COMMENTARY: OVERREACTION MONDAY
(Listen daily for the Rod Pedersen Commentary on Cat Country 98, Rock 98.5 FM & LTD Radio)
If only things went according to plan.
Coming out of Week 8 of the Canadian Football League season, there have been some surprises, which is just the way we like it.
There’s a heckuva lot of football left to be played so there are no generalizations to be made yet, but there are some troubling trends.
Most notably, the Calgary Stampeders. They looked average in Montreal Sunday night, losing 25-18 to the Alouettes, dropping their record to 2-5.
TSN was quick to point out that Calgary hasn’t had a losing season since 2007; the year before John Hufnagel arrived.
And it gets no easier … league-leading Toronto visits McMahon Stadium on Friday evening.
Meanwhile just like the NFL, it’s the quarterbacks who dominate the headlines in the CFL and that’s where we sit on this Overreaction Monday.
Hamilton’s Bo Levi Mitchell inexplicably broke his leg in the final seconds of the Ticats’ win at Ottawa Friday night, when all the team had to do was kneeldown a couple of times to run out the clock.
Don’t ask.
And of course all week long the talk in the Wheat Province will be the blossoming quarterback controversy. Saskatchewan’s #1 pivot Trevor Harris is on the shelf for the season which has left the team scrambling to try to win games with back-up Mason Fine, and then Jake Dolegala who replaced Fine late in Saturday’s 31-13 loss to Toronto in Touchdown Atlantic.
But it’s gotta be Fine starting in Week 9 when the Riders take on Ottawa. You pick your team coming out of camp, set your pecking order, and trust in your decisions as the season goes along.
Where you get into trouble is with panic, knee-jerk decisions and that’s what starting Dolegala this week would be.
Also, I can see from the outside now how the media can be a problem in fishbowls and pressure cookers like Saskatchewan. You’ve got reporters telling the team what to do when, frankly, they have no experience in that department.
That creates a lot of problems for the Riders, who’ve entrusted the coaches to make these decisions, not the media or fans. Then you’ve got a Board of Directors who doesn’t know any better, and tends to listen to the latter, not the former.
Again, wouldn’t it be nice if everything went according to plan.
That’s today’s Rod Pedersen Commentary
(The Rod Pedersen Show airs daily at 12 pm ET on Game+TV, WQEE Radio, YouTube Live & Podcast)
Fine is now 0-4 as a starter, enough said! No over reaction, they have nothing to lose if they start big Jake … they might even WIN…
Exactly! Fine is not fine. Using your logic Rod, Darian Durant doesn’t see the field way back when as the third stringer……gotta DO something!!
And come on Rod, Hamilton was on their own 2 yard line! Can’t step back from there and kneel down, it’s a safety touch! BLM should NOT have been on the field…….bad coaching decision and call by Steinhauer.
COMMENTARY: OVERREATION MONDAY
Very good, spot on comments RP, especially about the Saskatchewan Roughriders organization. Time to take off the gloves about that organizations operations.
The operations are doing juuuuuust fine. As long as the fans show up and you use the team to doll out sugar contracts to the various businesses aligned at the Board level – this CEO is the same as well Vladimir Putin was letting Oligarchs operate in the post Soviet Union era. – the deal is he gets paid and has job security. Who cares if they win or not. The fans are dumb enough to keeping going to games. Corruption when it’s legal – it really is done at a level as well as the Gambinos handled New York… Read more »
Did anyone get a chance to see the Edmonton Elks? – this is a cautionary tale of what happens when you have a Board that does not know whether the football is stuffed with air or feathers. It then goes to getting a CEO that at best knows computers and how to organization a Tae Kwan Do tournament. Who then in turn gets sold a bill of goods to hire and give complete control to what is in effect the CFL’s version of the WWF’s Honkey Tonk Man. To quote the great Jordan Peterson, “this is not good.” If I’m… Read more »