Guess What? Sam Shields Is A Hurricane.

Sam Shields, 180 degrees later.

Sam Shields recorded an interception, a sack and a forced fumble Sunday, and this all before he picked off Caleb Hanie for a game-clinching birth to the Super Bowl with 47 seconds left on the frozen grasses of Soldier Field.

This is odd not because Sam Shields enrolled at the University of Miami as a wide receiver, or because he was heralded as the second coming of The Playmaker by not-too-misguided message board junkies, or because he had declining reception totals in each of his four years at Miami, or because he was arrested for marijuana possession in the interim between his senior year and an NFL Draft in which he was not selected.

This is odd because Sam Shields, just a little over 12 months ago, was not good at football.

Shields was pegged a disappointment in his second year at Miami, a bust his third year, and the modifier to every expletive by the time his good-riddance graduation rolled around. Though he showed flashes of promise as a wet-eared cornerback, he was more often the butt of every go route, the very apotheosis of “alone on an island” and, perhaps most dishearteningly, symbolic of a lost era for UM football.

From day one, he was the fastest man on the field – capable of rolling out of bed and clipping 4.3 in sweats. But after a rookie campaign in which he was named an honorable mention for Freshmen All-America, Shields’ blinding quickness was neutralized by slippery hands, the depth chart’s glass ceiling and – one can only assume given the number of similar cases – a dearth of competent coaching. Shields, if anything, was a casualty of Randy Shannon and his rotating cast of hapless offensive coordinators.

Miami: refuge of the underutilized.

So how did we get here? How did we get to a point in which a special teams gunner turned 11th-hour DB turned NFL Draft dodger would become the last Hurricane standing in a post-season that also included the likes of Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, Reggie Wayne, Devin Hester, and Jonathan Vilma? How is Sam Shields, of all people, the first rookie to ever get a sack and two picks in a single playoff game?

Great question, and one Shields himself doesn’t have an answer for.

“I never thought of this,” he said in the days leading up to the NFC Championship, adding, lest there be any notion to the contrary, “It’s crazy.”

College teammate and current Detroit Lion Randy Phillips says Shields “hung in there,” which is at once an understatement and, really, the only three-word combination that can begin to make sense of Shields’ reality-defying turnaround. In fact, the junior receiver was not a castoff from his own side of the ball, but instead the recipient of an offer he could’ve refused, but didn’t.

Wesley McGriff, Miami’s defensive backs coach from ’07 to the onset of the Golden Era, doggedly encouraged Shields to switch positions going into his senior year, insisting that his future protege was a “big-time cornerback wasting [his] time at receiver.”

These kind of things happen in Remember The Titans, not at major FBS universities (unless, of course, said university employs Randy Lennard Shannon).

Shields, quite obviously, has busted his ass ever since – at a seemingly unfruitful ‘Canes Pro Day, as a free agent looking from the outside in on a 53-man roster, as a hotshot nickelback playing behind only a future Hall of Famer and his Pro Bowl counterpart. He’s never won a championship, not even in Pop Warner. He didn’t intercept his first pass – college, pro or otherwise – until Nov. 7. Now he’s 13 days away from playing on the biggest stage in organized football. Why? Because Sam Shields – unlike me and thousands of others – never gave up on Sam Shields.

- Robbie

(all quotes via The Palm Beach Post)