In the little CFL, a full recycle bin means more drama

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/03/2009 (6400 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This past Friday night, Obi Khan and I were doing a paid appearance at the Home Expressions show signing 2008 team posters and talking shop with interested passersby at the Spaworks hot-tub exhibition.

What we commonly do when we have some free time at events like this and a mountain of posters before us, is to take our Sharpie markers and colour in all the faces on the team photo that have gone their separate ways during the off-season. I’m sure it sounds a little callous and immature, but it’s an effective way to get a visual as to the extent of change from one season to the next.

This particular year, the number of black holes, so to speak, including coaches, executives and staff, was an impressive 35 faces that would no longer be affiliated with the ball club in 2009, and the ramifications of such a turnover in the CFL mean some already heated rivalries will be even more so this upcoming season.

The addition of new players and coaches is always an exciting time for the remaining holdovers for the many reasons I have outlined in previous columns. Whether it is the reconfiguring of team dynamics, the opportunity of a clean slate and proving ground for new coaches, or a chance to reinvent yourself and start anew as a player, change, more often than not, has almost exclusively produced positive results in the years I have played ball.

But what is even more appealing and intriguing in an eight-team league is how the dispersal of players and coaches from your roster adds to the intrigue and intensity of the matchups. Oftentimes, playing teams three or four times a season isn’t quite as compelling or exciting a drama as you would hope as a player, but when you face off against your former teammates and coaches, it adds another element you don’t always get to see in CFL matchups: when business becomes personal.

Take the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, for instance. In the 2009 season, we will play Hamilton four times — three times in the regular season and once in the preseason. Last year, the Tiger-Cats had little if any relevance to our football club; this year, they could easily be confused with our football club.

To start with, Hamilton has eight coaches on their coaching staff and five of them have previously worked for the Bombers. Greg Marshall, Jon Kropke, Mike Gibson, and Dave Easley all spent time here as coaches, and Khari Jones, the quarterback coach, had a couple of seasons here that rivalled that of any pivot in Blue Bombers history.

Add to the mix the fact they signed one of our biggest free agents this year in Alexandre Gauthier, who hightailed it out of Winnipeg even after his salary demands were met, and Kevin Glenn, our starting quarterback for the last four years, and a game that was sure to be the standard physical contest between Eastern division competitors just got exponentially more interesting.

And look no farther than our first game of the year in Edmonton against the Eskimos to see a storyline that will have Ed Tait and Randy Turner champing at the bit.

Not only has Mike Kelly, the former Eskimos receivers coach been promoted to lead the Blue and Gold this season, but no fewer than four 2008 Bombers players — Kyle Koch, Graeme Bell, Kai Ellis and Jason Nugent — are now playing for the Green and Gold. And I don’t even have space to address the other six teams with past and present Bombers exchanging their allegiances all across the CFL map.

When you have practised with players for years on end, you always look forward to the first time you actually get to play live against them. Because no matter how uptempo the practice and how you may have fared against your teammate in the heat of training camp, you tend to see a different animal on both sides of the ball when the whistle blows in the regular season and all those "would-haves, could-haves and should-haves" exchanged over the years are put to the test. And though it doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to figure out that former coaches love nothing more than sticking it to their old ball clubs, all the same, former players of these coaches want to make sure they are missed just as much.

So it seems in the small world of an eight-team league, where trades, exchanges and recycling pits many players and coaches against each other on different teams, change is just as good for the storylines that precede the games as they are for the teams that incur it as a means to improve.

 

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.