VANCOUVER — Football is a game of constant renewal, reinvention and rebirth, and perhaps nowhere is that more palpable than along its offensive line where its tackles, its guards and its centre can be looked upon as a union not unlike a musical quintet.
Within its ‘lean-on-me’ kind of environment, offensive lines not only learn to play through adversity, they oftentimes wind up learning to play each others positions, and in the end, the best ones build a level of communication so profound that they’ll swear that they can read each other’s minds.
“We switch positions, we switch sides, and all of that can throw you off a bit,” professes Ben Griffin, a third-year veteran guard, when asked to speak about both offensive lines in general and in particular the one he will help to man this year with the UBC Thunderbirds.
“But you just have to stay in the playbook and think about what everybody else is doing all the time,” adds the 6-foot-3, 305-pounder from Calgary’s All Saints Catholic. “If you do that, you get a good sense of what you have to do at every spot.”
On Friday (6 p.m.), when UBC hosts the Alberta Golden Bears at Thunderbird Stadium to kick off the new Canada West football season, the latest edition of UBC’s offensive line will initiate the process of getting to know each other all over again.
It’s a metamorphosis which doubles, in sport, as rite of passage, yet this time around, based on the circumstances of the past few months, those aforementioned underlying themes of renewal, re-invention and re-birth are perhaps more apropos than ever.
In April, there was elation when its two starting tackles left the nest to begin carving out their professional paths. Left tackle Giovanni Manu became UBC’s first-ever NFL draft pick, going in the fourth round to the Detroit Lions, while right tackle Theo Benedet was signed as an undrafted free agent by the Chicago Bears.
But then earlier this month, the team got the sad news of the passing of offensive line coach Dan Dorazio at the age of 72.
And amidst those highs and lows has come both renewal and re-birth, through the infusion of youth, as a trio of young players seem poised and ready to join their older teammates along that lean-on-me offensive line.
O-LINE 2024: THIS YEAR’S MODEL
The UBC Thunderbirds may not be the same kind of factory for NFL offensive linemen that say, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish or the Nebraska Cornhuskers, have been over the past few generations.
Yet through the spring and summer, no fewer than three Thunderbirds attended minicamps and main fall camp with the Detroit (Manu), Chicago (Benedet) and Dallas (Dakoda Shepley).
Manu played at left tackle for four of the Lions’ six preseason quarters and has been named to the 53-man roster to start the season next month.
Meanwhile, both Benedet and Shepley have the potential to make their team’s practice rosters or potentially get picked up by other teams around the league before the regular season kicks off in early September.
“I bet there’s a lot of Top 25 teams in the NCAA that can’t male that claim,” UBC head coach Blake Nill remarked when asked about what having that trio making NFL inroads has meant to his program.
“It certainly helps to promote our brand and our culture, and we just have to keep proving it over and over with these guys,” he added.
Let’s face it, it’s not often that preseason interest in a Canada West football team will centre around its offensive line, and although the casual sports fan is a long ways from beating down the doors to find out just who will be taking over at the bookend tackle spots at UBC this season, there is interest and curiosity in the launching point that the Thunderbirds program has become for potential NFL linemen.
What does the 2024 group which will attempt to keep clean pockets for quarterback Garrett Rooker look like today, in advance of Friday’s season opener?
Quite simply put, the experience is largely within the interior of the line, at centre and the two guard spots. Meanwhile, the strength of three first-year players coming off solid training camp showings would seem to be at the book-end tackle spots.
The biggest positional lock remains at centre, where the 6-foot-4, 315-pound fourth-year Gavin Coakes is the unit’s runaway leader in starts and experience.
Four other veterans will also play huge roles wherever new offensive line coach Peter Buckley elects to play them.
The aforementioned Griffin rubbed shoulders with Manu, lining up at left tackle for four conference starts and four straight playoff starts last season, including the Vanier Cup.
Arvin Hosseini, the 6-foot-5, 300-pounder is also a decorated vet as he enters his fourth season as a guard.
Riley Scheffer, one of the most versatile of the bunch, can play inside and out, and he showed as much as a freshman when he moved to left tackle in 2022, a shift which most famously gave Manu an opportunity to show that he, too, could also play a guard spot. As part of those significant dominoes, Coakes also moved to centre from left guard and has remained there ever since.
Also continuing to grow as he enters only his second season is the 6-foot, 275-pound Kaden Schiller.
“I loved the guys that graduated,” UBC quarterback Garrett Rooker says of Manu and Benedet, “but it’s next man up, and that is just how football is. You’ll have a new group every year and and we have a ton of vets on our O-line that have had live reps in league games, and I am just super confident in that group and how they show up every day. I am locked in with them and we’re going to do great things this year.”
And how have some of the younger prospects looked throughout camp?
Nill has offered positive reports on at least three.
Two are players who red-shirted at UBC last season in 6-foot-6, 285-pound Axel Statton from PoCo’s Terry Fox Ravens and Navjot Pooni, a 6-foot-5, 290-pounder who happened to be a high school Thunderbird at Langley Secondary.
The other, 6-foot-7, 300-pound Caleb Cunningham, comes to the ‘Birds after a season spent in the BC Football Conference with the Okanagan Sun where he was named the league’s Offensive Rookie of the Year after playing his high school ball in West Kelowna for the Mt. Boucherie Bears.
“It’s kind of unbelievable how much the young guys have progressed since the start of camp,” said Griffin. “It’s pretty cool, and it keeps you on your toes knowing you’ve got some young guys behind you.”
