Woes of Canada's talented toes

We are 33 million strong in this country and yet, to hear CFL coaches tell it, unearthing roughly a dozen homegrown men who can either punt or placekick consistently is akin to discovering a pink, three-legged Cyclops walking among us.

The situation has become so acute, in fact, there are many coaches who are concerned that unless the current thinking at the pro level radically changes, Canadian kickers in the CFL will soon become extinct and go the way of Canuck quarterbacks.

Oh where have you gone, Russ Jackson?

Funny thing is, a quick scan of the 2008 Canadian college football statistics reveals that nine placekickers connected on 75 per cent or better of their field-goal attempts last season. And in the three years before that, seven placekickers were at least equally as adept at their craft.

The punting numbers among Canadian collegians aren't quite as juicy -- there were seven players with an average over 40 yards a year ago, slightly less in the three previous seasons.

All of which raises a rather simple question, particularly in a week in which the Winnipeg Blue Bombers saw a punter they had been chasing -- veteran Canadian free agent Burke Dales -- return to the Calgary Stampeders before they added import Kenny Byrd a couple days later:

If there are Canadian kickers posting solid numbers in school, why are three of eight CFL teams -- the Montreal Alouettes, Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Bombers -- currently using Americans to do the job?

"I promise you we're still looking at those kind of guys, the Canadians," Bombers head coach Mike Kelly said. "We're trying to find them as best we can. But it's a thin talent pool and that's why we're looking at Americans. Believe me, if we could find a Canadian who could punt and placekick, we'd look at him in a heartbeat."

What we'll attempt to do here is discover why Canadian kickers are disappearing off CFL rosters and what, if anything, football organizers in this country could do to protect what is becoming an endangered species.

The numbers

There are eight teams in the CFL, meaning there could be a maximum of 16 jobs (one punter, one placekicker) available to Canadians.

The B.C. Lions (Paul McCallum), Edmonton Eskimos (Noel Prefontaine), Blue Bombers (Alexis Serna), Tiger-Cats (Nick Setta), Alouettes (Damon Duval) and Toronto Argonauts (Mike Vanderjagt) have kickers who handle both the punting and placekicking chores. The Calgary Stampeders (Dales and placekicker Sandro DeAngelis) and Saskatchewan Roughriders (punter Jamie Boreham, placekicker Luca Congi) use kicking tandems.

That means there were 10 kickers in the CFL last year, with Winnipeg's Serna, Montreal's Duval and Hamilton's Setta the Americans and the other seven Canadians.

As recently as late summer 2002 -- before the Ottawa Renegades signed import Lawrence Tynes, now in the NFL -- there were no Americans kicking in the CFL.

Three factors working against Canadian kickers

1. THE BEEFED-UP DESIGNATED-IMPORT RULE

The last collective bargaining agreement with the CFL Players' Association, signed in 2006, increased rosters to 42 players and added a third designated import, meaning there are now three DIs (non-starters who must replace imports) dressing for every game. The impact was significant for kickers: Where the two DIs were used as kick returners or extra defensive backs in the past, the third allowed teams to consider using an import at the kicking position.

"The whole issue, as far as I'm concerned, is they have no real incentive to go after Canadian kickers anymore and develop them, with the roster size and the designated-import spots," former Bombers punter Bob Cameron said. "Now they can take one of those spots and fill it with an American kicker. And there's 200 Division 1 universities in the States pumping out about 50 of those guys every year. You would think it would be a lot easier, and I'm not saying it is, to find somebody among those guys than come up with a Canadian.

"To me, it's the same as the Canadian quarterback. What's the incentive for a CFL team to develop one? Where are we going to get the next Russ Jackson when your only job as a head coach is to win? You find the best player you can get as fast and as easily as you can."

2. TALENT LEVEL

Cameron tells the story that when his son Brett, now with the University of North Dakota as a kicker, was at St. Paul's High School, they decided to head south to a kicking camp for American high school prospects. The attendance? Try 400 strong.

"It was crazy. It was pretty intense. We had our eyes opened," Cameron said. "I figured there would be a bunch of guys who weren't very good athletes whose fathers maybe pushed them into it. But I tell you what, some of these kids were outstanding athletes, outstanding players."

And yet when University of Manitoba head coach Brian Dobie begins scouting for the next Boreham (a Bison product) or Scott Dixon (the U of M's current placekicker) north of the border, the search often takes him all over the country.

"The things you worry about finding, just like the CFL, are offensive linemen, interior defensive linemen and kickers -- especially punters," Dobie said. "Punters are really tough.

"You don't really see punters, you see 'hoofers' -- guys who just kick the ball. Kids come to our camps and almost every one of them is a hoofer. They just boot the ball and you see very few that have good technique. Plus, look at the climate -- I'm always trying to keep track of high school and junior kickers on the West Coast, because those guys are playing rugby and soccer at the beginning of February. They're out there right now while we're shovelling our driveways."

3. OPPORTUNITY

Worth noting here is Cameron, a Bomber hall of famer, was cut eight times -- EIGHT -- before landing his gig in Winnipeg. Prospects nowadays don't often get a second or third look. Case in point: Warren Kean, drafted second overall by Edmonton in 2007, was cut last summer and surfaced with the Bombers but was released again. Is his career over? And Robert Eeuwes attended Argos' training camp in 2007 (he lost out to Prefontaine) and was one-for-one in his one pre-season field-goal try last year before being beaten out by Vanderjagt. He's now at the University of Windsor after already earning a degree from McGill, but will he get another look?

And then there's the case of DeAngelis, one of the most accurate kickers in CFL history (83.4 per cent career success rate), but not drafted (he was on the Bombers' neg list at one time). He signed with the Stamps after a so-so career at the University of Nebraska in which he hit just seven of 15 field-goal tries. If it wasn't for his birth certificate -- and the fact he kicked at a big-time U.S. school -- he might not even have landed a training-camp invitation.

"The other thing is, you come out of university in Canada and go to the pros, you might not get a second chance," Cameron said. "But Alexis Serna got the second chance because of what he did in his university days at a big-time school (Oregon State). A Canadian in that position... I don't know if you get that second chance. You're put in there in an exhibition game and you miss... you might not get another exhibition game. It's a job where coaches expect you to make 80 per cent of your kicks. And if you don't, YOU are costing them their job. That's the bottom line."

Two possible solutions

1. AN INCENTIVE

This is the same idea, in principle, that has been pitched in the past to the CFL board of governors about Canadian quarterbacks, but has gone nowhere. If teams could dress a Canadian pivot as one of their three QBs, they would be allowed to dress an extra import as part of their 42-man roster. As it now stands, the three QBs have no American/Canadian designation. The CFL also allows teams to carry a CIS prospect as part of its practice roster, but those spots are usually reserved for linemen or skill-position players. Why not do the same for kickers?

2. SOME PATIENCE

Easy to say when a coach's job can be affected by every miss, but two weeks of training camp and a couple of kicks in a pre-season game -- if that -- also mean that many prospects could slip through the cracks.

"There's a lot that goes into this," the Bombers' Kelly explained. "For example, it would be great to have a guy who worked exclusively with the kickers, but our coaching staffs aren't equipped that way. They're just not big enough to say, 'This is our kicking coach, and that's all he does.' And if you want to send a guy to a specialist in the off-season, well, that's not something that's built into everybody's budget, either.

"I don't know if there's a clear-cut answer to all this. But it's got to start at a younger age. We've got to start developing more kickers."

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 29, 2009 C1