Terry Jones
Edmonton Sun
Eskimos quarterback Mike Reilly has said it often. There’s only one stat he really cares about and it’s the one on the scoreboard when the final gun is fired. But now, more than ever, it’s visible from the cheap seats.
“I don’t really care about numbers. I don’t look at those. I look at wins and losses and I know that in the last two years since (Head Coach) Chris Jones came here we’ve been able to string together quite a few wins.” he said.
He’s 30-years-old and in the prime time of his career to make his name in this league as a winner. And he knows it.
When the season was about to begin, Reilly was looking forward to the season like never before. He’d just come off an off-season of rehabbing a late season foot injury.
“I should play the best football I’ve played as a pro,” is how he put it prior to training camp.
He didn’t even make it to Commonwealth Stadium. In the league opener in Fort McMurray he suffered a knee injury that kept him out until Labour Day.
“You miss the first half of the season, you’re not going to have the best year of your career stat wise but we can still have the best year of my career if we win the Grey Cup. That’s the goal. And we certainly have a possibility of doing that.”
“It’s kind of interesting with my career. It hasn’t been an easy road. I came from a small school,” he said of Central Washington.
“When you come from a small school to the pros there’s always going to be obstacles and things. There were a lot of times when I wondered if it was even worth it,” he said of bouncing from Pittsburgh to Green Bay to New Orleans to Buffalo to Seattle, back to Green Bay to St. Louis and back to Seattle before he went north to join the BC Lions in the CFL.
“You question whether you want to keep playing. But every one of those times when I’d been in the position where I asked myself ‘Do I just give up or keep fighting?’ I kept fighting. I think that’s why I play the game the way that I play it because I know that no matter how terrible it has gone that if you continue to fight, something good is going to happen.
“Because of everything I’ve gone through in my career I’m going to be the type of player saying ‘Whatever my team needs to help us win, to give us the best chance to win, that’s what is important to me.’
“If they need me to hand the ball off 35 or 40 times, if they need me to pull it and carry it myself 30 or 40 times, if they need me to throw it 30 or 40 times or some combination of those possibilities, I’m going to do whatever is asked and do it the best that I can.
“And the great thing is that I think every player on our team plays that way. That’s why it is so much fun to play for this team.”
Reilly believes a quarterback has to be a leader.
“I’m more of a leader by example. I’m not a huge, rah, rah guy that’s going to pump up the crowd and pump up the players. I have no problem getting in guys faces or picking guys up when they’re down. But I think you have to be able to read people. I think you have to understand what motivates them. And, to me, the biggest thing is if you’re going to ask somebody to do something you have to be willing to do it yourself.
“I watch a lot of movies set back as far as the middle ages and every time they’re going into battle, there are two ways the general goes into battle with his troops.
“Sometimes you see a guy leading everybody at the very front and he’s willing to go in there and swing the sword with his guys and it’s a big risk. I think guys fight harder for that guy than the guy who sits back on the horseback at the back of the battlefield ordering his guys around.”