A LINEMAN’S EULOGY FOR COACH DORAZIO
As part of a coaching career which had entered its second half-century, Dan Dorazio won four Grey Cups and coached four CFL Most Outstanding Offensive Lineman award winners.
Coming out of the Don James coaching tree at Kent State in the early 1970s, UBC was the final stop of his 52-year coaching career.
“We were so fortunate to have him in the program,” said Nill during training camp. “Maybe these kids won’t fully realize it until they are in their 40s, but as I’ve picked up the phone this week, you wouldn’t believe how many people in their 50s and 60s were crying into their phones.
“My players will feel the loss because coach Dorazio was such a big part of their lives for the past 18 months. It’s just human nature. But knowing what his mindset was, they are going to fight through this and they will be motivated by his teachings.”
Ben Griffin seemed to be speaking for the entire offensive as he eulogized his late position coach.
“It’s so hard to put it into words what a guy like that means to you,” said Griffin who truly came into his own at the heart of the ‘Birds’ O-line last season under Dorazio’s tutelage. “He was just one of the most tremendous human beings I ever met in my left. Everything he did was to make you more prepared for the game. He gave solutions to every question. He was a master motivator and you wanted to do right by him every time you were on the field. We were all so lucky we got to work with him for the year that we did.”
Yet it’s Griffin’s remembrances of the personal, one-on-one moments that seem the most significant.
“He called Riley (Scheffer) ‘Riles’ and he always called me ‘Benny’,” began Griffin.
“He asked a lot of us, but he wouldn’t ask for extra. So he’d say to you right when you were going out on the field ‘I am going to ask you to play like hell, but I’ll never ask you for anything more,’” Griffin laughed reverentially. “You know what I mean?”
Dorazio’s wit, wisdom and delivery are almost too much, and it feels like Griffin can’t stop.
“In the meetings, he was always hard on us, but then he’d always say ‘Criticism is like beef jerky. It’s tough to chew on, but the ingredients are damn good for you.’”
LEAN ON ME
Renewal is a beautiful thing.
And this season, the progress of the aforementioned first-years just might go a long ways towards keeping UBC in championship conversations, both at the conference and national levels, well beyond this season.
And so we move our focus towards youth with a look at one of the players looking to make his mark as a big-bodied, athletic tackle.
Yet Caleb Cunningham, still just 19, admits that his two predecessors in Manu and Benedet left a pretty substantial shadow from under which all future UBC tackles must climb.
“Definitely the pressure is there, coming in after both of those tackles,” begins Cunningham. “It’s big shoes to fill. But I don’t look at it like a bad thing by any means. I am ready to do it.”
UBC’s top three first-year O-line prospects are all just beginning their transformation to potential pros, and all three are just now beginning to add the definition and power they will need to play to the top of their effectiveness over their careers in blue-and-gold.
This season, UBC’s potential top eight offensive lineman average 6-foot-4 and 294 pounds.
Over the course of their UBC careers, Manu wound up adding 34 pounds form his freshman year in 2019, and was drafted to Detroit at 6-8, 254 pounds; Benedet would add 25 pounds over that same span and signed with Chicago at 6-7, 295 pounds.
For his part, Cunningham credits his level of mix of size and athleticism to the grace of a slow, steady growth throughout his childhood.
“I just kind of consistently grew… I broke six feet when I was 12,” laughs Cunningham. “In Grade 9 I was 6-6 and 210 pounds. That was my lanky phase.”
It’s also around the time he stopped playing basketball as a willowy post, and baseball as a strike-out prone first baseman.
He’s been just a shade over 6-foot-7 since the 10th grade, and has added 90 pounds over the past four-plus years.
Cunningham admits that turning down offers to play university football coming out of Mt. Boucherie in 2023 seemed strange to those around him.
Yet he stuck with his inner convictions, confident that a year in the BCFC was going to do him a world of good.
“I did get some questions, a lot of people couldn’t understand my call to play junior football. I get it. It was kind of an out-there decision because I was getting U SPORTS offers. So doing the junior thing was a bold move, but I decided to bet on myself. I went in confident and I felt it would only help in the long run.”
What Cunningham did, as an offensive lineman, was so impressive that he was picked the league’s Offensive Rookie of the Year.
He got voluminous snaps, he built confidence, and the proof of all of that has manifested itself on the field where he has been one of the talks of UBC camp among the team’s new players.
And whether Statton, Pooni or Cunningham wind up starting or not seems almost irrelevant at this stage, because by all indications, they are all putting themselves in a position to be contributing members of the positional rotation.
“I told coach right when I came in and he asked me what my goals were for the year,” remembers Cunningham. “I said I want to be a part of this offence that you can rely on. I want to be a piece for this team to get back to the championship and win one this time.”
The university and college football seasons across North America all get into full swing this weekend.
Pick a school, pick any school, and similar plot lines are in the midst of evolving with every positional group on every offensive and defensive roster on any team you might care to mention.
This is the story about the one at UBC, on its offensive line room, where the NFL has started to come calling.
There will be more joy and more sorrow as the season progresses.
Yet maybe most importantly there will be moments of real significance.
Towards the end of our chat, my first-ever with the young Cunningham, I asked him if he had ever gotten a chance to meet Dorazio, assuming he hadn’t.
He in fact did, over the week he spent at UBC spring camp. And although he sensed how special Dorazio was, he admits that he’s gotten an even better sense of him in the days since his passing through the conversations he’s had with UBC’s veteran offensive linemen, all of whom have been nothing but encouraging with their advice.
“I still feel like sometimes I am being coached by him just through the other guys who got the full experience with him,” Cunningham said.
Think about that for a moment, and if you’re like me, you’re smiling. It’s what this whole thing is all about.
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