BRENDAN MCGUIRE’S TOP 10 OF 2019

1. EMERGENCE OF CODY FAJARDO: Darian Durant was pretty good in his prime. But even at his best, he wasn’t much better than Cody Fajardo was in 2019. We haven’t had too many elite quarterbacks in the ‘306’ over the past hundred-and-some-odd years and if Fajardo has a couple more years like he did in his first wearing green and white, he will join a very short list that includes Glenn Dobbs, Frank Tripucka, Ron Lancaster, Kent Austin and Darian Durant. But what makes Fajardo stand above the crowd more than anything is how it feels like he’s one of us! Or at least he wants to be one of us. We haven’t had a star quarterback embrace the city of Regina like this since Lancaster was teaching high school in Regina himself. The story of Cody Fajardo going from the outhouse to the penthouse in under 5 months is easily the top story of the year gone by.

2. BEST ROUGHRIDER RECORD IN 49 YEARS:  Not going to say it was the best Rider TEAM in 49 years. That would’ve required some hardware in November and not clanging off the goalposts. But to have a regular season so good that only the baby boomers might remember seeing one before is a pretty spectacular thing to happen out of the blue for a squad that many of us (me, especially) never saw coming. Way off in the future, we will look back on 2019 as the season the Riders came completely out of nowhere to wow us all. Doesn’t top a championship year, nothing ever does, but this was the next best thing.

3. REGINA AWARDED GREY CUP 2020: It will be nice to show off the best outdoor sports palace in the country (and I’ve been to just about all of them so I can legitimately say that) and pump some cash into our city. Our economy has been in the crapper for long enough and this is a time when Regina NEEDS stuff like this to distract our minds from whatever might be going wrong in our world and allow us to pretend sports matters when of course we all know it really doesn’t.

4. CHRIS JONES LEAVING: Always felt like it was all about him from the moment he rode in, 8 days after winning Grey Cup 2015 with Edmonton until the day he left, shortly after he promised he was staying. Somehow the sun came up, the Roughriders piled up their highest win total in nearly half-a-century, and we have a new rock-star quarterback (something Chris Jones could never find) to boot. The sky didn’t fall here but it did over Jones’s new team, the Cleveland Browns. I think we’re okay with that.

5. REGINA RED SOX LOSE IN THE FINALS, AGAIN: What a heartbreaking finish to lose to Okotoks in the finals, but what an awesome program! The players, most of them American, tell me all summer long how lucky they are to come and spend a summer in Canada and play in front of crowds noisier and bigger than what they see with their college teams down south. The players might feel lucky to be here but not nearly as lucky as we are to have them come and play for us.  

6. NHL HERITAGE CLASSIC: The game itself, sucked. But most outdoor games do. Regina was waaayyyy overdue to host a regular season NHL game and we finally got it. The whole Rider nation thing has duped the world into thinking we’re a football province. WRONG! We’re a Rider province but more than anything, we’re still a hockey province.

7. REGINA PATS RE-BUILD: They don’t fool around like they used to. Remember wasting the best years of Jordan Eberle and Colten Teubert on some really crappy teams? Not anymore! The Pats deserved a re-build year in 2018-19 and can have another this year, which they are. But that’s it. Fans will trade some bad years with the good but 3 in a row would be too many.

8. SASKATCHEWAN RATTLERS ARE CHAMPIONS: This barely even made the radar but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It’s still early days in pro basketball for this country and the Canadian Elite Basketball League has great potential. We need stuff like this in our province and especially in Saskatoon to get the new arena built downtown.

9. SASKATCHEWAN RUSH HERE TO STAY: Into year number 5 and still filling the place. Once you come this far, you’re not flavor of the week anymore. You’re part of the culture. I never thought in a million years we would ever have a team to compete against New York with. Amazing!

10. SPORTSCASTERS LEAVING: Rod left the Sportscage, Bob McCown left Prime Time Sports and Don Cherry left Coaches Corner. We should never fear change as it brings new opportunity. For far too long, elites in expensive suits have decided who us listeners, viewers or readers have to pay attention to. Not anymore. This internet thing is a powerful tool that is cutting out the middle man. It’s all about putting the control into the hands of the on-air talent and more importantly, the customer. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of pretty awful fake news being spread by this internet thing, and it’s got me worried as much as anybody. But that’ll run its course and people will move on from that. The best is yet to come.

(Follow Brendan on Twitter at @brendanhowardmc)