Johany Jutras/CFL.ca
Brock Sunderland doesn’t like to name names when he tells a story about someone else, but this one, regardless of who the character is, sums up his first season as the Edmonton Eskimos’ GM.
His team was winning games, jumping out to a 7-0 start, but week by week, the Esks were losing players to injury. And not your standard, ‘we’re down a player this week’ stuff.
“Usually after the game you evaluate it. Is there anyone dinged up, is there maybe one injury or not? Then you kind of copy-paste and move forward and you work on overall things,” Sunderland explains.
“This year it’s been two to three days of meetings like, ‘We lost 10 guys’.”
I laugh when he says it. He stays straight faced.
“Literally.”
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When you’re in that situation, you talk to people for perspective. Sunderland reached out to a friend. Again, he doesn’t name names.
“I have a good friend of mine, he was a GM and president in the NFL,” Sunderland says. “We talk maybe twice a month just to keep in touch and bounce ideas. I asked him, ‘What did you do when you went through that? He kind of laughed. He said, ‘I’ve been in the NFL for 50 years and I’ve never had anything close to that’.”
If the Eskimos take the next two steps in their season and win the Western Final, then take the Grey Cup next week in Ottawa, it’d be fitting if Commissioner Randy Ambrosie helped bring the trophy out on a stretcher. If you’ve followed along at all this year with these Eskimos, you know what kind of year it’s been.
They’ve had 87 players on their roster this year and have had 83 different bodies in uniform at least one game. They’ve had 54 players start at least one game. They’ve lost 346 games to the injured list. Postmedia’s Terry Jones wrote last month that these injuries will cost the organization more than $1 million, when the team normally budgets for half of that amount.
“It’s been insane,” Sunderland says. That word comes up a lot. “It’s been insane. But fun.”
In spite of the injuries, in spite of a six-game injured list with better names on it than some teams’ game day rosters and, in spite of the transient nature of the roster this season, here the Eskimos are. They’re playing on the second-last Sunday of the season, favoured by some to take down their longtime rivals and move on to the 105th Grey Cup.
We all know that Calgary’s Marken Michel and Toronto’s James Wilder Jr. are the rookie of the year nominees this year. After everything that’s happened this year, though, you almost want to squeeze Sunderland’s name into the ballot box too.
Sitting in the lobby of the Eskimos’ hotel in Calgary on Saturday afternoon, Sunderland laughs at the suggestion.
“I haven’t even thought about it. My focus all day, every day has been one, winning, and two, doing what’s best for the organization,” he says. “I’ll throw that out to everyone else that has an opinion.”
Jason Maas, Brock Sunderland and the Eskimos have dealt with an historic number of injuries this year (Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)
Sunderland’s first season as a GM — following four seasons as the REDBLACKS’ assistant GM and 10 years prior as a scout in the CFL and NFL — is about as unique as you’ll find.
There were injuries on top of injuries, then a six-game losing streak that followed that 7-0 start. He’s made some shrewd and necessary trades, picking up C.J. Gable and John Chick from Hamilton and snagging Canadian DL Kwaku Boateng in the fifth round of this year’s draft. Of course, before any of that, he was only hired on April 22, after Ed Hervey was relieved of his duties on April 7.
Sunderland took the job the same week that his new team was going to mini-camp in Las Vegas, then had to come back, move from Ottawa, steer the Esks through the CFL Draft on May 7 and quickly get ready for training camp’s opening on May 28.
It’s a lot to throw on the plate of someone who hadn’t done the job before, but Sunderland has shown that he was the right guy for the job. Talk to him long enough and it’s clear to see that he’s on the same page philosophically with Jason Maas and Mike Reilly.
“The question people kept asking when I got hired was, ‘What are you going to do to put your stamp on it?’ I don’t really give a s – – – about my stamp. I want to win football games,” he says.
“My thing was coming and realizing, you don’t have to fix what’s not broken. I think sometimes that might be more difficult than walking into a situation where you have to completely revamp.”
“When you lose, you’re going to catch heat, just like the starting quarterback is. If that stuff affects you, you shouldn’t apply for the job.”
Brock Sunderland on the pressures of being a general manager
In his first season as a GM, Brock Sunderland guided the Eskimos to a 12-6 season (Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)
Sunderland was fortunate in that Maas was already the head coach. From their time in Ottawa, Sunderland would have eyed him as his head coach regardless of where he’d gotten a GM job. That he’d never held the title before hasn’t seemed to make much of a difference to him. Through a lifetime in and around football — his father, Marv, was a longtime scout in the U.S. college ranks, the NFL and CFL —Sunderland paid close attention to what he saw around him. What Maas and Reilly are so big on, Sunderland echoes.
“One of the smartest football coaches I was around was not genuine. And we were a winning organization with him as a head coach,” Sunderland says. “He was fired because he wasn’t true to who he was. Whether it’s football, life, any industry. If you’re not who you are, the facade is going to wear off. So why even start out with a facade?”
Taking over GM duties so late in the off-season, Sunderland reached out to Reilly and a few other players when he was hired, but he let all of his relationships develop organically. He met with players at mini-camp and addressed the team at the start of training camp and let things develop from there.
The Esks lost their sixth straight of the season on Sept. 30, the deal sealed by a Chris Randle pick-six on Reilly, lifting Winnipeg to a 28-19 win. Call-in shows, Twitter and chat forums were inundated with criticism of the team. Anger sparked in every direction: At Reilly, at Maas, into the Esks’ front office, onto Sunderland’s desk.
“You hear it. Of course you do,” he says. “I have family members that follow and they’d see the comments. What I’ll say to that is, if you’re in this role and that stuff affects you, you shouldn’t be in the role. Because it’s going to happen. When you lose, you’re going to catch heat, just like the starting quarterback is. If that stuff affects you, you shouldn’t apply for the job.”
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Those six weeks were unpleasant, no doubt, but Sunderland took it all in and kept his eyes and ears open.
“You go back to your experiences in life and you say, ‘O.K., we went through this in Montreal in 2006 and in Montreal we didn’t have the injuries. We just went on a real bad losing streak and we still ended up in the Grey Cup,” he says.
Sunderland learned about the team around him in that losing streak. Well before it was over, he saw at the end of the tunnel.
“There was urgency to correct things and get back on track but there was never panic, we never freaked out. Sometimes the key to success isn’t panicking and doing something just because outsiders think you should,” he says.
“Media and fans, I love the passion, because that’s one of the special things about Edmonton, but they see, not the tip of the iceberg, they see one per cent of the tip of the iceberg. All the things below the surface and all the moving parts, they have no idea.
“It’s our job, the people that move those parts, to maintain calm and do what we think is best and never react and do something because the media or the fans think we should do something. If that’s the case then you shouldn’t be in the role.”
This insane season is a game or two away from being over for Sunderland and the Eskimos. Whenever it ends, the new GM will exhale, finish settling into his home in Forrest Heights in Edmonton. This season has gone way too fast, and been filled with things that no one could have predicted. But the Esks are where their fans want them to be every year, battling a powerhouse Calgary team for a right to go to the Grey Cup.
“That’s one thing I love about this organization. We’re here in the final and there’s not one sense of contentment, where it’s like, ‘We’re here, we’re established for the season’,” Sunderland says. “The biggest thing is the yearning desire to win a Grey Cup.”
