TAMAN ON THE CAGE

Saskatchewan Roughriders GM Brendan Taman made his weekly appearance on 620 CKRM’s SportsCage on Monday and discussed the state of his 1-2 Riders as they return from the bye week for Tuesday’s closed practice at Mosaic Stadium.  Here are his quotes:

ON BYE WEEK ACTIVITIES

BT:  You’ve gotta pace yourself in this business and our coaches took three or four days off and then came back at the end of last week.  J.O. and I took a couple days off and tried to take it easy but in our business, it never stops.  You can field an agent’s call or a trade call or maybe somebody’s injury isn’t coming around.  Who knows?  I don’t know if it ever stops but I just looked at it as another week to our off-season.  We did quite a bit of work.

ON RB WILL FORD

BT:  I’ll tell you exactly what happened.  Obviously Winnipeg released him last Monday and he was talking to some other teams in the league.  We’d gotten ahold of him Monday and that was our first contact with him.  We’d planted a seed that we were looking at running backs and we may have an interest with the way it was going.  He had some interest from another team and made it known he wasn’t going there and jumped the gun a bit regarding a signing bonus from us and all that.  We were on a bye week so why would we sign him then?  We weren’t playing.  At the end of the day, he flew in Sunday night, he’s going to take a physical, and then we’ll sit down with him Tuesday morning.  He will practice on Tuesday, but I don’t know what his status will be; practice roster or 44-man roster.  News travels fast in this business and we weren’t as far down the road with him as people thought we were but some people in this business have a big mouth and that’s just the way it is.

WILL IT BE A FRESH START COME TUESDAY?

BT:  The message is easy; WIN.  Go out and win.  We’re just not playing smart or technically sound right now.  It frustrates our coaches to the inth degree because we’re better than what we’ve shown and we all know that but until they show it, we’ve got to get on them a little bit.  We’ll be fine.  We’ve just gotta play smart, efficient, within the system and make plays.  We just haven’t been doing that the past couple weeks.  A play here or a play there, we might’ve won those games.

Our guys have shown throughout their careers, wherever they’ve been, that they can make these plays but we as an organization always have show that, when players like Will Ford become available, if we can upgrade our team, we’ll have to look into that.  We’re not going to have a fire sale or wholesale changes but we’re always looking to upgrade our team.  We wanted him in free agency but the money was out of whack.  It’s not like we took a guy off the scrap heap.  We had interest in him for quite awhile.

When we had guys fumbling the ball, we had an opening to look into some people.  That’s the way this business works, no matter what position it is.  Anthony Allen and the likes are still here and Will will join that group and we’ll see what comes out of it.

ON COACH COREY CHAMBLIN

BT:  I’ve known Corey for quite some time as you well know and after the BC game, I wouldn’t say he was dejected, but he was pretty hot.  He was very frustrated and disappointed in how we were playing.  Since then he’s had a chance to review, refocus and re-energize and he’s very focused.  He’s very expectant of our team to play better.  He’s not dejected, I can tell you that, but he’s not upbeat either.  He’s very focused on being geared to win a football game this week.  When he’s geared up and focused, a lot of good things happen.