When Shaquil Barrett first got into the NFL, he didn’t need much time to deliver an omen.
It was August 2014, and Barrett — now Tampa Bay’s star outside linebacker and the NFL’s sack leader since the start of 2019 — was playing in the Broncos’ preseason finale in Dallas. That’s when teammates DeMarcus Ware and Von Miller, who were sitting that night, threw down the gauntlet to see what their unproven teammate could do.
“I remember making a bet with Shaq,” Ware recalled. “I said, ‘Shaq, I bet you $10,000 that you don’t have four sacks by the end of this game. And Von was like, ‘I’ll double it.’ There were 20 stacks on the table…. and we had to pay him. And it was right then I was like, ‘This dude right here is going to be special.’”
While Barrett didn’t actually tally four sacks that game — he finished with two, plus two tackles for a loss — the veterans paid him anyway, and began to pay serious mind to Barrett’s potential.
What Ware suspected then, everyone in the NFL knows now heading into Sunday’s Super Bowl LV matchup between Tampa Bay and Kansas City: Barrett, who spent all of 2014 on the Broncos’ practice squad and the next four seasons as a Denver reserve, just needed a real chance as an every-down edge rusher.
“By the time (I retired in 2016) I knew this dude was going to be very, very special once he got the opportunity to play full-time,” Ware said. “Tampa gave it to him, and the rest is history.”
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By the time Barrett was a senior at Boys Town, a second-chance school in a suburb of Omaha, he was showing promise. He moved from his native Baltimore to Nebraska as a sophomore to join his brother, Kevin, in search of somewhere with more structure and less distractions.
“It was a little culture shock for sure, but in good things, because you didn’t have to watch your back 24/7 or worry about wearing the wrong colors in the wrong place,” Barrett said. “And at Boys Town, that’s when I actually became a real athlete, and more than just running through a gap. I became more technical, more physical, more physically in shape. I became more of a football player, more of a wrestler and that helped me out a lot (to jump-start) to get where I am today.”
But even as a senior, when Barrett starred for Boys Town as offensive guard, on the defensive line and on special teams (six blocked kicks), he looked like a solid Division II prospect, at best.
“He was a very good high school player by the time he was a senior, but to say he would one day be the NFL sack leader? That’d be a stretch,” Kevin Kush, Barrett’s coach at Boys Town, said. “So it really is one of those feel-good stories in that way, and it’s all a credit to him believing and never stopping working to get better.”
Barrett took that mindset to Colorado State, where he landed after spending his freshman year playing inside linebacker for Nebraska-Omaha before the school dropped the program in a move that “devastated” him.
“When they dropped the football program, I had to man up,” Barrett said. “It pretty much forced me to be out on my own for the first time without any family members around to fall back and depend on… But that led me (to CSU), and that’s where I actually started learning how to get off the ball with confidence once we hired (linebackers) coach Joey Porter. He started teaching me about my get-off, and that’s basically the birth of my get-off right there — trying it over and over, and getting comfortable with jumping the snap a tiny bit.”
Barrett emerged as a force in 38 games across three seasons with the Rams, capping an impressive career with Mountain West defensive player of the year honors in 2013. But it wasn’t enough for Barrett to get drafted, and in May 2014 he signed as a free agent in Denver — where he was about to get an on-the-fly education from two future Hall of Famers in Ware and Miller.
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Tampa Bay defensive coordinator Todd Bowles is quick to admit that the Barrett he’s had at his disposal over the past two seasons, during which he’s led the NFL with 30.5 sacks, is a player with much of Ware and Miller’s pass-rushing DNA inside him.
“You see (Ware and Miller) in him from a hand-placement standpoint in the pass rush, because he’s got quite an arsenal,” Bowles said. “He can go power, he can go speed, and he can beat you with technique. I can’t take credit for that — he had to learn that from Von Miller and DeMarcus Ware and those (Broncos) guys when he came in the league.”
Barrett made his NFL debut in Week 1 of the 2015 season against Baltimore, and went on to start six games that season. He also started nine games in 2017, but saw no starts in 2016 and 2018 as he was stuck behind Ware, Miller, Todd Davis (who played outside linebacker in 2016 before switching inside) and first-round pick Bradley Chubb.
Even with the lack of consistent playing time, Ware said Barrett avoided self-pity while also being “a sponge and a chameleon at the same time.” In 61 games and 15 starts for Denver, Barrett recorded 14 sacks and 151 tackles.
“You would just look at him and ask, ‘Can he actually really play?’” Ware said. “Because then he wasn’t this big, brute, muscular guy. But whatever we told him to do, he did it exactly like that every time, and you saw it carrying over from the practice field to game day with his ‘Shaq Attack’ on. He puts his own little spin on (our advice), and that’s what makes him who he is right now. He had the skeleton, he put the meat on it, and went down to Tampa and dominated.”
When Barrett became a free agent after the 2018 season, he knew his opportunity to take the next step as a player wouldn’t be in Denver, where Miller and Chubb were cemented in their starting jobs. So he hit the open market, and thought he had a multi-year deal secured with the Bengals — until Cincinnati pulled its offer over concern about a perceived shoulder injury.
“That had me pretty upset because I was putting all my eggs into that basket,” Barrett said. “I thought Cincinnati would’ve been the right move for me, and they offered me a two-year contract. It would’ve been the most money I ever made with the most security… I didn’t hear anything else from anybody else from the teams I visited about any shoulder injury, because I never had a shoulder injury.”
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After the contract fell through with Cincinnati, Barrett opted for a one-year, $4 million prove-it deal with the Buccaneers. It was a steal as Barrett led the league with 19.5 sacks in 2019. The Bucs placed the franchise tag on him last offseason. Playing on a $15.8 million salary this season, he’s in for a big-money deal as a free agent after the Super Bowl.
Even though Barrett’s sack numbers are down this year (11.5 in 18 total games) compared to 2019, the outside linebacker has still been elite in terms of pressuring the quarterback. Barrett led all edge rushers in total pressures (75) and pressure percentage (16.3%) in 2020, and has a higher pressure percentage this season (88 pressures in 607 pass-rushing snaps including the postseason, 14.5%) than he did in 2019 (82 in 580, 14.1%).
“He had to change up his game a little bit,” Tampa Bay outside linebackers coach Larry Foote said. “He got a lot of chips, and double teams, and they slid the protection to him a lot. So he was a little frustrated early on, because those types of (edge rushers), they want those sacks and they want those numbers. But he had to learn how to be patient because he got chipped a lot — he probably got chipped the most out of all the D-ends in the league and he still was productive for us.”
Heading into Sunday’s Super Bowl, Barrett’s focus alongside Tampa Bay’s other star edge rusher, Jason Pierre-Paul, is on containing and disrupting Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes. For that tall task, Barrett is leaning on his experience as a reserve on Denver’s Super Bowl 50 team, and how the Broncos’ defensive pressure set the tone for victory in that game over Carolina.
“A couple nights before (Super Bowl 50), I remember Von talking to us and just motivating our position group,” Barrett said. “He was saying that (the Panthers) had never played a team like us, and it could come down to (the edge rushers), and we could control the game if we affect the quarterback. It could be all on us, and Von was determined to get it by any means and to not let failure be an option. And that’s what I’m on right now — we came too close to start all over next year without a ring.”
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