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The Riders actually got some breaks in this game which gave them the opportunity to pull out a win.  The fumble from receiver Ryan Smith was overturned upon review, which took Keon Raymond’s scoop-and-score off the board.  (The call on the field was a fumble, which was incorrect, however rectified by video replay).

The head referees continue to call the wrong player when announcing penalties.  This goes into the official stats page as fact.  For instance, when #59 Randy Richards was tossed out, they announced #58 (Xavier Fulton).

Accept the things you cannot change.

4 – TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?:  So you can limit the amount of penalties taken if it’s focused on during the week!

We noted on this website last week the various tactics Chamblin was employing in practice to combat the high number of penalties his team was taking.  Coaches were throwing flags in practice and if guilty, that whole side of the ball had to drop and give push-ups or burpees.  Then on Friday Chamblin took the whole team into the eastside stands to give them the fans’ perspective.

To paraphrase, Chamblin said the fans are going to have an opinion of the players regardless and they’re entitled to it.  However what type of performance are you the players going to give on which the fans will base those opinions?

Eureka!  Rider great Don Narcisse called this tactic by Chamblin, “amazing” and said, “I’ve got chills just hearing about it!” when we discussed it on Friday’s SportsCage on 620 CKRM.  I thought it was brilliant too.  Nobody had ever heard of a coach doing something like this.

This was vintage Chamblin, from 2012 when he was cutting his teeth as the first year head coach of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.  Remember the “Big Ticket” and the “Cornish Guarantee”?

Where have these kinds of things been?  Perhaps Chamblin’s been too focused on defensive strategies and personnel to put much time into these inspirational themes.

Maybe there are motivational things going on behind closed doors that we don’t know about but I haven’t heard of them.  We certainly haven’t seen any results that would suggest that’s the case.

The players want to be inspired and challenged.

Chamblin is once again showing the qualities that made him beloved in the Wheat Province.  Are they now happening at just the right time or is too little too late?

No one has ever questioned Corey Chamblin’s intelligence.  His motives or methods maybe, but not his smarts.

What happens next?

5 – QUARTERBACK CONTROVERSY:  Just kidding.  It won’t be a quarterback controversy once Kevin Glenn returns from that torn pectoral muscle but it will make for an interesting scenario.  On Saturday’s pregame show, Rider GM Brendan Taman divulged that Kevin Glenn is “throwing lightly” but is still at least two weeks away from returning.

After Saturday’s game Chamblin said once Glenn returns, the quarterback which best represents their chance to win will play.  (Which we’ve been telling you all along).

Both Chamblin and offensive coordinator Jacques Chapdelaine have cautioned that the progression of rookie quarterback Brett Smith “isn’t going to happen overnight” however it’s grown by leaps and bounds the past few weeks.

With a play here or there in the other two phases of the game, Smith could be 2-1 as a starter rather than 0-3.  However he’s still been victimized by some bad throws (i.e. the endzone interception at the end of the first quarter which was overturned by review) but HE’S A ROOKIE!  He’s done far more good than bad.

It’s just that the bad sticks out like a sore thumb, like the pick six’s in Edmonton and Toronto.

And with each passing week, we’re getting closer and closer to this season being scrapped and the focus being shifted to the future.

What will be the tipping point toward that decision?

6 – ONE LAST THING ON THE HALL OF FAME:  The Riders did a good job of honouring the 2015 Canadian Football Hall of Fame inductees who were present at Saturday’s game.  Gene Makowsky, Eddie Davis, Bob O’Billovich and Larry Reda were recognized on stage at midfield at Mosaic Stadium.  Was 2015 inductee Leroy Blugh there?  It was tough to tell.  It’s chaos in our broadcast booth at halftime and I couldn’t see all of what was going on at field level.

Inductee Dave Dickenson was in the locker room with his Calgary Stampeders making halftime adjustments as offensive coordinator.  Montreal Alouettes owner Bob Wetenhall was inducted as a builder, but he was back in Montreal firing his coach.

The whole week seem incredibly awkward.

There was no coverage on TSN of the induction in Saskatoon on Thursday.  There was ZERO coverage of the events by the Canadian Press Wire, where I get a lot of news for this website.  I did not receive a single news release of any kind from the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.

The induction class itself was announced on the Friday night of Grey Cup Week in Vancouver last season, for the second year in a row.

When nobody’s paying attention.

Again, accept the things you cannot change.

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COFFEE ROW

Harvey Johnson

On Thursday morning I accepted a long-standing invitation from football maven John Lynch to attend his weekly coffee group at the Casino Regina’s Last Spike Restaurant.  It was pretty typical of any coffee group in Regina, with a bunch of gray haired football fan retirees who go by the names of Joe, John, Del, Glen, Jim, Dave and Wayne.

And Harvey.

That’s right — Harvey Johnson, who worked as the statistician on Roughrider radio broadcasts from 1968 to 2011, is a part of this coffee group and I had to get his take on the 2015 Riders when I had the chance.

You see, we would always wrap up each broadcast with Harvey’s stats and then his last word assessment on the game, and on the team.

As a broadcaster, Harvey’s claim to fame was announcing on CKRM Radio in 1963 that JFK had been assasinated.  So, he’s seen a few things.  And I asked him for an assessment on the winless Riders.

“Quite frankly I’d like to know what the problem is too,” Harvey stated.  “There just seems to be an awful lot of issues.  I think it goes back to not enough good scouting and you wonder what those free agent camps in the States actually produced for them.  Other teams actually seem to have a better scouting system than we do.  There are times when the coaching staff is struggling in terms of finding the right situation for our guys.

