Ask and you shall receive a SAM
He had to ask for the job interview, but it’s turned into perhaps the most important request of the entire Hamilton Tiger-Cats season.
It cemented what is arguably the most thorough sideline-to-sideline linebacker corps in the CFL. You might get loud counterclaims from a few other league outposts but, hey, that’s why they invented fan forums.
Don Unamba finished 2017 as the Ticats’ field-side cornerback and during this spring’s training camp found himself among a horde of no-guarantee candidates for jobs in the secondary.
Meanwhile, the team was also casting for a SAM (field-side) linebacker to complement Larry Dean and Simoni Lawrence, two of the very best in the business.
They traded 2017 SAM Abdul Kanneh, to Toronto in early June and had pencilled in, first, Mariel Cooper, as the starter, and after he was hurt,
D.J. May.
Then May got hurt, and so did rookie Canadian Jackson Bennett who was lower on the depth chat.
“I just saw the opportunity to broaden my horizon and being around this league I knew that the more you can do the better,” Unamba recalls, as the Ticats (7-7) come off a bye week to face the playoff-bereft Argonauts (3-11) in Toronto on Friday night.
So Unamba asked defensive backfield coach William Fields, in a casual “really kind of a joke” conversation whether he could take a shot at SAM, intimating he could handle a position he’d never played.
Fields talked to new defensive co-ordinator Jerry Glanville and the next day Unamba got some reps.
He’s owned the job ever since, with a pallet of skills that has produced 43 tackles, a few of them in precariously open territory and four of them resulting in losses, seven pass knock-downs, four quarterback sacks, two forced fumbles, a fumble recovery and an interception which he returned for a touchdown against B.C., the last time the Ticats played.
It was the first pick six he’d ever had, even in high school, although he was officially credited for one at Southern Arkansas University when he stripped a receiver of the ball as he caught it.
“This one took me over the top, it was one of my best moments,” said Unamba, who played some WILL linebacker (Lawrence’s position) when he first came into the CFL with Winnipeg in 2014. Generally, he’d been a cornerback until this spring.
He says Glanville has taken his career to a new level by giving him a long leash and praises Dean as the cornerstone and inspiration of the defence.
“Unamba is the best SAM linebacker in the league and I don’t take any credit because he’s got innate ability to make plays that you cannot teach,” Glanville says. “Woody Hayes once told me that you need players that do what they’re told, but you need players who do more than what you tell them. He’s one of those.” Glanville estimates he sends Unamba on some kind of blitz a half dozen times per game, and the linebacker — “he’s a great disguiser” — fakes it as often. Then he’ll cover the player who assumed he’d be running into vacated territory.
“I just like to play with it, mess with the quarterback’s head a little bit,” Unamba says. “By now they know I come a lot so I’ll show I’m coming and drop out. I don’t want to show them the same thing every time.”
Eliminated from post-season consideration, the Argonauts can afford a looser, more enterprising head space. That could make them dangerously free-minded and with mobile James Franklin at quarterback, sealing the outside spaces will be even imperative. Unamba expects to make his usual contribution to that process:
“It’s a blessing how it’s all working out, after starting the year on the (SAM) depth chart at the dead bottom.”