Matt Smith/CFL.ca
Her face came into focus for me just at the end of the commercial, a teaser for a show on whatever network we were watching, but it was all I needed to see.
“That’s the woman from The Affair!” I blurted out a second later, so proud of my ability to spot an actor out of their natural TV habitat, venturing into another. “You know, the one that got affairred on.” My ability to articulate, sadly, lags behind on my list of skills.
My girlfriend needed the same amount of time to shoot down my revelation. As confident as I was that I was looking at Maura Tierney, she was equally steadfast that it wasn’t her. Sides were taken. Bets were made. It was a head-on collision of hubris.
These situations are never good. When you let your strong assumptions convince you that they’re fact, the results can be embarrassing. No matter how right you think you are about something, no matter how hard you dig your heels in, you can always be wrong. You can lose bets. Maura Tierney can actually be Pamela Adlon and your significant other can leave you eating crow. Or, more specifically, force you to present a bottle of wine to her in the role of her butler.
Hubris is a very dangerous thing.
If you couldn’t relate to this story a week ago, Duron Carter and Chris Jones have made it much more palatable. Football fans and a few players across the country woke up eating their words on Saturday morning. Carter as a defensive back, as seemingly ridiculous as it might have been, was no smokescreen. He took a week’s worth of questions, criticism, controversy and mockery and put forth one of the best performances of his career and one of the more memorable the CFL has seen in a long time.
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Duron Carter recorded a pick-six in his first game at defensive back (Matt Smith/CFL.ca)
I was in the wrong on Carter last week too. I racked my brain in the days leading up to the Riders’ game in Calgary, deep dive conspiracy theorizing on what we were seeing, trying to find some sense in it. There was so much going on around the move — and we’ll get to that — that it let the first offering of humble pie get prepped right under our noses.
We should never doubt Chris Jones in these situations.
In the years he was a defensive coordinator and into his fourth season as a head coach, Jones has always been seen as something of a mad scientist. As the DC in Toronto, he moved Tony Washington from the O-line to the D-line. In Edmonton as a head coach, he transformed D-lineman Eddie Steele into a temporary O-lineman when injuries weighed heavy on his team. Matt Black mentions Qudarius Ford, a defensive back on the Argos this year, who’d been a DB his entire life. Jones had him play some receiver for the Riders last year in Saskatchewan.
“That’s one thing that Chris Jones is great at doing,” Black said on Friday, a few hours before the Riders and Stamps kicked off.
“He’s great at putting players in position to make plays. When he was our coach here he moved guys around. He did a lot of things. He’s going to find your skill set, find out what you’re good at and he’s going to try to get that out of you.
“If it’s a package, if it’s a different position, if it’s moving guys around, when he sees certain attributes and traits in players he’s going to get as much as he can out of his guys. I think that’s what’s made him a good coach and led to a lot of his success.”
And in Duron Carter, Chris Jones might be working with the most unique talent in the CFL.
“I couldn’t play corner. I could maybe play safety. Not corner,” Argos receiver S.J. Green said on Friday, laughing.
“I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for so long and I haven’t played on the defensive side of the ball since I was in high school. Even at that point I played safety. The mechanics they have to have, to move, my body don’t move like that. My body moves like a receiver, so I don’t see myself ever making that transition.”
Bombers DB T.J. Heath has seen a lot of Carter this year, including in a tense back-and-forth between the two teams in this year’s Banjo Bowl. Like Green, he wondered about the mechanics of the move.
“It would definitely take…he has the (input) of an offensive coordinator and understanding of what’s going on,” Heath said. “But it’s a lot easier running forward than it is backwards. For the most of a game I’m running backwards. Sometimes for a guy that’s hard to do.
“Then again, he’s a talented player, maybe he’ll be able to do it. Maybe he had a background in it before. It’s hard to say. You don’t know what a guy can do until you see him do it.”
And of course, Carter got in there and looked like the most valuable player on the field. He backed up his Twitter trash talk, snagged Bo Levi Mitchell’s pass, danced around the entire Stampeders offence and dove into the end zone for the touchdown (someone check on Rod Pedersen and make sure he’s OK).
When I say Carter is the most unique talent in the CFL, the other part of that equation is the off-the-field/Twitter-fingers stuff. Managing a player like Carter is no small feat, but Jones — who marches to his own beat as a coach as well — is showing that it’s doable. Rob Vanstone wrote in the Regina Leader-Post on Friday that Jones meets daily with Carter to ensure all is well and that everyone is on the same page. It’s clearly not a 100 per cent smooth ride (see Carter’s tweet that suggested he was cut, his online battles with fans and the occasional Rider alumni, the fight he got in at practice last week and the buzz it created all week around his team), but the results speak louder than the considerable noise that Carter is prone to create.
There have been controversial players in this league before (I hope you’re imagining Arland Bruce tipping his hat at this moment), but we’ve never seen a player like Duron Carter.
We’ve seen players burn out doing some of the things that Carter has done. Carter somehow manages it incident by incident, game by miraculous game, tweet by tweet. It’s incredible.
It’s safe to say he’s lost the football traditionalists, the fans that swoon over a guy getting into the end zone and casually flipping the ball back to the ref and rejoining the huddle. And I think he’s lost and re-gained fans day by day over the last few weeks, live-tweeting how his wings are slowly burning as he flies under the outer reaches of the sun.
There is no one else like Duron Carter in the CFL. No one as open, as reckless, no one as willing to take you on a journey that, as he Dragon Ball Z’d in the end zone on Friday night, I started to think, could very well could end up in Ottawa at the end of November, playing for a Grey Cup.
It’d be crazy for anyone else. Death by hubris. For Duron Carter?
Life
— Duron Carter (@DC_CHILLIN_8) October 21, 2017
