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Hello, Las Vegas. Good luck in the Stanley Cup Final, I guess. Although I’d absolutely, one hundred per cent be rooting whole hog for you had you named your team The Posse. That would have been the correct thing to do. Ya blew it. If I have time, I might even watch a little of the series but truth be told, I’m all in on football season now as we have reached the eve of the first pre-season game. Giddyup, football fans.
Giddy. Up.
Here are my takeaways from the first week of training camp.
1. A reminder: Nothing is a given.
When defensive back John Ojo signed with the Saskatchewan Roughriders earlier this spring, the universal thought was that the Riders made a nifty little move, landing the 2015 CFL All-Star to bolster their corner position. Ojo was a standout with the Edmonton Eskimos in his rookie year, emerging as a lockdown corner with a bright, bright future. A ruptured Achilles tendon, suffered as training camp got under way in 2016, put him on a two-year odyssey of rehab and soul-searching, but he appeared ready to pick up where he left off, with lots of excitement over his return to the CFL.
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There’s plenty to be determined for quarterbacks across the CFL this training camp (Riderville.com)
However, just days into Ojo’s comeback, the high hopes of the Riders were dashed, with Head Coach Chris Jones deeming him “just too rusty” to be a legitimate candidate for a role on the team. Ojo’s claims that he was ready, both physically and mentally, to scale the heights again, turned out to be a bridge too far, reminding us all that what might appear to be a sure thing on the surface can always turn out to take a surprise U-turn when competition begins.
2. Sometimes it looks weird. Sometimes it just looks right.
Linebacker Adam Bighill looks strange in Winnipeg’s blue and gold.
That’s going to take some getting used to before it becomes something usual, the way it took some time before receiver Weston Dressler looked okay in something other than Riders’ green. Bighill in orange is what we’re used to, after his stellar run with the BC Lions between 2011 and 2016.
However, his wearing of the number 50 for the Bombers, as opposed to the 44 he’d donned with BC, looks exactly right to me, even if we’d grown accustomed to him stuffing runs and blowing up ball carriers in jerseys adorned with double fours. Bighill would have liked to have kept wearing those digits but new teammate Shayne Gauthier already had ’em and was not keen to give ’em up.
Seeing him in training camp video, sporting the number 50, seems just fine and dandy, though. Bighill’s new head coach, Mike O’Shea, famously wore that number during his hall of fame career and there are obvious parallels to be drawn between how he played the game and how Winnipeg’s new prized man in the middle does. So, 50 seems a perfect fit.
3. Speaking of perfect fit, this seems to be one…
Surprising availability can float your training camp optimism boat, can’t it?
Last year, the Toronto Argonauts solved their middle linebacker question when the Montreal Alouettes inexplicably released all-star tackling machine Bear Woods during the opening days of training camp. You know the rest.
Now, the Blue Bombers get the “voila” treatment in the middle, with Bighill, the CFL’s 2015 Most Outstanding Defensive Player and a four-time league-wide all-star, being gifted to them after his release from the NFL’s New Orleans Saints.
While the Winnipeg defence has been stacked with stars at many positions over the last couple of seasons, the unit’s stats have been less than intimidating, overall. Some kinda something has been missing and that something likely just showed up for the Bombers in the person of Bighill. His resumé speaks volumes, his leadership is unquestioned. Does the Winnipeg defence finally have the glue it’s been missing? Yuppers, I say.
4. It’s the REDBLACKS versus the world.
CFL.ca released its inaugural media poll this week and there were some interesting results in many of the categories. None more interesting, though, than the results for the question of “which team will win the 106th Grey Cup presented by Shaw in Edmonton?”
Seventy-three votes were cast. Edmonton led the way with seventeen nods. Calgary and Saskatchewan were right behind, with 16 apiece. Every team in the league, in fact, got at least one vote. Every team in the CFL got some love from someone who thinks their team colours will float down in a ticker tape flurry on Sunday, Nov. 25.
REDBLACKS quarterback Dominique Davis is pictured during practice in Ottawa (Chris Hofley/Ottawa REDBLACKS)
Except for one. Every team got at least one vote except for the Ottawa REDBLACKS. Ouch.
Heck, even the Montreal Alouettes – with a head coach new to the league and an expected starting quarterback with no previous CFL experience – got a vote. But not the Ottawa REDBLACKS, who now have been gifted with fuel for their fire and a theme for the 2018 season: No one thinks we can do this.
5. Jerry Glanville knows nothing about croissants.
Well, he doesn’t. He knows football. He knows defence. He might even know of Elvis Presley’s whereabouts if, in fact, The King is still alive. But Jerry Glanville, defensive coordinator of the Hamilton Ticats, knows nothing about croissants.
During an interview on the Raw Mike Richards podcast this week (It’s a very funny and informative interview, by the way), Glanville said that a croissant he’d eaten at Tim Hortons “beats anything I ever had in France.”
Flag on that play.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with Timmy’s croissants. They’re fine. But I, personally, just returned from a trip to Paris where I ate almost nothing but croissants for every meal and ate more of them during snack time in between those meals of croissants because THEY WERE UNBELIEVABLE.
Good news for the Ticats is that croissant knowledge has very little – in fact probably nothing – to do with designing ball-hawking, immovable object defensive schemes. Which is good. Cuz he knows defence, sure. But Jerry Glanville knows nothing about croissants. He will never – mark my words – never land a job as a pastry coordinator.
AND FINALLY…
Ha! An entire column without one single mention of Johnny Manziel!
Aaaaaaand, I just blew it.
