All Jake Ceresna cares about is having a strong finish during the last three games of the regular season and into the playoffs – both individually and as a team.
The 24-year-old defensive tackle actually stepped up his game three weeks ago after fellow defensive lineman Mike Moore was injured early in a CFL contest at Ottawa.
He had a season-high six defensive tackles and a quarterback sack against the RedBlacks that day and followed it up with six more tackles and two sacks in the next game against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
“I was rolling for those two weeks,” Ceresna said. “I felt really good. Going into Ottawa, I was there all last year, so I kinda had a good feel for their offence and what they like to do. Playing against them, I could see everything happening before it happened sort of thing just from practising with them.
“Going into Winnipeg, I just came out there and played,” he continued. “Sometimes you have a good game, and sometimes you can play at the same level, but the plays don’t come to you. I feel like I played at the same level last week (when he was shutout on the stats sheet against the Saskatchewan Roughriders). There just wasn’t as many plays to be made.
“You’ve just got to keep with it and keep grinding and, eventually, something is going to come your way.”
Ceresna gets to play against his former team for a second time in three weeks at 3 p.m. Saturday when the RedBlacks visit The Brick Field at Commonwealth Stadium.
The Eskimos will be looking to snap a three-game losing streak and prevent the two-game regular-season series from being swept again by one of the teams for a fifth year in a row.
“Definitely a big game coming up,” he said. “The pressure’s on, and we’ll see what we’re made of. We’ve just got to go out there and play our game and come out with a victory.”
A win against the RedBlacks will get the Eskimos, 7-8, back in the hunt for the final playoff berth in the West Division with games remaining against the two teams they’re battling for third place – Winnipeg Blue Bombers, 8-7, and BC Lions, 7-7.
But just because Ceresna had a good outing the last time against Ottawa doesn’t mean he’ll be able to repeat the performance on Saturday.
“Every game is a little different, even if you play the same team twice,” he said. “I’m just looking to make plays and help our team win.”
Ceresna doesn’t harbour any ill feelings for the RedBlacks because they dealt him to the Eskimos in February. Although he initially felt blindsided by the trade after his rookie CFL season, he was shocked when he discovered Odell Willis was included in the transaction.
Willis, 34, is a popular 10-year CFL veteran defensive end who was known as the Mayor of Commonwealth during his five seasons in Edmonton.
“It’s a compliment,” Ceresna said. “Brock (Sunderland, the Eskimos general manager and vice-president of football operations) was in Ottawa when I first got there, and he knows me really well. They wanted to get younger on the defensive line, and he really liked me from Ottawa, so he brought me over.”
Ceresna never felt like he had to replace Willis because they play different positions.
“They traded for me here because they wanted me to be the player I am and to do the things I’m capable of doing,” he said.
Fortunately for the Eskimos, Ceresna maybe even better than advertised. He worked hard on his pass rush after thinking he was “a little too one-dimensional” in his attacking options with the RedBlacks last year. A defensive end in college, he had to re-learn the techniques used by defensive tackles in the middle of the line.
“It actually turned out to be a really great thing,” Ceresna said about his trade to the Esks. “I’m excited it happened. I love it here in Edmonton. I really like the guys on the team, which makes it really easy to adjust. And I get to play next to Mondo (five-time CFL all-star Almondo Sewell, whose contract was extended on Friday through the 2020 season) and (Alex) Bazzie and (Kwaku) Boateng … just a lot of great pass-rushers here and to be a part of this organization.”
Sewell, 31, has been a huge inspiration because of how he works out and prepares for each game, how he defends against the run and what he can do on the pass rush.
“He’s played in this league for a long time,” said Ceresna. “He’s been an all-star forever. He’s a good guy to learn from. I’ve definitely picked up a couple of pass rush moves from him, like his hump move.”
Ceresna has even picked up Sewell’s celebratory somersaults after sacking the quarterback.
“When I came here, I saw him do it, and I asked the guys,” Ceresna explained. “They said, ‘It was a tradition here that they used to do.’ I was like, ‘Cool,’ so I started doing it too. I hope we can bring it back as a defensive line and defence.”
He actually started doing somersaults during the off-season in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a new approach he took this past winter for conditioning and body-control movement and hand-fighting techniques.
From a previous off-season, there’s a video of Ceresna jumping to the top of a 48-inch box from a standstill position.
“I did that when I was like 300 pounds, too,” he said proudly. “I trained really hard at Varsity House in New Jersey. They just really pushed me to my limits.”
All of Ceresna’s hard work has resulted in what he called “a good season” – 25 defensive tackles, six sacks and a forced fumble so far.
