May 19, 2018

Sanchez: Keep an eye on young receivers, D-line at training camps

Jimmy Jeong/CFL.ca

TORONTO — As the CFL season is nearly upon us, players are starting to report to their respective team’s training camps, getting set for the year ahead and competing for starting roles.

For CFL.ca’s Davis Sanchez, he’s most looking forward to seeing how the young, Canadian pass-catchers do at each of their camps.

“What I’m interested to see is this look at a new generation of receivers this year,” Sanchez said on this week’s episode of The Waggle presented by Sport Clips. “This will be some of the second, third-year guys. The Lemar Durants, Shaq Johnson in BC, then of course, young guys from last year. The (Nate) Behars the (Danny) Vandervoorts and then we’ve got (Mark) Chapman from this year.”


Episode 107: Dissecting Durant Retirement, Camp Preview + Darvin Adams 1-on1

James and Davis make sense of Darian Durant’s surprise retirement and look ahead toward the opening of training camp. Featuring Blue Bombers Receiver Darvin Adams.


Durant played in seven games with the Calgary Stampeders last season and collected 313 yards and two touchdowns while Johnson suited up in all 18 regular season games in BC and tallied 521 yards and two major scores.

Behar and Vandervoort, both 2017 draft selections, saw limited action with the Eskimos and Lions, respectively, in their rookie seasons.

All four could potentially have a bigger role in their team’s offences when the season gets underway in just a few weeks.

“(Julian) Feoli-Gudino is going to be expected to play a big role in Ottawa as a potential ratio changer there,” continued Sanchez. “There’s some young, younger, Canadian receivers, and I’m probably missing a couple, right now that are darn good. You saw what (Jimmy) Ralph did last year. I know he wasn’t drafted so you sometimes forget about him. But numbers wise, he out shined everybody. There’s a lot of good, young, Canadian receivers.”

Will 2017 draft pick Nate Behar have a bigger role with the Eskimos this season? (Arthur Ward/CFL.ca)

Sanchez is also looking at the other side of the ball and in the trenches at the defensive lines across the league.

“The other thing that I look at is the defensive lines this year,” said Sanchez. “There’s as good of defensive line talent in this league as we’ve seen in years. Talk about all of the offensive linemen who got drafted well, there’s a reason that people are taking all of these linemen because there are some damn good defensive lines out there this year. I want to look at West and start to talk about the West but then I look over at Toronto and it’s like God dang. Montreal has some guys.”

The Toronto Argonauts defensive line, including Shawn Lemon, Cleyon Laing and Justin Tuggle, helped the team win the 105th Grey Cup presented by Shaw.

While Montreal added former Blue Bomber Jamaal Westerman to their defensive line that already had John Bowman in fold.

For more news and notes around the league, listen to The latest episode of the Waggle, in which James and Davis discuss Darian Durant’s retirement and much more.