there because Miller organized the summit and Barrett was a backup on the Broncos. In the local newspaper’s article about the summit, Barrett was listed only as one of the “players attending.”
But as Smith focused on even the tiniest slivers of the cross-chop method — “you can’t do it unless you’re close enough to smell his breath,” he explained at one point, bringing his face inches from Barrett’s — Barrett was rapt. When several of the other players began bantering to each other, Barrett kept staring at Smith’s hands, watching as they shifted his own arms this way and that.
It was an awakening. Barrett arrived in the NFL in 2014 with just two moves he felt comfortable using while rushing the quarterback, either bulling over the lineman with a straight-ahead push or trying to swipe away the lineman’s hands and slip on by. It quickly became clear to him that wasn’t nearly enough to survive in the NFL, and it was getting harder and harder for him to imagine having the success he craved.
This summit, then, felt like an opening, an opportunity for him to take control of his own future. Barrett tried the cross-chop move himself, slamming down on his opponent’s outside arm as he pulled himself past. He did it again and again and again. He pictured himself doing it in a game, taking it from his toolbox and surprising an opponent who assumed he was just another hack.
He smiled and looked at Smith. “Bro,” he said quietly, “I’m about to turn it up.”
WHEN BARRETT AND I connected for a video call a few weeks back, he showed me the warm living room of his spacious, Tampa-area house. I mentioned it probably felt like a long way from the tight, ever-changing sleeping spots of his Baltimore childhood, when his family moved frequently, and he nodded. “Things have gone so fast for me,” he said, “and, also, so slow.”
This makes sense. Barrett’s emergence as a dominant pass rusher who recorded 19½ sacks last season seemingly came out of nowhere, and it was for him as stardom is for so many in the NFL: a sudden, arresting development rising from what was, in truth, a long, plodding progression.
That 2019 performance was why the Bucs used their franchise tag option for the first time since 2012 to keep Barrett: No Bucs player had ever led the NFL in sacks, and Barrett had broken summit-mate Sapp’s franchise record (16.5). Though this year has been more challenging — Barrett has six sacks through 12 games for the Bucs, a much more modest pace than in 2019 — moments of brilliance have remained: A string of three sacks in four weeks was underlined by a timely strip sack of Patrick Mahomes in Week 12.
The pass rush summit, Barrett says, is where all that was born. If he were still trying to make it in this league with only a pair of pass rush moves, it’s more likely he’d be out of the league than standing as a franchise player for a team with Super Bowl expectations.
“One hundred percent,” he says, “maybe — maybe — I’d have hung on as a special-teams player, but with two moves as a pass-rusher? No. No. Two moves won’t get you very far at all.”
Yet while Barrett felt the summit sent him on the way to solving one problem back in Denver, he also knew he still had another: He needed a team to believe in him.
In the fall of 2018, Barrett thought he had a legitimate chance to crack the Denver first-string unit. But the Broncos front office, he says, made it clear that it preferred Chubb, a top draft pick, from the beginning. By not even offering him a chance, Barrett felt, the Broncos were making it clear they never projected him to be anything more than a backup. He played only a quarter of the defensive snaps that year and had just three sacks.
“It was probably the worst possible way to handle their business,” Barrett says now, adding that he was never able to get a satisfactory answer from Vance Joseph, the Denver head coach at the time, about what he had to do to move up. “I wanted to get out of there so bad. I knew there was no way to go forward there. … There was nothing the Broncos could have done to bring me back.”
At the end of that 2018 season, Barrett and Miller went to Las Vegas for a few days to celebrate the end of another year and, as Miller described it on a video call last month, “to say goodbye.”
“We knew he was leaving,” Miller says. “That was our last hurrah.”
Barrett thought he was headed to the Bengals as a free agent, but Cincinnati pulled its offer after raising some questions about the health of Barrett’s shoulder. Tampa Bay came in with an offer, and Barrett quickly signed. He immediately felt a weight lift.
“We all knew what was coming next for him,” Miller says. “We all knew that whenever he got a chance to play, he was just going to kill guys.”
In his first month with the Bucs, Barrett played more than 80% of the defensive snaps and had nine sacks in four games. Late in the fourth quarter in a Week 4 game against the Rams, he forced a fumble that his teammate, Ndamukong Suh, picked up and returned for a touchdown to seal the game.
As he lay on the turf and watched Suh run the other way while the crowd roared, Barrett allowed himself a moment to revel in what he had accomplished.
“I thought, ‘I’m finally making the plays that Von makes,'” he says, smiling at the memory. “I felt like I had arrived.”
WHEN BARRETT SIGNED his first autograph — he thinks it might have been at some point in college – he signed his full name, “SHAQUIL BARRETT,” with a looping S, and T’s that were fully-crossed. He enjoyed writing it all out.
