It’s finally over, this miserable train wreck of a CFL football season in Saskatchewan.
And for me, Festivus has come early as a fan of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
You know what Festivus is. That’s from that episode of Seinfeld where they made up a holiday on Dec. 23 that featured “airing of grievances” and “feats of strength” and so on.
I don’t have any feats of strength to give you today, but get ready for a lot of airing of grievances about this wretched Riders season.
I have to get it all out of my system because, from a fan standpoint, this has surely been the worst year I’ve ever experienced following the Roughriders, and I know I’m not the only person who feels this way.
The Roughriders have been so bad so often that there have been multiple low points. There was the first game in which quarterback Darian Durant went down, that game in British Columbia where they blew a big lead and lost in OT, and that game in Ottawa that cost Corey Chamblin and Brendan Taman their jobs.
I had gathered with friends to watch the Banjo Bowl versus Winnipeg, and we were so disgusted with what we witnessed we turned the game off before it even ended.
It got to a point where just about every game for the Riders marked a new opportunity for some new “low point to the season,” as if we haven’t had enough of them.
A perfect example was the final game of the season against the Montreal Alouettes, which promised to set all sorts of dubious achievements. Most defeats in a season being one of them.
But most dubious was the quarterbacking situation. Prior to the game the Roughriders announced Keith Price would get the start at QB — a guy who, before the season, would have been the fifth-stringer!
Among on those on the team for Montreal was Kevin Glenn, who — wait, wasn’t he the Roughriders’ quarterback earlier this season?
It is a sure sign of a bad season when guys you were cheering on all season are now your opponents. We had to put up with this situation a week earlier, too, when running back Jerome Messam was playing for Calgary, because he was traded a couple of weeks before.
Now onto my grievances. The main one has to do with the usual hype machine we have come to expect out of Regina for every Roughriders game, all designed to fire up the masses and keep the fans hooked on all the news out of Riderville all season long, as if it’s some narcotic.
For example, we got endless propaganda all season about how the Riders still stood a good chance to make the playoffs, even though we all knew they were terrible.
Even after they lost to Ottawa — the game that dropped them to 0-9 and cost Chamblin and Taman their jobs — we still got hype about how interim coach Bob Dyce was having his team play to win.
The fatal flaw in this “playing to win” theory was the assumption this current group of Riders were actually capable of winning, which they are not.
And the results speak for themselves. We got efforts like the 46-20 lopsided loss to the B.C. Lions, in which our side lost to an untested quarterback, Jonathan Jennings, who’d previously tried out for the Riders and been rejected at their Florida mini-camp!
Instead of concentrating on making the playoffs, this team needed to concentrate on revamping the roster. The Roughriders needed to move ahead with the youth movement and give them playing time. Instead, they deluded themselves into thinking they still had a chance at the Cup, and stuck with their veterans right to the bitter end. Only after they were eliminated did they finally do something to deal those veterans away.
Onto my next grievance, and it’s about the general attitude from the Roughriders organization to the fans. It looks to me like “we’re the only team you ought to support, and you have to be there regardless of whether we win or lose, and if you aren’t you’re not a real fan.”
This franchise ought to be pleased to still have paying customers after a season like this.
What bugged me most was the reaction, and in particular from the “Roughriders media,” about the run of the Toronto Blue Jays this season. Local fans were excited and wearing Blue Jays merchandise and so on, but instead I heard lots of moaning about “why aren’t people interested in the CFL?”
Could it be because the Blue Jays were offering the superior product this year, by a wide margin? Deal with it, Riders.
Now there’s one more grievance I want to air, and it has to do with folks going around telling us that 2015 was an inevitable tradeoff for going “all in” with all the veterans and free agents in 2013 — the people who won us that memorable Grey Cup. Yes, this season was terrible, but we wouldn’t have had it any other way.
That is just so much rubbish.
Management should have been prepared for the 2013 aftermath. Had they been on the ball, they could have engineered some sort of “soft landing” where the veterans could have been phased out and new people brought in quickly to address the club’s needs.
Had they done that, we’d have a lot of young talent on the roster right now and be in position to “load up” either next year or the year after for another run at the Cup.
Now, the roster is such a shambles that rebuilding could take years.
The fans deserve better. They have filled the Roughriders’ coffers from ticket and merchandise sales, and continued to show up with crowds of 30,000 or more, even during a season like this one.
These are the best and most loyal fans in the entire CFL. Believe me, that’s the best thing the Roughriders have going for them right now.
