Don Landry | Argonauts.ca Insider
“I don’t think too many people even know my first name,” says A.J. Jefferson, settling in to talk about his background and about life as an aggressive, first-year, short side (boundary) corner in the Canadian Football League.
Funny as it sounds, Jefferson’s made his name with those initials. For the record, he’s perfectly willing to have you call him Anthony, but nobody really does that. “Pretty much I’ve always gone by A.J. my whole life,” he says, explaining that his father’s name is also Anthony and the “J” – as you might expect – stands for “junior.”
At 27 years old, Anthony Ray Jefferson is fast rising as a big play difference maker for the Toronto Argonauts, a quick study who has turned around two of the team’s seven games with highlight reel plays that were catalysts for wins in Saskatchewan in Week 2 and in Winnipeg, last Friday night.
His fourth quarter punt return TD, against the Bombers, came with the Argos struggling on offence and the team trailing, 20-14. “Our guys pretty much cleared a lane for me and all I had to do was get vertical,” Jefferson says of the 69 yard run, opting to choose his 100 yard interception return, in Regina, as his favourite of the two big momentum swingers.
“The pick-six was definitely something to remember, for me,” he says, “because I did not play well that game. That was something that was a complete turnaround in the game. Got the whole team fired up. Definitely stuck out for me.”
Admitting that he did not play well for the most part in that Saskatchewan game isn’t a surprising thing, when you learn about Jefferson’s background and the lessons that he carries from his childhood, courtesy of his grandfather, Fred.
“My grandfather was kinda my father figure growing up,” Jefferson says. “My dad was around but he wasn’t around as much as I would have liked (him) to be.
“(Fred) is one of those people that I never wanted to let down. I never wanted to disappoint him. He was always a positive force in my life. He always supported me in whatever I did. He kept me accountable, he kept me disciplined. He kept me on the straight and narrow for the most part.”
“He told me ‘you gotta do your job and try to make everybody else around you better.”
Grandpa Fred, Jefferson explains, was demanding and supportive. A big football fan, Fred nevertheless wasn’t so keen on A.J. playing the sport, as he saw it as a whole lot more dangerous than the other sports – soccer and basketball – that his grandson was also playing.
But Jefferson caught the football bug the year before he got to high school, finding that he excelled at both defensive back and receiver. “It was a way more intense sport than anything I’d ever played,” he remembers of the early allure of football.
After a college career at Fresno State and four seasons in the NFL that saw him stop in Arizona, Minnesota and Seattle, Jefferson decided to attend an Argos tryout camp last spring and when the team offered him a contract, he decided it was time to head north to the CFL. “I’m excited about it,” he says of his first season in Toronto. “We’re winning. I feel good.”
With the first seven regular season games on his resume, Jefferson is taking stock of what he’s been able to accomplish and is also continuing to adjust to the style of football he says other teams have forced him into playing. Knowing that Jefferson likes to be physical at the line of scrimmage, opponents have given him, more and more, a diet of waggling receivers blasting into his territory from the slot, as opposed to static wide receivers coming at him at the snap.
“They’ve been waggling guys a lot because they don’t want me to put my hands on guys,” Jefferson says, noting that he was getting caught in a chase position a lot during the early portion of the season as he adjusted to that kind of attack coming at him.
“I’ve been practicing it a ton,” he says of a technique he never needed until this year. “It was hard in the beginning because people were running past me and I was sittin’ on a lot of stuff. But I’m getting the tempo down. It’s been a fairly easy transition because that’s what I’m seeing every single week now.”
That transition will not come at the cost of the aggressive nature Jefferson displays when it comes to looking for interceptions. “I’m definitely a ball hawk and an aggressive kind of guy,” he notes. “I’m a high risk, high reward kind of guy. If I’ve seen a play a couple of times I’m definitely gonna take a chance and jump a route and try to get an interception and make a big play for my team.”
The fine line, Jefferson cautions, comes in the area between taking a calculated risk and a foolish one, a balance that he constantly strives to achieve.
“At times I can get us into trouble,” he admits. “Early in the season I got hosed jumpin’ a lot of stuff and they ran a couple of double moves on me. That was just because I was gambling. Now, I kind of see things a little bit better and the game is slowing down for me.”
As it is for other first year members of that Argos’ defensive backfield. Players like Akwasi Owusu-Ansah, Devin Smith and Travis Hawkins. Jefferson is optimistic that the secondary will continue to get better and better.
“We’re all meshing together well. We’re all figuring out – as our playbook expands and we add plays – we can trust each other.”
As far as looking for big plays as a defender as opposed to on special teams, Jefferson claims it’s no matter to him; he’s happy to get them wherever he can and if that means trotting back to field punts after a defensive series, he’s all in.
“I like a challenge,” is his response to the scenario.
That’s about as straight ahead as a pick-six in Regina or a punt return TD in Winnipeg.