James Wilder Jr. was in a familiar place this spring, shortly after he’d signed with the Toronto Argonauts. He was talking football with his father, James Sr.

A father’s voice usually carries a lot weight, but when your dad is a 10-year NFL vet and a former Pro Bowl running back, it packs a little extra oomph when it comes to dispensing career advice.

To be blunt, James Sr. wasn’t totally sold on his son’s decision to play in the CFL.

“At first when I was coming to Canada, he didn’t know too much about it,” James Jr. said on Wednesday.

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Whether it’s the NFL or CFL, pro football is a small world. One name drop quickly turned what might have been a yellow light into a green one for the concerned father. That name? Marc Trestman.

“Once he figured out that I was here with Tres, he said that made him feel a lot more comfortable,” Wilder said.

Trestman, it turns out, has coached both father and son through his 36-year career. He was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterbacks coach in 1987. Wilder Sr. rushed for 488 yards that year and had 328 receiving yards.

“I was just trying to find my way (as a coach),” Trestman said. “I remember him being a great player. I don’t remember getting to know him personally or anything like that, other than just normal coaching stuff.”

“He spoke highly of my father. He said, ‘I’ll be very satisfied if you can get to half of what your dad was,’” James Jr. said of Trestman. “He spoke highly of him and I talked to my dad and my dad spoke highly of Marc Trestman as well.”

Through a year of watching James Sr. in Tampa and through this year, where James Jr. has enjoyed a breakout season — he was announced as the team’s nominee for outstanding rookie on Wednesday — Trestman has seen a very familiar-looking player start to blossom.

“Very similar styles,” he said. “A long player, high runner. Great guy, but I didn’t know (James Sr.) well.”

Trestman and football fans across the country are getting to know the younger Wilder very well. At six-foot-two and 232 pounds, he’s proven to be unstoppable through the second half of this season. He’s turned 104 hand-offs into 736 yards and four touchdowns and caught 44 passes for 442 yards.

Named a starter on Sept. 16, he stunned the Eskimos with a 190-yard rushing performance in a 34-26 win. Sitting at 4-7 before that game, the Argos have made Wilder a focal point of the offence and are now 8-9. A win in Vancouver on Saturday night would give the Argos first place in the East Division, a first-round bye in the playoffs and put them in the enviable position of hosting the Division Final on Nov. 19.

Wilder, Trestman and QB Ricky Ray (the unanimous selection for the team’s Most Outstanding Player award) will all tell you that it’s not as simple as their season turning for the better by naming him the starting running back, but the move played a part in it.

“It seems that way but honestly, I can’t sit here and take credit,” Wilder said. “We have a lot of stuff added into our run game from what we were doing earlier in the season. Coach Himey (o-line coach Jonathan Himebauch) came and installed a few things for us and it’s been successful.”

“Yeah I think he’s been a part of it. I think he’s been a big piece of that,” Ray said.

“I think we’ve all as a team started executing a lot better, especially offensively. James obviously has given us a lot of big plays and really taken advantage of his opportunity. We’ve been able to run the football explosively and our screen game, all that.”

Like a chef sampling a meal in mid-preparation, Trestman looked at his run game in September and decided that it needed something a little different. Even he’s been surprised with what’s come out of the oven.

“I didn’t expect it to be what it was,” he said. “There might have been other people that did within the organization, but I didn’t expect him to be as productive as he was as early as he was in the game.

“I wish I could say that. I’m certainly happy, but I can’t. We were just trying to see if at that point of the season we could take a look and see if we could get something more going. I didn’t have any expectations of him being as productive as he has been.”

Ray benefits with Wilder in the lineup. As a quarterback that does his best work in the pocket, the addition of a dominant running back that can do a lot of everything — he protects Ray, prides himself in needing multiple defenders to pull him down and can turn a short pass into a big gain — makes the Argos’ offence a pick-your-poison nightmare.

“Not only is he a big physical guy, he’s fast,” Ray said, thinking back to a Wilder touchdown against the Alouettes on Sept. 23 where he stiff-armed two players while running for a touchdown.

“He has top-end speed where he can outrun everybody. Just the way he punishes players too, he’s hard to bring down. It’s impressive to have that combination. You’re usually either physical or you’re a fast guy. He kind of has it all. I haven’t been around a guy that’s had that combination.”

“If I’m doing (well) in the run game, you have to fill the box or I’ll have a successful game,” Wilder said. “I feel like if you do fill the box and I don’t have a successful game, you’ve got the GOAT, one of the greatest, the greatest quarterback in the CFL (in Ray).

“You can’t fill the box with him because he’s going to pick your defence apart. You have to choose one or the other. Which one do you want, which one is going to do the least damage? I think it compliments Ricky a lot and I think it makes it easier for him as well, with me being a bigger guy that I can protect him and give him some space, some time in the pocket.”

The deadly pocket passer paired with a tough-to-stop running back is a combination that Trestman loves. He said more than once on Wednesday that Brandon Whitaker has done it in Toronto in years past and for him with Anthony Calvillo when they were in Montreal, along with Avon Cobourne.

“That’s the kind of runner you want: a productive, pass protector, protective runner and protective pass receiver. That’s what we got with James,” the coach said. “He’s given us some explosiveness that we didn’t have.”