The signature isn’t quite as elaborate anymore — “it went from Shaquil Barrett to Shaq Barrett to S-squiggly-squiggly B-squiggly-squiggly to like, a few lines that sort of look like some letters” — but he gladly will scrawl those lines or take pictures with fans whenever they ask because it reminds him how lucky he feels to be well-known.
Still, fame isn’t a draw for Barrett. In truth, he is much more pragmatic about what football offers him. It isn’t an ego boost or even, necessarily, a fix for his competitive side.
It is simply security, and a welcome reprieve after years of wondering whether a life like this would ever happen for him.
“When I think about all that and then think about what’s going on right now,” Barrett says, “it feels weird sometimes because I don’t know what to do except act like this is all normal.”
When I asked Barrett about the house he grew up in, he laughed and began ticking off all the different places he lived before running out of fingers. “The bills always caught up” with his family, he says, so they moved around. Sometimes they bunked with an aunt. Sometimes a cousin. Once, he and his parents and siblings crammed into his grandmother’s senior home apartment for a stretch, sleeping on couches or the floor. For fun, he said, the kids ran around the rec room where the “old folks played cards.”
Everything in his life felt slack and untethered, like loose threads you tuck back under your shirtsleeve only to see them fly up again. Football represented one of the few reliable constants, and Barrett loved the game but battled his weight, struggling every year to drop enough pounds to get under the limit for his age group on the Charm City Buccaneers.
He did what he had to do. He wore plastic sauna suits and sweated as much as he could when he was as young as 8. He starved himself, or would eat only tuna fish and mustard for days. He used laxatives. He tried something called “black magic,” he recalled, which was a powder you mix with water. “You drink it for a few days and you’re supposed to lose 10 pounds,” he says. “It was really gross. But I needed to play, so I did it.”
There was always something pushing at Barrett, always something challenging the equilibrium he craved. As a boy, it was his weight. At his first college, Division II Nebraska-Omaha — which he attended because his brother was there and he didn’t want to go to school alone — the football program was disbanded after just one year as part of the school’s move to Division I. At his second college, Colorado State, it was juggling the realities of being a student, a football player and a husband and new father. (Barrett married his wife, Jordanna, when he was 19, and they had their first child the same year.)
Then came the NFL draft when no one took him. Then a rookie year when he barely got off Denver’s practice squad. And then the realization that, without some kind of technique overhaul as well as a team that believed in him, his dream might be over before it ever really got going.
Only then it did.
Now, Barrett and Jordanna have three children (two boys and a girl), with another little girl on the way. They are comfortable in Tampa. Like everyone else, they have muddled through the pandemic of the past year, making parenting decisions for their 8-, 7- and 5-year-olds as best they can. And every deal that Barrett signs, every year he makes his mark enough to stay in the NFL, is to keep that their reality as long as he can.
“They’ll never know the feelings I had when I was a kid,” Barrett says. “That’s what I want to give them more than anything.”
THE HALF-DOZEN or so moves Barrett added to his arsenal after that pass-rushing summit have names like ghost and swipe and swim and fake-bull, and Barrett’s face lights up when he talks about them. He keeps an iPad with highlights of other top pass-rushers, and studies it constantly, looking to see if there is even a shred of technique he can integrate into his own game. When I ask him to break down a move for me, he begins pantomiming the arm movements, snaking a hand around his phone’s case and leaning side to side as though he is planning to shoot through the screen.
“There are so many ways to get to the quarterback,” he explains. “You just have to pick the right one.”
Now, in a season when the addition of Tom Brady has only heightened expectations for the Bucs, Barrett is finding out that even having eight different moves isn’t enough when you are a star. So far this year, Barrett has found himself facing double-teams a lot more often than when he was a rotational player, and he is also discovering that even when he has only one offensive lineman in front of him, the approach his opponents are taking is different.
Instead of taking one or two small steps backward and then meeting him at a point, Barrett says, the linemen just keep moving backward, refusing to fire their hands out and engage with Barrett and, essentially, delaying him from using one of his moves on them.
To combat this, Barrett is working on a ninth move that is more assertive and doesn’t rely on the lineman opening the confrontation. This technique, called the longarm, involves reaching out and slamming the edge of the lineman’s chest to move him upfield, then cutting back underneath toward the quarterback.
It takes plenty of strength and, even more, very precise timing, but — like needing to drop 10 pounds when he was 9 years old — Barrett sees it simply as a necessary means to getting to the next step: the multi-year contract he’s after. Playing under the Bucs’ franchise tag this season means he is getting paid handsomely but is on a one-year contract.
“It’s on me, and I like that,” Barrett says. A life-changing deal is within reach. He shrugs. “I’m in control, and I just have to go do it.”