SANTA CLARA – Richard Sherman was in a room of reporters.
So while giving his perspective on his approach to practice, he put it in terms the group could easily understand.
On Sherman’s first padded practice repetition of training camp in a one-on-one drill this summer, he jumped in against speedster Marquise Goodwin. Sherman, coming off Achilles surgery, got beaten badly. The play was captured on video, and it went viral. Some pointed to it as proof that Sherman was no longer the same player.
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“I’ve been beat probably thousands of times in practice,” said Sherman, a four-time Pro Bowl performer. “But the amount of times I’m beat on a Sunday with the lights on is very limited because in practice, you’re working. You’re working your craft, trying to figure out what you’re doing to do.”
Coach Kyle Shanahan used Sherman’s willingness to put himself in a less-than advantageous positions in practice as a teaching point to the team. Sherman made an analogy that any reporter could appreciate about the true meaning of practice.
“That’s like you guys putting out an article that’s a rough draft and putting it out there for everybody to see,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, this is a rough draft. Yes, it has some typos, some mistakes, some notes, some stuff that doesn’t look right, the wording is off, no commas, no periods, yada, yada, yada. But this is a rough draft. I’m sorry that you saw it before I put out the final product.
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“What we see on Sunday is the final product, so I think you get kind of get lost in that.”
Sherman, who missed the first two exhibition games with a minor hamstring strain, will play Saturday night against the Indianapolis Colts, he said.