Truth is, I didn’t know much about it at all until some people told me I was the second player in Panthers history to get it. It’s only awarded four times a season, so I started to think maybe it was a pretty big deal.
But I’ve never really been big on the individual stuff. It feels good, it’s something to strive for, but I want to be a champion—not the Defensive Player of the Month.
If you win an award, that’s like a bonus, but winning a Super Bowl dominates my thoughts and dreams and just about everything I do.
Every day I picture myself in a game, making a play to win it. I do that all the time, and it’s the same thing, every game.
Every night football crosses my mind at some point. They say your dreams are your unconscious desires.
When I set a goal I stay focused on it, I constantly think about it. It’s easy to forget when you get tired, tired of practice, tired of meetings. Every day you have to go out there and say, what can I do today to make myself a little better? To help the team win? When you stay focused all the time, it’s easier to maintain a high level of intensity.
Not everyone can stay that focused; anybody can do it for a day. Being consistent is hard. Most guys in this league are just as good or better than me, but they can’t stay as consistent as me, as focused and intense. Those days when you’re tired, when you push through it and something good comes out of it, that makes you feel like it was all worth it.
We play at Oakland on Sunday. Amazingly, we didn’t have a good practice on Wednesday. You would assume after a bye week you would come back mentally fresh, but it just wasn’t a good day for us. Guys were making a lot of small mistakes on stuff that we’ve repped a million times since training camp.
Today, we had a great practice, the intensity was there and guys hardly made any mistakes. Jake was on fire, putting the ball wherever he wanted.
It’s a dangerous game against the Raiders. When you play a game that you’re supposed to win, some guys go in extremely confident and think they can win just by showing up. It’s a cliché, but it’s true … any given Sunday in the NFL, any team can win.
My approach is, the Raiders are a very talented team with a lot of big-play capability. They can just put it together, go out there and have fun, rally behind all the critics saying they don’t have it.
We’re halfway through, when the true season starts. At 6-2 we’ve set ourselves up to be in a good position, but so have a lot of other teams. Every game is huge right now, and teams can still turn it around. It comes down to winning one game every week, so the next game is always huge.
We’ve been real good at home, so getting home-field advantage for the playoffs is really important to me right now. We’re unbeaten at home, so it doesn’t matter who we’re playing or what predicament we put ourselves in, we know we can come back from it.
That’s a good thing to see and be a part of.
Carolina Panthers starting middle linebacker Jon Beason, the NFC Defensive Player of the Month for October, writes a blog for playerpress.com at www.jonbeason.com.