National Post (National Edition)
Long, winding road to the Ticats for Addison
Bralon Addison’s football journey has had a lot of stops and starts. He had a spectacular sophomore season at the University of Oregon in 2013, then blew an ACL the following spring, leaving him sidelined as the Ducks made it to the NCAA championship game.
Addison, a former option quarterback at a high school outside Houston, recovered to become a receiver/returner threat for his junior season at Oregon, but after he skipped his senior year to prepare for the NFL, he went undrafted. He signed with the Denver Broncos and was then released, was signed by the Chicago Bears and released again last spring.
Addison came north this year, spent time on the practice roster of the Toronto Argonauts and was cut in August. Down the road in Hamilton, the Tiger-cats signed him and he saw limited work in a few games. He had a strong game in the regular-season finale, earning him the starting job in Sunday’s East semifinal. And, on the first series, with quarterback Jeremiah Masoli scrambling on second-and-long, Addison hauled in his desperation pass before crashing to the turf for a 38-yard gain.
So, after all that, after the repeated heartbreak and the very real chance that his pro football career was over before he had even turned 25, did Addison think, in the moment, that he had finally arrived?
“I mean, I was just trying to take it one play at a time, especially after I hit my head on the turf,” Addison said Wednesday at Tim Hortons Field. “I was just trying to get back up and make sure I could contribute.”
Check and check, then. Addison would contribute all over the place, finishing Hamilton’s romp over the B.C. Lions with five receptions for 124 yards, most of that coming as the Ticats blew the visitors off the field in a 28-0 first half. In his last two games with Hamilton, Addison has piled up 227 receiving yards. In the whole of his professional career, with two NFL and two CFL teams, he has totalled 237 yards. Suddenly, if the Tiger-cats hadn’t quite found a replacement for Brandon Banks, who was having the best year of his career before a season-ending injury last month, they had at least stumbled across a vague facsimile of his production. Head coach June Jones said he got a sense that Addison was starting to get comfortable in his offence by the final weeks of the regular season. And Jones, who has coached all over the place over the past 35 years and is not shy about mentioning that he knows a thing or two about the game, said he could just tell that Addison would be a good fit. “I’ve identified those guys for a lot of years, and he’s a good player,” Jones said. He felt strongly enough about that diagnosis that he put Addison in the starting lineup on Sunday instead of Terrell Sinkfield, a former 1,000-yard receiver with the Ticats who was on NFL rosters as recently as September. “He’s smart and quick, and he’s getting faster, too, because he’s running so much,” said Jones of Addison. “I think he’ll be better each week.”
Asked Wednesday, as the TigerCats prepared for the Ottawa Redblacks in the East Final this weekend, about finding a groove with a new guy like Addison, quarterback Masoli was quick to direct praise elsewhere. “It’s all on him, man. He did his job as a pro. He prepared himself to the best of his abilities and it showed,” Masoli said.
He said he sees some similarities between Addison and Banks. Neither is big, for one. While Banks is famously wee, Addison is listed at 5-foot-9 and 197 pounds, which is perhaps accurate if he has 10-pound weights in each pocket.
“Those guys are just dogs, though,” Masoli said. “Competitors. They want to win on every rep, every route. Every coverage, they want to win.” A former Oregon player himself, Masoli allowed that Addison’s background as a quarterback has probably helped him adapt quickly to Jones’s complicated offence.
“He’s just a smart guy,” Masoli said, calling him a “quarterbackfriendly” receiver. He knows how to get himself open, and how to respond when a play is breaking down, Masoli said. Consider that first second-and-long against the Lions, when Masoli was on the move and Addison found open space in a seam downfield, before securing the ball and bouncing himself off the turf.
“We knew he had some playmaking ability in him,” Masoli said. “When it happened, it didn’t surprise me, but it set the tone for the day, for sure.”
As for Addison, who credited veterans like Banks for helping him get up to speed in a hurry, his is a particularly CFL kind of story: released by one team after never making the field, only to star in a playoff game for a different team two months later.
“Honestly, I just think that’s just how life works, period,” he said on Wednesday. “You just gotta stay ready and never give up, and be ready for your opportunity.”
So far, Bralon Addison has seized his.