DeVone Claybrooks’ eyes showed a glimmer as he described what he saw on Labour Day this year.

“Charleston (Hughes) probably hit him here,” Claybrooks, the Calgary Stampeders’ defensive coordinator says, pointing to his mid-back. “Micah (Johnson) caught him high here,” he says, pointing at his chest.

You can imagine the result when a 246-pound body makes contact with your back and another 273 pounds, going full-speed, makes contact with your chest. And if you’ve watched Mike Reilly play over the last five years with the Edmonton Eskimos, you know what happened next.

“I thought he was dead!” Claybrooks exclaims. “He shook it off and I think he completed a 60-yard bomb the next play.”

This is, in a black and blue nutshell that somehow refuses to break, is the Mike Reilly experience. The 32-year-old Esks quarterback has built a career on being able to absorb what look like heat-seeking missile strikes at times, rockets of humanity that would destroy just about any target they might find.

Not Reilly.

He took his lumps again this year but put together the best season of his seven-year career, throwing for a league-leading 5,530 yards and 30 touchdowns, while making 68.3 per cent of his passes. He rushed 97 times for 390 yards and a dozen touchdowns.

He took the Eskimos through a wild ride of a season, starting 7-0 in spite of injuries decimating the team’s roster. Edmonton lost six straight after that and Reilly helped dig the team out of that hole, closing out the regular-season with five-straight wins and a victory over Winnipeg in the West Semifinal.

On Thursday night in Ottawa, Reilly won his first Most Outstanding Player award, becoming the first Esks player to take the honour in 28 years. It’s something that one of his best friends, BC Lions quarterback Travis Lulay, saw on Reilly’s horizon five years ago when the two parted ways. Reilly came into the league as a backup with the Lions in 2010.

In those three seasons together, Lulay learned a lot about the guy from Central Washington State that had an odd penchant for bowties on walkthrough days.

“I thought that he was a pretty gritty guy,” Lulay says, recalling the 2011 training camp where he saw his friend get put to the test by the Lions’ coaching staff.

“We had a guy come in that our staff seemed to like and they started to give him opportunities to essentially take Mike’s job,” Lulay says.

“He battled through that. He was my training camp roommate. I knew the emotional ups and downs of that training camp, but coming out on top, making the plays when he needed to make the team (was tough).

“He was a small school guy, even going back to high school. He’d transferred high schools in his senior year, which was tough. Then he transferred schools in college (from Washington State to Central Washington).

“I sensed he was an overcomer, an overachiever, a guy who could persevere through that stuff. That’s what he did.”

***

Emily Davis grew up in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state, just like Mike Reilly did. They had different circles of friends when they were younger and never really crossed paths. She remembers being in Las Vegas with friends in 2009 and paying attention to the NFL draft, because there was a chance that the quarterback from her hometown had a shot at being chosen. His name wasn’t called that night.

Her career in medical sales brought her to New York City. Reilly’s football dream had him in BC a year after the NFL draft. They both came home for Thanksgiving in 2012 and were hanging out with mutual friends when they met. They married in 2015.

“It wasn’t really until we started dating that I really knew anything about football,” she says. “Now I don’t miss a CFL game ever, whether it’s him playing or not. Now it’s kind of our life.”

She knew he was obviously good at what he did, but the opportunities to actually see him play were limited while he was with the Lions. He was battling for the backup role, then was stuck behind Lulay, who led BC to the 2011 Grey Cup and was named MOP that year. She’d fly in from New York when she could to see him play and when she couldn’t make games she was on her couch, watching on ESPN3. When she finally got to see her then-boyfriend as a starter on the field, it was difficult. Edmonton went 4-14 in 2013 and Reilly was obliterated throughout the season by defensive linemen across the league.

The losses piled up, but fans across the league started to become enamoured with Reilly’s style of play. He was fearless in the pocket, determined to find his targets no matter how many of those human rockets found their targets, over and over again. When he left the pocket, he was elusive and fast. Those first years especially, he wouldn’t back down if he had a few steps behind him and could see a first-down marker or the end zone. He had no problem putting his body on the line, week after week.

At one point in that season, TSN did a feature on him, calling it Tough as Nails. It was a montage to the punishment he’d taken that year. At one point, Reilly stared into the camera and poured a bag of nails out onto the ground in front of him. They fell and bounced off of the floor in slow motion.

While fans cringed at the hits and marvelled at how Reilly always popped up, it was tougher for Emily to watch.

“It was a trying year all around,” she says. “I remember when TSN made that Tough as Nails thing. I thought, ‘This isn’t even cool, this is scary and sad.’ It was really hard to watch.”

But like everyone else watching Reilly, the highs — the huge passes, the fearless running and the emotion that shone through his play — were and still are just as thrilling to her.

