Thomas happy to be back in the mud

Part-time real-estate agent, part-time football player Jake Thomas knows which gig he prefers.

Even after eight scorching days of a three-week training camp that shows no sign of cooling down.

“Where would you rather be?” the Winnipeg Blue Bombers defensive lineman was saying. “We’ve been doing different types of jobs, manual labour, stuff like that. Even myself, it’s a lot easier to hit people than just take phone calls all day.

“It’s a grind. But people enjoy the grind. They like being in the mud.”

More like scorched artificial turf down at the South Winnipeg soccer field.

But Thomas, like so many others, has found a new appreciation for camp.

Having one taken away, along with the entire 2020 CFL season, will do that.

“I was a little bit caught off guard,” Thomas said of the day last season was scuttled. “Everything that we were hearing, there was going to be a bubble.”

After feeling sorry for himself for a few days, he started taking advantage of the realestate licence he’d written back home in New Brunswick the previous year, and started job-shadowing.

It’s the CFL, after all. “Unfortunately the league we’re in, most guys had to go find a job,” he said. “We didn’t have the luxury of just working out and hoping there would be a 2021 season.”

There will be, albeit a shortened, 14-gamer without preseason games.

That means everybody had to be in good shape when they arrived.

“I wouldn’t say conditioning was poor,” Thomas said. “But speaking for myself, football technique was very rusty. As camp goes on I find I’m becoming more and more the player I used to be ... because you can run, you can work out, but there’s no better way to get in football shape than by playing football.

“Like, I can’t go find two 300-pound men and just ask them to run into me for an hour, once a week.”

That Thomas, 30, is still absorbing blows from offensive linemen nine years after the Bombers picked him in the fourth round of the CFL draft is either a testament to his hard work or a fluke — or both.

“A lot of it’s luck,” Thomas said, putting his most modest foot forward. “I was lucky enough to be drafted by this organization. Not every organization gives a Canadian kid a year or two to develop. I really appreciate what they’ve done for me here in Winnipeg. That’s usually why I try to stay here as long as possible.”

His head coach would argue Thomas has made his own luck.

“Where a guy gets drafted is pretty well irrelevant,” Mike O’Shea said. “He has great understanding of the game. He’s smart as a whip. His value in the locker-room to his teammates is up there among the best. There’s nothing not to like about Jake.”

Bombers brass made a conscious decision to go with veterans, bringing back much of their 2019 championship team.

Thomas is one of six returnees on the D-line, joining Willie Jefferson, Jackson Jeffcoat, Steven Richardson, Jonathan Kongbo and Thiadric Hansen.

He says there is no greater glue than that produced by winning a Grey Cup.

“You see across the league there were a lot of guys that decided to move on. Guys love playing for each other.”