Tara Sullivan

Sports Columnist, @Record_Tara

EAST RUTHERFORD – Jason Pierre-Paul surely wasn’t going out on any kind of football limb with the message he delivered to a teammate before Sunday afternoon’s game against the Bears.

“You’re going to get a pick today,” Pierre-Paul recalled telling Landon Collins.

“Not a risky prediction,” the veteran defensive end would admit later, a nod to what Collins had done in the team’s three previous games, snaring two interceptions in London against the Rams followed by one against the Eagles and one more against Cincinnati.

Collins, the second-year safety out of Alabama, wasted no time answering his locker room elder, telling Pierre-Paul that both he and fellow DE Olivier Vernon “would get two sacks a pop.” Pierre-Paul more than delivered, notching 2½ sacks along with a forced fumble, and Vernon added one of his own.

But it was Collins, once again, who made the biggest play of the day, Collins, once again, who got his hands on the football in a crucial moment, Collins, once again, who proved himself one of the NFL’s preeminent closers, his interception with 1:11 left to play securing the Giants fifth straight win, 22-16. On a defense that is continuing to emerge as one of the best in the NFL, it is Collins making the biggest, perhaps most-surprising surge. With veterans all around him, from the Super Bowl-winning JPP to the big-money free agent addition Vernon, from the team captain/linebacker Jonathan Casillas to the experienced cornerback tandem of Janoris Jenkins and Dominque Rodgers-Cromartie, Collins is the one they look to now.

This is the ground floor of greatness.

“I don’t know who’s playing better than him in the NFL right now,” Casillas said. “Call it luck. Call it whatever. He’s at the right place at the right time. He’s making tackles, PBUs, sacks, he’s doing everything. He’s so much smarter than he was last year. He’s still the same player, a tremendous athlete for sure, but he’s so much smarter for sure. You can see that now.

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“He’s definitely leading us right now, and we look to him,” Rodgers-Cromartie said.

“If the season were to end today, I would put all my money on Landon Collins being an All Pro,” fellow safety Nat Berhe said.

If the season were to end today, Collins would certainly be in the discussion for defensive player of the year, proving just how far he’s come — and not just from a rookie year when he led the Giants in defensive snaps but often struggled to keep pace with the NFL game, grew frustrated with missed opportunities to intercept the ball or fought inconsistency as he played alongside six different safeties on the opposite side. Collins didn’t even play defense until he arrived to Louisiana’s Dutchtown High School as a freshman running back.

“There was a running there back called Eddie Lacy,” Collins said, grinning as the audience nodded in recognition of Lacy, currently a Green Bay Packer. “We went to the same high school together. I was a running back since I was 4 years told. When I got there, there was no running back for me. I went to safety and then I played over there.”

Collins would follow Lacy’s path out of Dutchtown to Alabama (picking it over hometown LSU, much to the chagrin of his mother), winning a national title before entering the NFL draft. When he was still available after the first round, Giants general manager Jerry Reese went to work overnight, engineering a Day 2 trade that gave the Giants the first pick of the second round, which they used on Collins. Team brass was overjoyed, fully confident they’d snared a first-round talent with a second-round pick.

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Collins is proving them right. Already a two-time defensive player of the week this season, he took the hard path of his rookie season, lost weight, got in better shape, studied film like a maniac and came back renewed.

“It feels tremendously different,” he said. “I’m confident in every call that I make. I’m confident in every position I’m in. And I know how to just read and know the concepts, and know where my help is at. And I just play ball from there. The confidence level is through the roof compared to last year.

“The game is very slow now. Everything just comes to you now.”

Take the final pick, when Collins was sure the Bears would try to duplicate a play the Bengals nearly made the previous weekend, when A.J. Green beat the secondary only to have Andy Dalton misfire due to the pressure the Giants put on his pass. This time, Collins was ready.

“We were expecting a deep ball. Either a deep ball or a screen. But they went deep,” he said. “They needed a first down or to get the score. Last week, we got beat on a dig-and-go by A.J. but they didn’t get it. He almost got it out there. They ran the same thing, but this time it was an out-and-up, and I just sat back there and waited on it. There’s no purpose on me playing close to the line of scrimmage, so I just laid back, saw that, and the ball just sailed and I came underneath and caught it.”

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From there, he started dancing, met first by cornerback Trevin Wade, who joined the celebration. Within seconds, he was engulfed by delighted teammates, feeling it as they patted his helmet, slapped his back and thanked him for saving them once again.

“I told him to shake my hand so I can get some of that juju,” Berhe said.

“’That’s it,’” Casillas remembered thinking. “’The game’s over. Checkmate.’ No matter what was going on, the ebb and flow of the game, the offense trying to close the game out, we knew we were going to have to go out there at least one time [get a turnover]. It ended up being late, but who but 21 to come up with the play to win the game?”

It’s a recurring theme. The Giants turn to the defense to close it out. The defense turns to Collins to make it happen.

“He’s a ball hawk,” Ben McAdoo said.

E-mail: sullivan@northjersey.com