“It’s a different perspective when you really care about the person on the (receiving) end,” she says. “I’d sit there and watch him and cover my eyes half the time because I’d see all these hits. That’s such an emotional answer but it’s my life, and it’s my person on the other side. It’s not always easy but it’s a lot of fun and we wouldn’t miss it or change it for anything.”

Lulay was in touch with Reilly throughout that first season in Edmonton. It was trying for Reilly in ways that he couldn’t have anticipated. The losing hurt, and so did the hits.

“One of the most underrated traits of quarterbacking is physical toughness, being able to stand in there and do it,” says Lulay, who’s gone through his share of shoulder issues and tore his ACL this year in a game.

“You look at the (West) Semifinal game and stuff coming out about (Matt) Nichols playing on a bad calf and a broken finger. No one really cares.

“People in your room care, and your wife at home, but big picture it doesn’t really matter if you’re injured or not, you just have a job to do. You have to find a way to suck it up and go out and play.

“Sometimes there’s more pain there than people can recognize. Mike’s been able to do that. I don’t know how many quarterbacks were able to stay upright all 18 games this season but Mike did it and that’s a tough thing to do.”

***

From the lows of that four-win season in 2013, to a Grey Cup win in 2015 and through the Esks’ remarkable 7-0 start this year, Reilly’s place with the Esks was never questioned. He’s endured injuries and played through the vast majority of them, including a broken bone in his foot during the 2014 playoffs (he played on it until he literally could no longer walk). Win or lose, injured or fully healthy, Reilly was always seen as that tough-as-nails, ride-or-die quarterback in Edmonton. Until that six-game losing streak came around.

The team’s best start in 56 years was forgotten over the next six games and for the first time, Reilly caught some of the ire of Esks fans. Interceptions that used to be shrugged off — he threw eight of his 13 on the year through that period — were met with furious fingers on social media and angry voices on post-game call-in shows. Playing in the West, where three teams finished with 12 or more wins, the Esks’ season was slipping away.

“This year was really, really unique,” Emily says. “That lull of losses, that was really tough. I’m so proud of him this year, probably more than ever.

“It’s not because I think he’s had the best year of his career, which arguably it could be. What makes me the most proud of him through this year is how he was during the six-game loss stretch. I have never seen him so challenged.

“I think because he was trying to figure out what needed to be tweaked. Mike’s such a fixer, he’s a leader. If it’s something he can’t control, he has a really tough time with it. I’m so impressed because it took a lot of internal battle, trying to figure out what he could do and if it’s in his power to turn it around.

“I think a lot of it showed on the field but I think a huge part of his leadership is off the field. Him connecting with all of his teammates. It was a really, really tough time, one of the toughest times I’ve ever seen him go through. It turned out to be this amazing season and I’m so proud of him for that.”

It was still a difficult time for him. There were days he’d come home to their two-bedroom condo in Edmonton and would want a couple of hours to himself, and times where he couldn’t let the frustration of what was happening go. Emily says that their daughter Brooklyn, who recently turned one, played a big part in helping Mike deal with the low points this year.

“She doesn’t care if he’s having a bad day at work or not,” she says.

“We were up in Edmonton for a majority of that difficult time and I think it was a blessing in disguise. When he’d come home at night, him and Brooklyn, it’d be normal. She wanted to play. She wanted to see her daddy and I think that brought a level of joy that he didn’t have before. We knew there were difficulties going on but I think having a family and having a baby, children, just kind of changed it all. It helped.”

Johany Jutras/CFL.ca

Reilly and the Esks managed to turn their season around. They ended their regular-season with a five-game win streak and handled Nichols and the Blue Bombers in the West Semifinal. Their season came to a close last week in Calgary, where they were four points short against the Stampeders.

Speaking the week of the West Semifinal, Lulay figured Reilly would win the Most Outstanding Player award.

“I think there are arguments for Ricky (Ray). He had a phenomenal year and you saw in the game or two that he was out how much different that team is without him,” Lulay says.

“I think there’s an argument for Ricky, but I think it falls short when you compare it to Mike’s season. He stayed healthy the whole year, he played in the West and his team won more games. He’s statically better in most passing categories, led the league in rushing yards (as a QB), aside from the passing stuff. I think when you talk Most Outstanding Player, I think Mike’s season was just a notch more outstanding than Ricky’s season. That’s how I see it.”

Since Mike went to the CFL, the Reilly family has split its year into halves. Six months go to Mike and football. The offseason is family time. Emily says that in those non-football months, he puts the same type of focus and care into that side of his life. Always a problem-solver, always a fixer, he wants to get everything right.

“I think that he is so compartmentalized because he has to be. Football is very demanding and requires a lot of his effort and time but from our personal lives perspective, he is exactly the same,” Emily says.

“If we hit a challenge or something needs to be addressed in our family life, very much so he is the same exact way. He is not one to sleep on it. He’ll put in his entire heart into it and try to figure out what it’s going to take. The way he leads the football team, he’s the leader in our family as well.”