Don Landry | Argonauts Insider
We all saw it. Argos’ linebacker Cory Greenwood felt it.
In the team’s last outing, a 25-20 Week Three loss to the Calgary Stampeders, Greenwood started the game a house afire, and never let up, finishing the night with seven tackles, as well as two more on special teams.
Greenwood didn’t experience anything out of the ordinary during warm-ups that night. No gut feeling that his game was about to assert itself. However, right from Calgary’s first play from scrimmage, he felt different.
“Those first couple of plays, I don’t know what it was,” he says. “Things were clicking. I was just diagnosing the plays. I knew what was going on and reacting and making plays.”
The 30 year old native of Kingston, in his first full season of CFL football, is starting to acquire one of the most valuable commodities a player can have; the feeling that things are happening naturally.
“Every game I’m feeling a lot more comfortable out there,” he says. “The runs that (the opponents’) offence is trying to attack us with, the route combinations, the way they’re trying to set it up on the field. I’m just a lot more comfortable.”
As the Argos prepare to meet the B.C. Lions in Vancouver Friday night, Greenwood is feeling excited, with the gears of his game starting to mesh more smoothly. Another challenge awaits in the form of Lions’ tailback Andrew Harris – “He runs good routes, he’s fast, he’s shifty,” Greenwood says – and the Toronto front seven will need to slow him down. “I don’t take anyone lightly,” Greenwood answers, when asked just how big a challenge Harris is, comparatively speaking.
Generally, it’s good not to take anyone lightly if you’re a pro football player, but Greenwood has a more specific reason not to. “I haven’t played every team in this league yet,” he explains. So he doesn’t have a “book,” if you will, on Harris or on many others for that matter.
After four years in the NFL spent primarily as a special teams tackler – an experience for which Greenwood is very thankful – the Concordia grad is jazzed about picking up where he left off when he left university ball.
“I missed, like actually playing football, you know what I mean? Like starting. Being the guy that people looked to to make plays,” he says.
He hasn’t yet arrived at full capacity comfort, although the Calgary game was a big step towards that. Every week, Greenwood is getting more and more back to a second nature kind of play. Every week, the Argos’ coaching staff adds a little more to the schemes and responsibilities he needs to master.
“I definitely have tons of room to grow as a linebacker,” he admits. “There’s still a lot more plays, a lot more stuff that I need to see. Different scenarios. I haven’t seen it all yet.”
He looks forward to it. Getting a taste of being in the proverbial “zone” in the game against the Stampeders, Greenwood explains how a linebacker knows he’s approaching that stage:
“When your read (his assigned opponent to key on) has taken his first couple of steps, you know what the play is. I feel like I’m getting closer to that stage. But, like I said, there’s lots of football left. Different situations and scenarios that I haven’t been put in.”
On Friday night, Travis Lulay could very well be one of Greenwood’s “reads” on any given play. The Lions’ quarterback is back in the elite category this season and he made a meal out of Saskatchewan’s defence last week, rushing six times for 105 yards, conducting the “zone read” running play to perfection.
“It was almost like ‘you know what? I dare you to run on us,’” Greenwood says of the Roughriders’ set-up that night. “And he pulled it and he ran. It didn’t even look like they had a player accounting for him. That’s just scheme and assignment football.”
According to Greenwood, it’s up to the Argos’ defensive ends to disguise exactly what their intentions are as they rush, making Lulay’s choice not so clear when it comes to whether he hands off to Harris or keeps. Beyond that, the linebackers have the difficult prospect of looking for the fake, a much more difficult task than it appears to be on television. Sometimes the quarterback and running back get lost for a split second behind all those big bodies on the line of scrimmage. And that’s all it takes.
That’s the little picture, though. As for the bigger one?
“Once you get past the thinking part, you’re just reacting,” Greenwood says. “That’s when you can play full speed and that’s when you start making a lot of plays.”
Cory Greenwood is progressing. Is his big game in Calgary a sign that things are lining up for him?
“Things are just kinda clickin’,” he says again.