Vince Wilfork's playoff outlook healthy

FOXBORO — Rewind the clock to last January. Patriots defensive tackle Vince Wilfork, shelved for the season by a torn Achilles tendon, was watching from the sidelines in Denver as his team fell to the Broncos in the AFC Championship Game.

The Patriots season wasn’t the only thing expiring with that loss. So, too, it seemed was the 6-foot-2, 325-pound defensive captain’s Patriots future.

With the final year of Wilfork’s contract calling for a $7.5 million base salary and $11.6 salary cap hit for 2014, and concerns about an Achilles recovery for a 32-year-old man of his size, his career with the Pats seemed to be in jeopardy.

A contentious negotiation ensued. In March, Wilfork reportedly cleaned out his locker and asked for his release rather than taking the substantial pay cut the front office requested. However, by month’s end the two sides agreed on the parameters of a three-year extension.

It turns out to have been a beneficial agreement for both sides. Wilfork is playing some of the best football of his career. He started all 16 regular-season games, anchoring a defensive line that emerged as one of the league’s top 10 against the run. Asked yesterday about his return to form, Wilfork’s tone reflected that expected of a Patriots captain.

“My goal was just getting back on this team and helping my teammates win, and we’ve done a lot of that around here,” he said. “I’m just fortunate and grateful to be playing another postseason game this week coming up. That’s always been my goal to get back and help my teammates win. That’s how I approach the season.”
As for the doubters, Wilfork never paid them much mind because he never doubted himself.

“I wasn’t surprised that I can play and be effective at this level,” Wilfork said. “Health was never an issue with me this year, thinking about it.”

Nobody is happier about Wilfork’s return to form than the Patriots young linebackers. After losing former All-Pro Jerod Mayo for the season to a torn patellar tendon, Dont’a Hightower and Jamie Collins were asked to pick up the slack. They have done so with great success, and Hightower believes that is thanks in large part to having Wilfork lining up in front of them.

“Vince helps a lot, especially having an older guy, a veteran guy who knows the game as well as he does,” Hightower said. “It slows everything down. It slows the offensive line from getting on top of us. Nobody is just going to leave Vince Wilfork single blocked at all.”

As for the task at hand on Saturday afternoon, a postseason showdown with the Ravens is nothing new to Wilfork.

“It seems like the Baltimore Ravens are a division opponent, we play them so much,” he said. “So they know us, we know them. It’s going to be one of those tough, old-school football games, I feel, a game that’s going to have to be played in the trenches up front.”

When the two teams met in the 2011 AFC Championship Game, Wilfork was a disruptive nightmare for the Ravens, finishing with six tackles, three for losses, including a sack, as the defense held Ray Rice, the NFL’s second-leading rusher that season, to 67 yards on the ground.

While you might doubt the Patriots’ defensive line’s ability to replicate a performance that dominant, proving doubters wrong would be just another day at the office for Wilfork this season.


(bostonherald.com)