“I’m not sure what the ulimate answer is.  The executive of the team needs to take a long, hard long at what the future is the for the next four or five years and then draw out a plan that produces some consistency.  Right now what we’re doing isn’t working.”

And Johnson zeroed in on the defense which has been a big problem all season long.

“It has,” Harvey concurred.  “Quite frankly, and it’s my own opinion, it’s a difficult thing for a head coach to handle a defensive coordinator’s position.  It’s interesting because when Chamblin came here he didn’t want people doing two jobs.  He’s doing two jobs himself.  If you’re gonna not want your players doing two jobs, i.e. as a defensive back and a returner, than why would it be okay for you?

“It’s difficult for a head coach to cover the whole thing.”

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CARTERI’S CORNER

Lastly, we leave you with this.  Perhaps this will perk up your “Down Week” a little bit.

Carm Carteri

27-year Rider Radio analyst Carm Carteri doesn’t think this season was written off with Saturday’s 34-31 loss to the Calgary Stampeders.

“No I don’t!” said an exasperated Carteri.  “We go to Ottawa now and if we win that, you gotta remember nobody else is excelling.  The B.C. Lions only have three wins, Winnipeg only has three wins, and in the next four weeks we see Winnipeg and Ottawa twice!  The Riders can get on a roll.

“Everybody can say ‘Ya they haven’t even won a game yet‘ but they can win four in a row because I don’t think Ottawa and Winnipeg are that good.  If the Riders get lucky and get on a roll, look at against the Stampeders — this is a really good football team but the Riders, even though they had some bad spots, they came back and almost pulled this one off.

“Unfortunately they didn’t finish and this is something we’ve talked about all year long; this is a team that has all new coaches.  They never won in the preseason and they’re now 0-8 in the league.  They don’t know how to win.  That’s a tangible you can’t teach or coach — you just gotta have it evolve within the team.  They’ve got a good young quarterback and he’s getting better and better but every game he’s thrown a killer interception.

“If they can clean up one or two plays, I think they can get on a roll.  I just hope all of Saskatchewan can hang in there like we’re trying to do.”

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Our crew with Tom Wright

UFC SASKATOON

Some notes from UFC Fight Night Sunday in Saskatoon:

– Max Holloway’s first main event was bittersweet.

The Hawaii product defeated Brazilian Charles Oliveira in the first round of the co-main event of UFC Fight Night 74 on at the SaskTel Centre in a bout that was stopped due to injury.

The featherweight fight ended at 1:39 after Oliveira started to favour his right shoulder following an exchange. The seventh ranked UFC featherweight went down and the fight was stopped, giving fifth-ranked Holloway (14-3) a knockout victory at the SaskTel Centre. Oliveira (20-5) was carried away on a stretcher.

– We made the welcome trip up to the Bridge City with former Rider Scott Schultz and Regina MMA promoter/coach A.J. Scales.  It was nice to get away from the epicentre of the Rider Nation for a few hours, even if we elected to drive home right afterwards rather than stay over.

– The road out to “Sask Place” seemed longer than normal, but that was because construction had traffic restricted.  We missed the start of the first fight at 4:00 pm.  Amazingly, it didn’t take long to get out afterwards despite all the horror stories we’d been warned about.

– A Fight Night is pretty much the exact same type of deal as the Saturday night Pay-Per-Views, however with a lesser-known card and not as many heavyweights and middleweights.  Announcer Bruce Buffer was there, which was cool.  Sadly UFC fixtures Dana White, Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan were not.

– The crowd was disappointing, announced at 7,202 in the 15,000-seat facility.  However those who were there were LOUD making for a raucous atmosphere for the card televised across the U.S. on Fox Sports 1.

– You have to wonder if the half-full arena will make the UFC think twice about staging a Pay-Per-View event in Saskatoon in the future.  You could’ve crammed that many people into Regina’s Brandt Centre which would have made for a hornet’s nest.

– And that really isn’t an indictment of Saskatoon, but rather of the entire province.  The UFC says the highest per capita sales of their PPV events comes from this province.  But they won’t shell out the dough to see it live??

– The ticket prices of $250 may have scared lots of folks off but you can’t complain about the bang you get for your buck.  The event started at 4:00 pm and concluded just before 10:00 pm.

– It was great to chat with UFC Canada President Tom Wright on Sunday, the former Commissioner of the CFL, and when I asked him for his thoughts on the event, his response was, “Great.  Just Great!”  We also chatted about the Roughriders for a brief second and Tom said he “feels bad” for the 0-8 team.  However I mentioned that we can’t be on top forever and his response was, “I know”.

– It was my first UFC event and it was very interesting to survey the crowd.  They were generally between the ages of 40 and 50 with virtually no children in attendance and the only senior citizens were the ones working as ushers and security.  The lone piece of Roughrider merchandise we noticed was a Rider flag a guy had tied around his shoulders as a cape.

– I’ll talk about this on the SportsCage on Monday but the “show” in Saskatoon was mind-blowing.  I’ve been in venues before where the music blaring through the speakers rattled my clothes but not until Sunday had I experienced an event so loud that it rattled the skin on my face!  It was blood-pumping.

– The CFL and WHL could take some notes from the UFC on the “in-game experience” however we have to remember this is an almost once-in-a-generation type of event as opposed to 10 or 36 home regular season games.  Still, you can always turn up the volume and the UFC had theirs at “11”.

– All in all, it was a great trip!  We’re planning a visit to Las Vegas for a UFC show in the spring.

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THAT’S IT! THANKS FOR STOPPING BY…
RP
@sportscage
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