Courtesy Edmonton Journal:

Eskimo fans who couldn’t possibly stomach one more serving of the team’s tepid vanilla offence are being promised a flavour burst of Neapolitan this season.

Tonight’s pre-season game in Calgary ranks as the first taste test then, though its lingering effects on the public palate will be tempered slightly by the fact starting quarterback Ricky Ray won’t be the man serving it up.

Regardless, the Eskimos have pledged a dramatic about-face on offence and it is the very same philosophical shift that the team’s growing legion of critics has been demanding for two years sans playoffs. Throw the damn ball downfield. Impose your will on the defence, don’t just meekly take the crumbs they are willing to give up. Make defences adjust. Establish an identity early, commit to it, develop it weekly, and live or die with it.

The Eskimos don’t quite know what it’s going to be because there are too many parts still moving in and out of the lineup this early in its metamorphosis, but offensive co-ordinator Rick Worman knows what they want it to be when the regular season starts.

“What we’d like it to be is multiplicity,” he said Thursday. “That’s a general term, I realize. But if we can be unpredictable, if we can be multiple in stretching the field vertically, horizontally, through floods, through getting the ball in a running back’s hands in the open field, if we can run the ball, if we can do screens. It sounds like a cliche, but we really want to be unpredictable and multiple not only in our sets, but in the types of plays we call in certain situations. We certainly don’t want to be passive, we want to be aggressive in how we attack defences, rather than just react to defences.”

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