Marc Trestman On CFL Rule & Field Changes

Famed NFL, CFL & NCAA coach Marc Trestman joined the RP Show on Thursday to discuss a variety of things including his football life now (living in Naples, FL but not retired), regale some Oakland Raiders stories, and discuss the list of rule & field changes announced last month by CFL Commissioner Stewart Johnston. Here are some of the quotes:

“#1 is I remember sitting in the rules meeting with Wally Buono, my first or second year, he would always say ‘We gotta really be careful when we talk about rules when we want to change them because it’s been a pretty good league for the last 100- , or whatever, 140 years!’

“I think that one of the things I do respect is the fact that, I’ve heard and I don’t if it’s true, that the coaches were not involved in these decisions. That’s very disappointing. The people that know the football the best aren’t involved in the decision-making? That was very disappointing to me, personally.

“And then #3, the timing of it. I thought it was disrespectful to the people in the league that are playing and coaching (a) game because it affected them. I mean, Jason Maas and whomever should not have been having to answer a question about rule changes during the week of a game. That’s really hard to do and it takes everything to focus in the moment on winning a game on the scoreboard, so that was disappointing.

“Now as far as the rules go, I don’t want to be specific in any. The one that caught my ear was the 35-second (playclock) rule. Just watch the NFL games, with the 40-second rule, and 30% of the plays don’t get started until there’s less than five seconds left on the 40-second clock. But I did hear the Commissioner say that they’re going to leave some of that to coaches and that would be a good one because that’s really hard to get a team to the line of scrimmage, make checks, protection changes, and get that ball of in 35 seconds when in the NFL sometimes they don’t get it off sometimes in 40!”

Trestman did go on to say that he understands Commissioner Stewart Johnston is doing what he thinks is best for the CFL. The full interview can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We2ZpyJ9ZtI&t=6858s

RP
@rodpedersen