John MacKinnon
Edmonton Journal
EDMONTON – The football term “controlled scrimmage” is only slightly oxymoronic, if you think about it.
Yes, Edmonton Eskimo Head Coach Kavis Reed made clear he would enforce a five- or 10-yard force field around his quarterbacks on Saturday in the CFL club’s first intra-squad game. It worked. Nobody took a cheap shot at any of the signal callers.
But the coach wanted to see some things from his players: speed, explosiveness, aggressiveness, on and on.
Endless repetitions in practice drills are one thing, but in a competitive training camp, jobs are won or lost according to the performances in live action.
There is competition all over the depth chart, including along the interior of the defensive line, which is where 25-year-old rookie Ko Quaye is scuffling for a job.
“Ko Quaye is quietly having a very steady, consistent camp,” Reed said about the six-foot-one, 295-pound tackle from Brooklyn Park, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis. “When you put the film on, he’s seldom out of position, he’s where he’s supposed to be.
“He’s almost assignment perfect, when we grade him, and he’s making the plays.”
Quaye, who honed his skills as a University of South Dakota Coyote, had three cups of coffee in the NFL, brief stints with the Jacksonville Jaguars, Buffalo Bills and Cleveland Browns, before signing with the Eskimos in February.
In Defensive Coordinator Mark Nelson’s scheme this season, the Eskimos will revert to mostly using a 4-3 alignment — four down linemen and three linebackers.
Second-year tackle Ted Laurent and free agent non-import signing Don Oramasionwu appear to be locked in as starters with Quaye and Almondo Sewell also in the mix to be part of the rotation.
“We’re blessed with extremely talented interior defensive linemen,” Reed said. “Donnie O and Laurent have done a phenomenal job, and Almondo Sewell … is performing extremely well.”
What Reed is not yet seeing from Quaye is the explosiveness that makes a player stand out.
“He’s having one of those camps where (you wonder) will the race go to the fast guy or does it go to the slow, steady guy? We’ll see. The Tortoise and the Hare might be the analogy here.”
Looks, including practice looks can be deceiving. Quaye is no giant, but he’s bigger than he appears. And he can move.
“When I’m in street clothes and people try to guess what I weight, they’re always thinking it’s in the 240 or 250-pound range,” Quaye said. “I haven’t been 250 pounds since my senior year in high school.”
Since Reed doesn’t expect to release any players until after the first pre-season game against the Stampeders Friday in Calgary, there is plenty of time and ample opportunity for players to make an impression.
The importance of timing is something Quaye learned early in life, if only by osmosis. When he was four years old, his mother, Elizabeth, hustled Ko, his two-year-old brother. Al, and his sister onto the last KLM flight out of Monrovia, Liberia, as that African country descended into its first bloody civil war.
The warlord Charles Taylor emerged from that conflict as the country’s leader. He proved to be one of the most vicious dictators in modern world history until he was indicted on war crimes charges in 2003, prompting him to resign and flee to exile in Nigeria.
Last month, Taylor was convicted of 11 war crimes charges including terror, murder and rape, and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
In the 1990s, Ko’s father, Alfred, worked for the Liberian embassy in Paris, which is where the family lived for a year or so before emigrating to the United States. Elizabeth and Al moved first, settling first in New Jersey, then in Brooklyn Park, Minn. Alfred, Ko and his sister followed soon after.
Given his age at the time, Quaye has no memories of that era. In fact, he first learned of that harrowing time from his parents, who were interviewed for a documentary film about the Quaye brothers when both were high school stars in Brooklyn Park, years ago.
“I guess it’s something they (his parents) don’t really talk about,” Quaye said. “He caused a lot of terror for a country.”
For Quaye, his connection to that troubled past might become more meaningful later in life. Right now, he’s focused on earning a job with the Eskimos.
His pathway to the CFL is far more conventional than his brush with history. At South Dakota, understandably, the big rivalry was with North Dakota, whose star receiver was Weston Dressler, now a mainstay with the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
In the three years Quaye played there, the Coyotes never did beat the Fighting Sioux.
“I kind of hold a slight grudge against the UND boys.”
He’ll have to make the Eskimos if he wants to exact some measure of revenge against the likes of Dressler, though. That Tortoise-and-Hare tuss
le won’t be sorted out for a while.
jmackinnon@edmontonjournal.com
Twitter.com/rjmackinnon
Check out my blog, Sweatsox, at edmontonjournal.com/blogs
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