OUT OF THE TUNNEL: IT’S DRAFT TIME!

BY: RODPEDERSEN.COM STAFF

It’s nice to have some real-ish football to talk about these days. Between the just-finished three day marathon that is the NFL Draft and this Thursday’s CFL Draft, we have a week of football to talk about. And with a season in peril, it might be the only football we have to talk about for a long time.

Thursday night will be fun and it will be interesting to see what the Saskatchewan Roughriders do.

2019 was the first year under the tutelage of general manager Jeremy O’Day and it might have been one of their best in a few years.

They saw a need for a receiver and took two in the first two rounds. Justin McInnis and Brayden Lenius both grew so much in their first season and when the 2020 season finally begins, one or both may have a starting Canadian spot on the roster. 

LB Jacob Janke and OL Vincent Roy will have a shot to make the club this season while LB Christopher Judge had his season and career end early because of a myriad of injuries. 

The player that may be the best out of the bunch is Charbel Dabire. The 6’1″ 300 pound D-tackle will be a big part of the interior of the Roughrider defence in a rotation with Zack Evans and Makana Henry. At 23 years old, he just might take over the starting spot by the end of the year.

They didn’t need to draft an offensive lineman early because 2018 first round pick Dakoda Shepley signed a few months before the draft and, along with Philip Blake, the Riders had a considerable depth at the position. 

Because of this, receiver and defensive line won’t be positions at the top of the list but offensive line will be for 2020. 

Your starters will be future Hall of Famer Brendon LaBatte, who is at the backside of his career and has fought injuries over the past few seasons. Dan Clark is coming off the best season of his career and will be 32 years old and entering his 10th season. And of course, the aforementioned Shepley. Behind them, other than Braden Schram and Jake Bennett, there isn’t much.

What is tough for the Roughriders is that they have the seventh overall pick and then won’t be up until the 30th pick in the fourth round. They traded the second round pick and Josh Stanford to Montreal in 2018 for Philip Blake and Patrick Lavoie. The third round pick was forfeited to select Jake Bennett in the 2019 supplemental draft. 

That means the Riders don’t have a lot of room to make a mistake this year. If you miss on the first round pick, there isn’t a high pick to back you up until halfway through the draft.

Look for the Roughriders to pick up a couple of linebackers to help fill out their special teams. There is a need for a couple of bigger bodies to set their spot and not get knocked off on both return and cover teams.

As with all drafts, this is what we think will happen and like every other draftnik and ‘expert’ out there, it’s a rare occasion where we get things right.

We love the CFL Draft and are reading every piece of information and are starving for more. The problem is that there isn’t much to consume and there are a couple of reasons for this.

The CFL Draft is an incredibly enigmatic event on the Canadian sports scene. It should be incredibly important, especially to its lone broadcaster, but it usually just floats under the NHL and NBA playoff runs, the beginning of major league baseball season, and all kinds of golf, tennis and whatever sport of your choice.

This week, the CFL Draft has the stage all to themselves since everything came to a screeching halt early in March. It also shows how little Canadian sports fans really care about the CFL Draft.

First, there isn’t much to speak of for broadcast coverage. We understand that the pandemic has sent everyone home at TSN but this was also a great opportunity for Duane Forde and the numerous amount of CFL pundits to get on their video chat room of choice and have a solid 30 minute per week draft show. Any new content during these times is absolute gold and this was a great opportunity to cheaply and efficiently put together a unique show that is now lost.

Digitally there are only two outlets going hard on the draft: 3DownNation and the CFL.

Let’s go first to the league website, CFL.ca.

They do a solid job trying to create any sort of hype leading up to the Draft. There are multiple mock-drafts, scouting bureau lists, prospect spotlights and opinions. There’s one big catch; it’s a league-run website so they can’t be super critical of a player or any organization for past terrible draft classes.

This is where 3Down comes in. They have really gone all-in this year and the material is great but there aren’t many true player breakdowns. Sure one can interview a player and get a few opinions, but show me why a player will be a second or third round prospect. Give me film breakdowns. This is a situation where we need more than the cake, we also need to know the recipe.

This isn’t their fault. 

Over the past month we have seen more highlights and breakdowns of the NFL’s first overall pic Joe Burrow than the whole upcoming CFL draft class.

The majority of CFL fans (teams have done studies about this) just like going to the games and having a good time seven to nine times a year and that’s about it. So if you are a hardcore Canadian football nerd (like yours truly), we are in an incredibly small minority. 

So why bother making the investment trying to hunt down precious footage from across USports and the NCAA for a small number of fans?

What we can do is watch the draft on Thursday and tell a friend to watch too. Read everything and support those writers as well. If we can bump the ratings and show the need for more we will get more.

Go watch the draft Thursday night at 6:00pm Saskatchewan time on TSN and follow your favourite draft tracker and watch The Rod Pedersen Show the next day for reactions. Let’s build an audience to give us more.

(RODPEDERSEN.COM STAFF)