If you want to see Houston Texans head coach DeMeco Ryans light up and have a massive smile on his face, mention the name Kamari Lassiter.
“Kamari could play in any era of football with the way he approaches the game,” said Ryans exclusively to Big Sarge Media. “He never takes plays off, and he is consistently trying to improve on his craft.”
Heading into one of the biggest games of the season this past Sunday against the Kansas City Chiefs, a team that had the Texans’ number over the previous five games played at Arrowhead Stadium with a 5-0 record against them, Houston wondered if their second-year cornerback was going to play as he was dealing with a foot injury he sustained against the Indianapolis Colts a week prior.
Yet, if you have been around Lassiter for any amount of time, you know that football is his life and has always been since the age of five, when he told his parents that he was going to play in the NFL, and as time went on, he put in the necessary work to fulfill his dream.
There was no contingency plan. Lassiter never talked about what he would do if he didn’t make it to the NFL. The only goal he ever wrote down was to play in the league and be recognized as one of the best to do it, and he is on his way to achieving it.
On Sunday night, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes wanted to see just how good Lassiter was and if he was healthy enough to stay with the speedsters that Kansas City has at wide receiver, especially with the injury report highlighting Lassiter’s injury.
Late in the third quarter, with his team trailing by three points, Mahomes found what he considered a favorable matchup that he could exploit between Lassiter and wide receiver Tyquan Thornton on first down.
At the snap of the ball, Mahomes knew he was going to take a deep shot towards the end zone, and Thornton looked as if he had a step on Lassiter.
Still, he was using a trail technique he learned from his teammate, All-Pro cornerback Derek Stingley Jr., to bait Mahomes into believing his man was open.
By the time the ball touched the wide receiver’s hands, Lassiter was right there to break it up and prevent the touchdown.
“That is Kamari,” said Stingley after the game about Lassiter. “Every play is 100 percent, all the time. It doesn’t matter what is going on, what the circumstances of the game, whatever, he is going to go out there and end up with the ball some way or somehow. He is a complete football player.”
Seeing that Lassiter was healthier than many Chiefs personnel believed, Mahomes would have learned from the previous quarter that he should work the middle of the field and avoid his side, like he was doing with Stingley.
Yet, at the start of the fourth quarter, Mahomes tested his luck again, this time with wide receiver Hollywood Brown facing Lassiter one-on-one.
Surely, that matchup could be exploited with Brown’s speed, but what Mahomes didn’t consider was Lassiter’s ability to track the ball in the air, a skill he improved during his time with the Texans and by being around his best friend and teammate, safety Calen Bullock, who has an uncanny knack for preventing opposing quarterbacks’ passes from being completed.
He took the ball right out of the air, preventing any momentum for the Chiefs, as the Texans left Kansas City with a 20-10 win.
“I think maybe the quarterback thought that he had something, and I was able to make the play,” Lassiter said during his postgame press conference. “But that’s just being able to play with guys who are always on the details. I play with the best in the world.”
As the Texans enter their final four games of the season with the playoffs still within reach (If the season ended today, Houston would qualify), it will require a sustained effort from the league’s top defensive unit to push them forward. With shutdown corners in Lassiter and Stingley, along with a stout front seven, they are in an ideal position.