Ford focused on continuing to develop as a passer

Tre Ford, the rookie Canadian quarterback who makes his second CFL start tonight when the Edmonton Elks host the Calgary Stampeders, got to learn first-hand this spring what it’s like for American quarterbacks who cross the border to try three-down football for the first time.

But Ford had his experience in reverse.

In May, just weeks after the Edmonton Elks had made him a first-round pick in the CFL Draft, Ford accepted an invitation to a mini-camp audition with the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens.

Having grown up playing the three-down game before starring at the University of Waterloo, he got to experience what it’s like when a quarterback goes from playing one style of game all his life to another.

 “There were a lot of things that were different,” Ford said this week. “The motions I thought in the NFL were so confusing because you actually have to move the person and let them stop. And if you want to move someone else, then you have to move them and let them stop.

“Here you can just give the motion and start the waggles and everybody kind of goes with it and you time it up to hit the line. Learning little things like that and the way people call plays was a bit of an adjustment.”

But once he returned to Canada his background in three-down football became an asset, easing his transition to the professional level in his rookie season with the Elks. The timing, the angles, and the motion around him were all familiar, allowing him to skip the learning curve that quarterbacks coming from the NCAA or NFL inevitably face.

“It helped me a lot,” Ford said. “It definitely, definitely was an advantage playing three-down football.”

Not having to learn a new game allowed Ford to focus on his performance at training camp, where he competed among seven other quarterbacks in what amounted to a football version of Survivor.

The nature of Edmonton’s quarterback audition made it hard for Ford to know where he stood, until he found himself among those still standing at the end. 

“It’s a little bit tough mentally because there’s eight quarterbacks and they are trying to evaluate everybody,” Ford said. “So, you don’t get a tone of reps when you are out there – maybe 10 full-team reps every day. What can I really show in 10 plays? … I’m trying to show everybody that I can pass because everybody already knows that I’m athletic, but I don’t really get a chance to show how athletic I am.”

Ford met the expectations that were planted in the mind of Elks head coach and general manager Chris Jones after he watched Ford throw at the University of Buffalo’s pro day in April.

It was then that Jones started thinking seriously about Ford as a quarterback candidate for a team that was unabashedly casting the starting job wide open.

Though Nick Arbuckle won the starting job out of training camp based on his experience, Jones gave Ford his first CFL start in last week’s game at Hamilton. Ford passed for 159 yards and ran for 61 more in a 29-25 Elks’ win, a game played just a short distance from his hometown of Niagara Falls, Ont. and where he attended school at the University of Waterloo.

Ford didn’t look out of place in his first CFL start, managing to focus on the task at hand by tuning out the presence of so many friends, family, and people from his past.

“I didn’t really try to take it in, I was just so focused on the game,” Ford said. “Getting my first start was cool and everything, but I knew if we lost it wasn’t going to be as sweet.”

Though Ford gets attention for being one of the league’s few Canadian quarterbacks, it’s his freakish athleticism that truly sets him apart. It’s the same attribute that helped him place fifth nationally in the 60-metre dash during the most recent Canadian university championships.

Few players, if any, have ever possessed more raw speed at the quarterback position, which makes Ford’s potential as a dual threat on the wide Canadian field tantalizing.

The more he advances as a passer, the more threatening his ability to run will become. The more he slices defences with his feet, the more time and space they will have to give him to pass.

“Defences can take things away, but you give other things up, so it’s hard to balance what you want to do. When you have a QB who can be so mobile and stretch the field with his legs, and then you still have to worry about those deep and intermediate balls in the defence, it’s really hard to game plan against that kind of stuff,” Ford said.

“I hope I follow the pattern of developing more as a passer and being able to really stretch the field with both my arm and my legs.”