“My goal right now is to finish with eight sacks on the season,” he said.
Ceresna, who had only 18 tackles and two sacks in 14 games with Ottawa last year, was born in Danbury, Conn., and grew up in New Fairfield, Conn., an affluent town with a population of 30,000 located about an hour’s drive from New York City. He was a New York Yankees fan growing up, even had the team logo shaved into the back of his head for a couple of summers, so he hopes the Boston Red Sox don’t win the World Series.
Even though he’s an East Coast guy through and through, Ceresna says he feels comfortable in Edmonton.
“The only thing is it’s a little drier out here so I’ve got a humidifier at home for when I sleep because I’d wake up and my mouth would be so dry I’d have to drink some water,” he said. “Other than that, it’s been good. I like it out here. It’s a cool area.”
Well, he hasn’t appreciated the early start on winter, but he’d have a lot of company on that one.
It’s always been all about sports
Ceresna has an older brother, Dan, but didn’t follow in his footsteps. Dan played only one season of football and is now a farmer in Pennsylvania.
“He liked farming a lot better,” Jake said. “That’s his passion. I was more a sports guy.”
Jake gravitated to sports at an early age.
“I just loved playing sports,” he said. “It wasn’t always football. Whatever sport we were playing at the time, I just loved being active and running outside and having fun.”
He started playing baseball when he was five, football when he was eight and tried wrestling and basketball along the way.
“I knew in high school after my freshman and sophomore year that football was really going to be my main sport,” he said.
He was already six-foot-four and 250 pounds in high school when he recorded 111 tackles during his senior season. He had 142 tackles and 14-1/2 sacks (including 9-1/2 sacks as a senior) while playing as one of the three down linemen in a 3-4 defence for three years at SUNY-Cortland (State University of New York College at Cortland, N.Y.).
“I had a really good senior year,” said Ceresna, who needed only some green paint to dress up as The Hulk for Halloween one year in college. “We had a great team, and we were just getting after the quarterback.”
Cortland Head Coach Dan MacNeill was also a big influence.
“He’s a legendary coach,” Ceresna said. “I learned a lot of great philosophies and things about life from him. It was a really good time. We had a lot of success there. In my senior year, we won the conference championship.”
Ceresna had added another inch and 55 pounds by the time he was invited to join the New York Jets early in their 2016 NFL training camp but has since dropped his weight to around 285, 290, so he could be quicker in the CFL game.
“My parents are both on the shorter size,” he said. “My brother is six-two, and I’m six-five. My dad always says we have some distant relatives who used to be taller.
“My dad was always a bulky, strong man. He was a farmer growing up, so he always had a lot of strength. That’s where I get my strength from. I’m not really sure where the height comes from. Just something in the water, I guess.”
Dream comes true
Ceresna’s lifelong dream to play a professional sport might not have looked very likely when he was playing football at the NCAA Division III level, but he’s made the most of his opportunities after college.
He was invited to a three-day rookie mini-camp with the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and was picked up three weeks later by the RedBlacks for training camp (he was released after breaking his hand) in 2016. When the hand healed, he accepted a workout with the Green Bay Packers, who were desperately looking for offensive linemen. He had the right size but didn’t have the techniques, so he returned to Cortland to learn how to be an offensive lineman while helping out as a coach in case another opportunity came up after the season.
Two days later, the Jets invited him to training camp, which was already underway.
“It was cool that I got to keep playing defensive line and I got the opportunity right away,” he said. “It was definitely a great experience to be a part of the New York Jets organization (incidentally, replicas of Ceresna’s No. 72 Jets jersey are still available online at sale prices).
“I was bouncing around for a little while, and I had two injuries, which kind of sucked,” he said. “I broke my hand in Ottawa, and I hurt my ankle with the Jets. It was just kind of disappointing because my whole football career I never really had any injuries, and I always played every single game. So to finally make it to where you want to make it and get injured, it’s just disappointing.”
Ceresna was placed on the Jets’ injured-reserve list after he suffered a high ankle sprain and was released three weeks into the regular season. He re-signed with Ottawa in May 2017.
Ceresna is the second SUNY-Cortland player to make it to the pros, following in the footsteps of R-Kal Truluck, an undrafted NFL free agent who played 41 games over four seasons from 2002-05 with Kansas City, Green Bay Packers and Arizona Cardinals. Truluck also played in the CFL with Saskatchewan from 1998-2000 and the Montreal Alouettes in 2001 and 2006-07.
Switching up the O-line
Matt O’Donnell will have a more confined workspace on Saturday.
The six-foot-11 O’Donnell is shifting back to right guard, a position he has played the most since joining the Eskimos in 2012, after 14 consecutive games at left tackle, where there’s a lot more space to defend.
