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Keion Crossen charged at Patrick Mahomes with the speed of a mischievous toddler running from his mother.
Two decades before he became a key special teams contributor for the Giants and the reason defensive coordinator Patrick Graham was able to design an impromptu play for sacking Mahomes and stalling the Chiefs in a game on Nov. 1, Crossen showed his wheels to everyone he encountered.
“You could not catch him,” said Winnie Moses, Crossen’s mother. “Everywhere he went, he had to run, and I’m yelling, ‘Slow down, Keion. Slow down! You are going to hurt yourself!’ He’d say, ‘I’m going to be all right, mom.’ And he never hurt himself. Whatever he does, he does it 100 percent — but he was too little to be running so fast!”
If you think the fastest player in that “Monday Night Football” game was Chiefs receiver Tyreek Hill — nicknamed “Cheetah” — or Giants receiver John Ross — who set the NFL combine record for fastest 40-yard dash (4.22 seconds) — then maybe you don’t know about the 25-year-old Crossen.
“I’d arguably say I’m the fastest guy in this league when we’re talking about acceleration,” Crossen told The Post. “I’ve taken a lot of pride in figuring out how to implement track speed into the game. You can only go so fast on the field because you have to play within the scheme, whether you are defense, offense or special teams. But speed is personal for me. That’s what I do best.”
Crossen has run 20 mph on 60 plays this season, which was at least 12 more than every other player in the league entering Sunday’s action, according to NFL NextGenStats. He led in that category last year and has reached 20 mph on 234 plays since 2019 (25 more than the next-fastest man).
The Giants — like the Patriots and Texans before them — primarily deploy Crossen’s speed as a gunner on punts rather than as a defensive back. A gunner topped 22 mph 11 times over the first nine weeks of this season. The tally reads: Crossen 4, Rest of NFL combined 7.
“I think guys here know what it is and tip the cap,” Crossen when asked if he is challenged to many races on the practice field. “At the end of the day, it’s all fun and games about who is the fastest. All I care about is that we play as a team and win as a team.”
Moses grew up as one of eight siblings in a family of athleticism and education, raised at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Fifth Street in Newark. She still has the second-place trophy she earned in the 200-meter dash when representing Barringer High School in the 1970s, as well as her son’s many track awards — some from the two years he lived in Newark with his grandmother.
“Speed demon” is in Crossen’s DNA on both sides, as his father, Thomas, ran high school track in North Carolina. The family used to race until the parents and older brother Thomas got tired and left Keion and Tanisha — his look-a-like older sister by 18 months — to settle the score.
“I put him and his sister in the street and I said, ‘The fastest one gets candy,’ ” Moses said. “Wherever Tanisha was, there goes Keion. Whatever she did, he did. She ran, he ran. He wanted to be faster.”
Crossen’s legs took him to second place in the 400-meter dash at the North Carolina high school state championships. After a four-year football career at Western Carolina, Crossen ran the 40-yard dash in 4.32 seconds at his Pro Day. The Patriots spent a 2018 seventh-round draft pick on that speed for special teams coordinator Joe Judge to harness.
Three years later, Judge, as Giants head coach, signed off on trading a 2023 sixth-round pick to acquire Crossen. He filled a hole on the punt team, though he was fined $6,133 last week for unnecessary roughness after a late hit on Raiders punter A.J. Cole.
“I would say I’m the best at what I do,” said Crossen, who considers Pro Bowl votes for special teamers to be a popularity contest. “I close ground really fast, so I’m never in a true panic when it’s is all about, ‘How fast can I get there?’”
The Giants stifled the Chiefs’ explosiveness with a heavy dose of two-high safeties. But Graham figured there might be a point in a close game where an exotic look was needed to confuse Mahomes.
So, Graham, defensive line coach Sean Spencer and outside linebackers coach Kevin Sherrer had the idea over text message to use Crossen as a quarterback spy. On a third-and-goal from the 8-yard line in the fourth quarter, as Mahomes scrambled left, Crossen’s speed burst led to an 8-yard sack. The spy package worked so well that the Giants tried it once more in the game — resulting in a strip-sack by Leonard Williams.
“We knew there was going to be a moment where we needed it, and he got it done,” Graham said. “Kudos to him. He’s always ready.”
Football teams spend months drilling the same plays over and over. One key to the Giants’ recent three-game defensive turnaround is Graham’s innovation and willingness to let players trust their instincts.
“We might have walked through the play once,” Crossen said. “He asked me, ‘Do you think you can get him?’ I said, ‘Hell yeah, I can.’ Coach Graham is smart, and I knew if he thought of it then he had a lot of confidence it would work. When I get my chance on defense, I have to make the best of it.”
At her home in Texas, Moses ran around the house celebrating the sack — then wore out the rewind button on the television remote control.
“I watched it 100 times,” she said. “I don’t think I went to sleep until about 3 a.m.”
Moses just isn’t as tired as she once was trying to slow down young Keion. That’s for NFL opponents to figure out now.
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