COMMENTARY : A Funny Thing Happened to Blake En Route to CFL

The Jets cut Jeff Blake on Sunday, Aug. 28.

He had been living in a dorm at Hofstra University, where the Jets train. He got into a car the next morning and drove from Long Island to York, Pa., where his mother-in-law lives.

Blake had been a college football star once. There are a lot of those who never make it and end up taking this ride out of town. He was two years out of college, and he was out of work.

In the past month, Jeff Blake is a football star all over again, the sudden and improbable star of the Bengals. They write rap songs about him in Cincinnati and call him “Shake ‘n’ Blake” and can’t make T-shirts with his picture on them fast enough. The trip to all that, the kind of trip you can still make with enough talent and enough luck, began Monday morning, Aug. 29. Even when so much is wrong with sports, something wonderful can still show up out of nowhere and make you stand up and cheer.

“I was alone in that car, I’d lost my job, and I had a lot of time to think,” Blake was saying Tuesday (November 15) night from Cincinnati. “And I kept thinking the same thing: How am I going to support my family?”

“I was hoping I’d be able to somehow catch on in the Canadian Football League,” Blake continued. “I knew there’d been some interest, and my father (former Toronto Argonaut Emory Blake) had played up there. But I’d never been cut in my life. All of a sudden, I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Except I still believed this: I was good enough to play in the NFL.”

He got to York early in the afternoon. Ralph Cindrich, his agent, called. Cindrich said the Bengals were interested in signing him. Bruce Coslet, who had been Blake’s coach with the Jets, was now offensive coordinator with the Bengals, and Coslet had always liked Blake, as a player and as a person. At 5 p.m., Bengals coach David Shula called York, Pa. By 6:30, Blake was on a plane out of Harrisburg. He was in Cincinnati as a Bengal at 9:30 p.m., 12 hours after leaving Hofstra.

“It’s like Bruce Coslet choreographed this thing right from the start,” Cindrich said Wednesday. “Now, if Bruce told Jeff to walk across the Ohio River, the kid would start walking.”

Blake was supposed to be third string in Cincinnati. But a month ago, David Klingler got hurt against the Browns and so did his backup, Donald Hollas. The Bengals’ record went to 0-7 that day. The next week, Blake was the starter against the Cowboys. He threw for 247 yards and the Bengals lost, 23-20, even though they had led 14-0.

The next week, Blake threw for 387 yards and the Bengals got their first victory, against the Seahawks. Last week, Blake threw for 354 yards and four touchdowns against the Oilers, and the Bengals won again.

“When I was sitting on the bench with the Jets, then with the Bengals, I always pictured myself on the field,” he said. “I’d look at film of other guys and see myself throwing the touchdown passes. It was always just a question of me getting in the game.”

He always believed he had games like this in him, even on cutdown day, when he took the Long Island Expressway to the New Jersey Turnpike, then picked up Rt. 78 outside of Newark, and finally 83 South, and thought all these roads might be taking him away from the NFL for good.

“I love to prove people wrong,” Blake said. “People doubted me because I come from a small school like East Carolina. People said I was too small (6-0). I started to think I’d be another statistic, another guy who never got a chance to play in the NFL.” Blake paused. “Listen, I understand the Jets made a business decision. But at least give me a chance. Give me a shot before you cut me. If I’d had a shot and then I blew it, you wouldn’t have heard any complaints from me. But they didn’t do that. I felt like they’d made up their mind before training camp even began.”

So the 23-year-old quarterback, who would be the most exciting quarterback in New York, now plays in Cincinnati and makes $162,000 a year. Most NFL quarterbacks make millions. Boomer Esiason does. Esiason has 1,686 passing yards for the whole season. Dave Brown has 1,503 passing yards. Jeff Blake, who is no more experienced than Brown is, has nearly 1,000 passing yards already, and six touchdown passes, and just one interception. Maybe Charlie Ward could have been this kind of quarterback in the NFL if all the geniuses hadn’t thought he was too small.

“He’s just another guy who’d never gotten a chance to show what he could do on the field with the real guys,” Coslet said. “His rookie year with the Jets, we were getting Browning (Nagle) ready. Last year, it was Boomer. It looked like it was going to be the same situation here. Then the guys ahead of Jeff got hurt, and he was finally out there with the real guys. He’s made the most of an opportunity, and a lot of guys don’t do that. And in the process, he’s brought some life and hope to Cincinnati, where there wasn’t any life or hope at all.”

Last week, Blake brought the Bengals from behind four times. This was the same Oilers defense against which the 8-2 Browns scored 11 points and the 7-3 Steelers scored 12 points. During the game, Blake suffered a badly bruised ankle. He went in to have the ankle X-rayed, came riding back on a golf cart, got off the cart and immediately threw a 34-yard completion to Harold Green and a 33-yard completion to Carl Pickens. The plays set up the field goal that won the game for the Bengals.

“God works in mysterious ways,” Blake said. “When they were looking at my ankle, the Oilers had the ball the whole time. When I got back to the field, it was exactly the right time for me to get back into the game.”

He has just come from another late night at Riverfront Stadium, going over Sunday’s game plan with Coslet, looking at more film. In the background, you could hear laughter from Blake’s wife and their two children as she tried to bathe them. The season is much better in November than it was at the end of August, for all of them.

“Right now, people are pulling for me because I’m the understudy-type guy,” he said. “I feel like I’m playing for all the understudy-type guys, all the backups who never got a chance to show what they could do. You put in your time, and then some guy who’s never played a minute but gets drafted No. 1 or No. 2 automatically gets your job, and your dreams.”

His father never made it to the NFL. Jeff Blake says he is living out his father’s dreams as well. “I’m letting him walk proud,” he said. The T-shirts they are selling in Cincinnati show Blake coming up out of Riverfront Stadium, with the earth opening up underneath the stadium and lightning in the sky. Sometimes it still happens this way for the understudy-type guy. They give him a shot and he lights up the sky. The dreams do not always end up in the rearview mirror.