I looked back on my writing from a year ago at this time. I looked back on a lot of people’s writing from a year ago this time. Things were different in Toronto.
Not much was expected from the Toronto Argonauts, really. A rebuilding season with a vaunted brain trust that, nonetheless, came into the campaign with not much preparation time and a fair number of players collected by the previous regime.
Smart guys, Marc Trestman and Jim Popp, sure. But to expect them to do anything other than blow out a few walls and maybe get some new kitchen cabinets up as they began to restore the place, seemed a little much. A playoff spot? Probably not.
The Toronto Argonauts, in 2017, had the luxury of being taken lightly. The luxury of low expectations. That’s now gone.
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In their first year anchoring the ship, Jim Popp and Marc Trestman led the Boatmen to a Grey Cup victory (Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)
In 2018, Popp, Trestman and the rest of the Toronto Argonauts are expected to build a gorgeous addition to the place they rescued from a dilapidated existence a year ago.
So there’s the bad news. The Argos come in as more of a known and respected commodity, with eight other teams, eight head coaches, deciding they are a measuring stick of some degree or another. The good news is that expectations for year two of the Popp/Trestman dominion would have been higher anyway. Not this high, maybe, but high. It’s also good news because wouldn’t you rather have lofty expectations than despair anyway?
With a surprising Grey Cup victory last November, the Argonauts are now being measured as serious contenders, and so the question is apparent: how will they react when everyone expects them to be more the windshield and less the bug?
There aren’t a lot of major positional questions heading into this season but there are some. There is star power and depth all over the field and enough consistency of roster to suggest a smooth transition from hunter to hunted. As always, that’s easier said than done.
There are some challenges to be met and losses to be overcome if the Argos are to do what is expected of them this season. You can find them at the receiver position, in the defensive secondary and in the coaching ranks, to name three. The kicking game is important, too, so let’s throw that in there as well. Four.
With receiver DeVier Posey off to the NFL for a tryout with Baltimore, the defending champions have pretty large shoes to fill. Posey emerged as a big-game, pressure-time target as the 2017 season wore on, his rise culminating with him nabbing both a 100-yard touchdown reception and the Grey Cup MVP Award on November 26th. Toronto may ultimately look to a veteran like Brian Tyms to fill that spot, though like most teams, they have a bevy of new receiving talent to consider. Thursday night’s pre-season game against Ottawa will be a key in sorting out that question in time for the opener.
Mitchell White is no longer in the team’s defensive backfield and if you don’t think that matters, you haven’t been paying enough attention to Mitchell White. He’s talented, he’s savvy. But what he is, mostly, is somehow exactly what a defensive secondary needs to be glued together tightly. He did it in Ottawa, and he did it last year when he was added to the Toronto line-up halfway through the season.
The Argos have impressive newcomers like Ronnie Yell and T.J. Heath to lean on, to pick up the slack. They’ll need to do that because Toronto parted ways with another Swiss army knife type of defender, the underrated Rico Murray, now in Ottawa.
You could argue that the biggest loss on defence came from the coaches’ room. Defensive Coordinator Corey Chamblin bid adieu to the Boatmen this past off-season, and he has been replaced by Mike Archer, a coach with reams of impressive experience south of the border, but whose first full-time association with Canadian football came last season when he served as Toronto’s linebackers coach.
With the release of Swayze Waters, Ronnie Pfeffer will take the kicking duties for Toronto this season (Argonauts.ca)
Chamblin’s contributions to the Argos’ championship season should not to be understated. He was handed a collection of mostly veteran players, many of them newcomers to the Argonauts. That meant they hadn’t played together all that much, leading most of us to assume Chamblin would build a relatively vanilla defence at the outset, leading to more and more layers as the season progressed. Almost immediately, though, Chamblin threw exotic schemes at his group, trusting their veteran knowledge while tasking many of them with varying responsibilities not only from game to game, but sometimes from series to series. It worked, almost immediately, and only got better as the season wore on.
Will the Toronto defence be as stout as it was last year? Much of the veteran personnel needed to accomplish that feat is in place and a sign of the team’s depth was shown when it was announced that middle linebacker Bear Woods underwent back surgery, sidelining him for the first month of the season if not more. That kind of news would usually be met with great consternation. It was not, however, because the Argos are very deep at linebacker, with free agent acquisition Taylor Reed (94 tackles with Ottawa in 2017) ready to patrol the position, if he is not outdone by second year man Terrance Plummer. Or by Akeem Jordan. Or by Khalil Bass. Or by one of his other teammates.
It will be up to Archer to stitch this group into place and how well he can do that remains to be seen.
With Lirim Hajrullahu gone via free agency to Hamilton, Toronto lost its solid punter/placekicker, a man who hit every one of his 36 extra point attempts, last season, and came through with the winning field goal late in the fourth quarter of the Grey Cup Game. His back up last season, Ronnie Pfeffer, has won the job, with veteran Swayze Waters being released by the club on Tuesday.
Pfeffer, the 25-year-old Laurier grad, was a rookie back-up to Waters with Toronto in 2015, seeing some action when the veteran was injured. He was then snapped up by Ottawa later that season, before returning to Toronto as a practice roster player in 2017. He hasn’t kicked in a regular season game in two seasons, with just sixteen field goal attempts during his career (good on twelve). It seems the club feels Pfeffer is primetime ready and we’re about to find out if that’s right.
So far for the Argos, so good. In their opening pre-season tilt, they fielded a team made up, largely, of understudies and hopefuls. They blasted the Hamilton Ticats pretty good, although you might argue the ‘Cats did that to themselves, turning the ball over seven times before halftime had arrived.
Nevertheless, it’s a very different feel around the 2018 edition of the Argos. Whereas 2017 began with a sense that the team was on track to climb out of the misery that had befallen it, a guarding of that optimism reigned. Hope for some progress had replaced the pessimism and that was enough.
Hope is now expectation and as they endeavour to get answers to a few key personnel questions, that is something this edition of the Toronto Argonauts will have to manage as part of the challenge of mounting a repeat performance.