Tommie Draheim, the starting left tackle who broke his thumb in the season opener at Winnipeg, is finally ready to return to the lineup.
“The guys are quicker, a lot more agile,” O’Donnell said about playing tackle. “You definitely have to move your feet and cover them up.
“You had to be quicker, and you had to make sure you’re sitting upright because you have good vision, too, for safeties and different weird blitzes because you might not always have the defensive end depending on what they throw at you.
“You’ve got to make sure you have your head on a swivel and study the playbook.”
Now he’s going to be playing “in more of a phone booth. There’s not as much space. You’ve got to get on guys quicker. They’re a lot stronger. They’re a lot bigger weight-wise, so you’ve got to make sure you get your hands on them right away. There’s not so much finesse. You’ve just got to meet force with force.”
Draheim, a former RedBlacks player, played most of the first game of the season after suffering a Bennett fracture at the base of his left thumb. He had surgery a couple of days later.
“I feel good. I feel fresh,” he said. “It’s good to go against Ottawa because I know them pretty well from the last couple of years.”
Veteran centre Justin Sorensen, who sat out last week’s game in Regina, is still listed as a backup behind David Beard.
The Eskimos have given up 11 quarterback sacks in the last three games after surrendering only 24 sacks in their first 12 games.
“All of the boys just need to pull together and make sure we keep the QB clean, so they can do their job, and we’ll get back in this win column, and everything will be great in this world,” O’Donnell said.
Reilly has the flu
Quarterback Mike Reilly was nowhere to be seen when veteran QB Kevin Glenn ran the Eskimos offence during Friday’s walk-through session at the Commonwealth Community Recreation Centre Field House.
Reilly apparently has the flu and wanted to stay home, so he didn’t infect anyone else.
“He’ll be ready tomorrow,” said Eskimos Head Coach Jason Maas.
Glenn, the 39-year-old, 20-year veteran who hasn’t played a single down this season, doesn’t expect to be playing Saturday.
“We’ll see,” he said. “(Reilly’s) a tough guy. I’ve seen the guy get hit a couple of times where I ran to pick up my helmet, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, he’s getting up.’ ”
Glenn said this season may be the longest he’s ever gone without playing in a game if he wasn’t injured.
“It’s been a pretty long time,” he said. “Even in my rookie year, I might have played in the fifth or sixth game of the season. Ever since then, I’ve played on a consistent basis.”
The Eskimos have been trying to get their offence back on track after some uncharacteristic outings in recent games. Edmonton has had 34 possessions over more than nine consecutive quarters without scoring a touchdown – the Eskimos’ longest TD drought in 133 games since 2011 – and put up only 15 points on the scoreboard over the last two games.
“As much as it looks like there was tons to fix, there wasn’t that much to fix,” Maas said about last week’s game with the Roughriders. “We’ve played better than what our offensive production has been, but at the same time, we’ve got to be better.”
Turnovers have been a problem of late, with 13 turnovers in their last 32 possessions and seven interceptions and four lost fumbles in the last three games.
“Thankful for us, our defence has played well enough to keep us in two of those three games with minus-11 turnovers,” said Maas, who admitted that Reilly “needs to be more accurate at times” with his passes while pointing out that they worked on the QB’s footwork this week, among other things.
“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Reilly said. “We know how to play good football on the offensive side, but we’ve got to get back to that and believe in that. We’ve got to believe that we’re capable of it.”
“I have a ton of belief in our football team,” Maas said. “I have a ton of belief that the work they’ve put in this week is going to lead us to success ultimately.”
Short yardage
National cornerback Arjen Colquhoun will make his first start of the season at the field (wide-side corner). “It’s been a little bit of a crappy season; I caught the injury bug,” said Colquhoun, who has missed 13 of the Eskimos’ 15 games with various leg injuries and hasn’t played since Aug. 9 at BC “I’m just happy to be back out there. I want to play with Forrest (Hightower), I want to play with AG (Aaron Grymes), I want to play with Kinger (Neil King). I played with them last year, and I’m just excited to be back out there. We have playoffs still ahead, all of our goals are still ahead of us. I’m just happy that I could be back for these last three games and playoffs and the Grey Cup and just contribute.”
This is the second time this season the Eskimos had only four days between games. The first time was the Labour Day Classic and Rematch contests in the first week of September.
Middle linebacker J.C. Sherritt is on pace to make 100 tackles in a season for the second time in his eight-year CFL career. He ranks fourth in league with 85 defensive tackles.
Kicker Sean Whyte has moved into 20th place on the CFL’s all-time scoring list with 1,259 points.