THROWIN’ ELBOWS WITH BRENDAN MCGUIRE

1. ROYAL DUKE OF REGINA:The Rider offence desperately needed to hang on to Duke Williams in order to maintain the momentum it built near the end of last season. Losing Duke would’ve felt like a return to square one. Now Cody Fajardo has his number one weapon back and it remains to be seen how they build around him or if they’re content with Kyran Moore and Shaq Evans who both re-signed but are coming off of serious injuries. Will be curious to see who emerges as the new running back with the departure of William Powell back to Ottawa. 

2. NO MORE JON RYAN: Was/is much more than just a punter. Was the best holder in the league and perfect weapon to have for fake field goal tries. But more than anything, just having him in the room to tell the younger players ‘Hey we’re pretty good’ was priceless. If the Riders win a Grey Cup in the next couple of years, I will bet dollars to donuts that some of the players will credit the Jon Ryan influence to getting them over the hump. We’ll likely never see his kind around Riderville again. 

3. RIDERS BIGGEST LOSSES SO FAR: Loucheiz Purifoy and Ed Gainey. The unsung heroes on that defence (and Purifoy on special teams, too) who remained from the Chris Jones era. Very brave of GM Jeremy O’Day to complete the process of erasing Jones’ fingerprints from this defence and put his own stamp down. It’s worked on the offensive side of the ball and so far so good with the defence, too. 

4. NFL DOESN’T HIRE BLACK HEAD COACHES: This Brian Flores lawsuit signals a seismic shift from blaming the NFL for its pathetic failure to hire black coaches toward blaming the individual teams themselves. I struggle to see merit in his claim against John Elway and the Denver Broncos but see plenty of grounds for his grievance against the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants. I could be seeing this all through orange-colored glasses (Full disclosure I’ve met John Elway, have cheered for the Broncos all my life and love them all dearly) but Elway and the Broncos have only made only four head coaching hires since 2011. Those hires have included a black head coach (Vance Joseph) and two of the other three were wildly successful hires (John Fox and Gary Kubiak) that included a super bowl championship. It could be argued that Vance Joseph wasn’t set up for success as he had no quarterback but the same could be said for his successor, Vic Fangio. The New York Giants, on the other hand, have sucked for 8 of the last 9 seasons with five different head coaches and have yet to hire a black head coach in their entire history. Canadian-born Brian Daboll is a solid hire but the Giants appear really tone-deaf on this issue and they could pay dearly if the American court system gets to the bottom of who told Bill Belichick that a decision had already been made before Flores’ interview. The complaint against the Dolphins cuts much deeper and has plenty of evidence to back it up. Will be fascinating to see where it all goes. We are in uncharted waters with this. 14 of the NFLs 32 franchises (43.75%) have never hired a visible minority to be its full time head coach. That’s nearly half the league. Black coaches aren’t penetrating the old boys club of the NFL and some people are mad as hell about it. As they should be.    

5. CFL DOES HIRE BLACK HEAD COACHES: 7 of the 9 CFL franchises (22.22% have not) have hired a black head coach (I’m giving Ottawa credit for the Renegades from 2002-2005) including the Saskatchewan Roughriders. The Riders have hired a black GM, three black head coaches (including one interim for half a season but still) and they’ve hired no less than three minority coordinators on both sides of the ball. All within the last twenty years. Again, nothing stellar but not a disgrace like most NFL teams, either. The only CFL teams to never hire a black head coach include the Blue Bombers and Stampeders who both have work to do in this area. But to be absolutely fair, those teams have been winning a lot and haven’t been hiring too many coaches, period. Both teams have hired minority candidates as coordinators, too. I don’t mean to pick on everyone for not making more diverse hires as we did have a head coach here in Saskatchewan who was treated well and had no problem playing the race card any time fans and media held him accountable to his record. So we’ve seen that, too. But that’s not what’s happening in the NFL right now. Not by a longshot.  

6. SCOTTIES: Could not believe the meltdown we saw by New Brunswick’s Andrea Crawford team, blowing a three-point lead late in the one-two page playoff game Saturday night. You just knew the deflating feeling would be too much to recover from and it was. Glad to see New Brunswick and some of these other maritime and northern territory teams in the conversation. And glad to see Kerri Einarson win three in a row. She and her team play with so much enthusiasm. With the five-rock rule, the great game of curling is a good place right now. 

7. THIS WEEK I’M JEALOUS OF: Rod Pedersen for doing his show live from Super Bowl 56 week in Los Angeles. In February of 2006 I was lucky enough to cover the Super Bowl 40 festivities in downtown Detroit before Jerome Bettis and the Steelers beat the Seahawks for Ben Roethlisberger’s first ring. My coworker and I got some great sound bites from visits with James Brown, Jim Mora Sr. (PLAYOFFS?!) and Tom Arnold. Getting close to the celebrities wasn’t easy as they were mostly surrounded by body-guards and handlers, etc. I just hope the CFL manages to restore that carnival atmosphere in November when the Grey Cup arrives in Regina. And yes, Rod is right about relaunching a skills competition maybe even as part of CFL Week. The CFL last held such an event going into the 2008 season in Hamilton and it was great but could’ve been so much better with more events. We’ll talk more about that another week.     

8. OLYMPICS: Such pathetic leadership (if you even want to call it that) from Russia and China to use this event to try and push their own propaganda of strength from their own countries. Both are a joke and not worthy of anyone’s respect. Glad Canada and the American governments chose to stay away. Bigtime respect for Eric Staal leading the Canadian men’s hockey team into these games.  

9. BASEBALL LOCKOUT: Tell these goofballs on both sides to get their crap together already. Nobody is going to sympathize with these billionaires or millionaires with everything else the world is going through today. Due to his failure to speed up the games, promote labour peace or bring baseball back to Montreal, Rob Manfred is turning out to be a big disappointment as commissioner. Bring back Bud Selig, already! Never thought I’d ever say that but you know it’s bad when.  

10. END OF COVID: I’ve had it. Many of you have had it. And more of you will get it soon. I’m not seeing those of us who are vaccinated getting too sick from it. That and people are at the end of their rope on this. Life will be back to normal by the end of spring and we will all put this in the rear-view mirror. Bold prediction I know but this can’t go on forever. I’ve been wrong before but I feel pretty good about this prediction.