Imagine that you are a person who only knows the basic facts about DK Metcalf. You know he's a wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, that he's large, and that he's pretty good at football. Now imagine you are standing next to or in front of this man. Would you, a person who does not possess any kind of intricate knowledge of his specific abilities or statistics, say anything to piss him off? You likely would not, because, I mean, look at him. That makes you smarter than Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz.
Metcalf finished last night's win over the Eagles with a career-high 10 catches for 177 yards, so you can't blame him for being eager to reveal just how badly Schwartz played himself by telling Metcalf that he was not as good as Calvin Johnson during their pregame chat.
Now, if you want to be charitable to Schwartz, you could point out the fact that Metcalf is in his second year in the league and is obviously not yet at Johnson's level, because Johnson is one of the most thrilling and dominant receivers the NFL has ever seen. But that overlooks Schwartz's real error, which was to say "you're not Megatron" to the one receiver in the league who is most capable of producing Megatron-style performances. Metcalf is a 6-foot-4 mass of rippling muscles who runs very fast and jumps very high. He is in fact quite reminiscent of Johnson. Jim, what were you thinking!
Watch that highlight reel above, and you will indeed see Metcalf making the sort of plays that Johnson used to make all the time. There's the slant route where he snags the ball and immediately runs over a tackler, the post route where he outruns the entire defense, and the deep ball where he leaps over his defender and secures the catch with one hand.
It shouldn't be too hard to convince yourself that those plays look just like the ones Johnson used to gift us, which says a lot of good things about our and Metcalf's future—the NFL has been significantly less fun since Johnson left the game—and very bad things about Schwartz's instincts for talking trash. Schwartz's defense probably still would have gotten eaten up if he'd told Metcalf that he was nothing like, uh, I don't know, Torry Holt, but at least his embarrassment wouldn't have been so acute.
