Professor

Abiamiri a manchild in the making (phillyBurbs.com) | Mike Sielski

PHILADELPHIA — Until Notre Dame and Navy first snapped the football on that October afternoon, Todd Spencer still held out the hope that the Midshipmen's unorthodox offense might neutralize Victor Abiamiri.

“An NFL pass rusher,” Spencer, who coaches Navy's offensive tackles, called Abiamiri last week. But in the days before the Fighting Irish's 38-14 victory last year, Spencer put his linemen through no special preparation to deal with Notre Dame's senior defensive end. Navy, after all, runs the option, doesn't really throw the football unless it's out of desperation, and Spencer thought the system would be enough to counter Abiamiri.

Then, over the course of the game, as Abiamiri collected six tackles and two quarterback sacks and gave the Eagles another reason to select him in the second round of the NFL draft, Spencer saw how wrong he'd been.

“Oh, gosh, we were just scared to death of him,” Spencer said over the telephone. “Tremendous burst, tremendous upside.”

With the Eagles' rookies set to report to training camp on Friday, this is the promise for Abiamiri to fulfill: that at age 21, he's beyond blowing past those fighter pilots-to-be and can be a bona fide factor along the franchise's defensive line. There are enough questions there as it is. Brodrick Bunkley can't be a second-year bust, and Jevon Kearse can't start the season looking like he's too thin even to play safety, and the Eagles already have several ends in Abiamiri's mold — smaller, speedier pass-rushers such as Trent Cole and Darren Howard and Juqua Thomas. Make no mistake, too: Abiamiri has a character and background that are beyond reproach, and the Eagles love their character guys, but his on-field speed, as much as anything, was why they regarded him so highly.

“His quickness — that was thing I remember as much as anything,” said Tom Freeman, who was Stanford University's offensive line coach in 2006. Abiamiri had three sacks against the Cardinal in Notre Dame's 31-10 win on Oct. 7.

“He'll do a nice job,” said Freeman, who's now coaching at the University of Central Florida. Eagles defensive coordinator “Jim Johnson's got some fiendish blitzes, and I'm sure he's just licking his chops. At the time, Victor faced bigger guys. He was probably 255 pounds or so, probably closer to 250. He relied on quickness.”

Of course, so did N.D. Kalu and Jerome McDougle, neither of whom was cut out to be an every-down defensive end. And so, purportedly, do Kearse and Howard, who have been underwhelming despite signing sizeable contracts. Johnson's scheme is predicated on a pass rush, on the threat of a blitz, but it seems the Eagles are always searching for defensive ends who can provide that pressure and still be stout enough to stop the run.

Listed at 6-foot-4 and 267 pounds, Abiamiri insists that he isn't a one-dimensional player, that he can power-rush an offensive tackle as easily as he can beat him to the outside.

“I'm able to switch things up,” he said recently. “I have the ability to do both. I can do both.”

At the Gilman School, the private high school in Baltimore he attended, Abiamiri started out as a basketball player, a 6-2, 190 pound guard making his way around the Maryland AAU circuit as a ninth- and tenth-grader. It took his oldest brother, Rob, now a fullback for the Ravens, to return home from the University of Maryland for winter break, his body heavier and harder, before Victor understood what he could really do in football if he spent more hours in the weight room.

By the time he was a senior, Victor weighed 245 pounds, and his parents, natives of Nigeria, saw their kitchen tabletop covered in scholarship offers. But Peter and Rita Abiamiri — a social worker and a nurse, respectively — didn't raise their three sons to shirk their educations, didn't send them to Nigeria for a month as teenagers to learn the Igbo tribe's culture and language so they could return to America and squander the experience. Victor used one of his official recruiting visits to spend a day at Princeton before deciding Notre Dame offered the best of those dual tracks: the lure of big-time college football and the reward of rigorous academics. He graduated in 31/2 years with a degree in finance and with 201/2 career sacks, the third-most in ND history.

“He was a manchild,” said Joe Ehrmann, the defensive coordinator at Gilman, who played 10 years in the NFL for the Baltimore Colts and Detroit Lions. “Victor will play his 10-12 years in the league. He has a tremendous ethic and is a gifted kid, and he has a great balance. Victor would understand he's not going to measure his life by how he plays in the NFL.”

No, but everyone else around here probably will. Great kid? Finance degree? Who cares? This is Philadelphia. These are the Eagles. This is about that burst and that upside. This is about Victor Abiamiri scaring some NFL coaches to death.

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