Stamps keeping eyes, ears open with Riders on way
Team ‘being a little more cautious’ with practice situation, writes Daniel Austin.
There were no fans in the McMahon Stadium stands Tuesday.
At one point, a Stampeders staff member even went to check on a few people watching practice from atop the hill just outside the stadium’s southeast corner.
With the Saskatchewan Roughriders rolling into town Saturday evening (7 p.m., TSN), security is going to be tight around McMahon, but head coach Dave Dickenson insisted after Tuesday’s practice that it won’t be anything the Stampeders haven’t done before when the Green & White roll into town.
“It’s open practice to me, it’s just what we do. We’ve been doing it for years,” Dickenson said. “Just trying to keep our ideas to ourselves. There’s nothing major, you’ll see fans up there, we just need to know who you are.”
None of the Stampeders practices are officially closed in the lead-up to the Riders’ visit this weekend. Media is still being given access to the field during practice and some fans will likely be in the stands later in the week.
The Stamps say they’re just trying to be careful. Not because of anything Riders coach Chris Jones has done, though. Nobody is implying that the Riders are trying to sneak spies into practice to steal signals, as fun as it may be to imagine an army of undercover Riders sneaking around the bowels of stadiums across the league.
“We’ve been doing it for the Riders whether (Jones) was there or not,” Dickenson said. “So it’s just because of the situation. We’re going to probably close more (practices) this year.
“It’s not even closed, it’s just being a little more cautious with the information we’re giving out.”
The Riders, for their part, have opted to keep practices open to the public on Tuesday and Wednesday, but will run a completely closed training session on Thursday before travelling to Calgary on Friday.
Both teams clearly are looking for any advantage they can find, and the Riders and Stampeders are abundantly familiar with one another to begin with, given Jones’ time as the Stamps’ defensive co-ordinator and the offseason departures from Calgary of current Riders Derek Dennis, Glenn Love and Bakari Grant.
These are two teams who know an awful lot about one another, so playing a little hide-and-seek with this week’s game plan only makes sense.
“We’ve got a lot of ex-teammates on that team, obviously some of their personnel guys have been here,” Dickenson said. “We’ve just got to watch what we say and make sure we don’t give them any advantage to what we’re running, who’s playing and that sort of stuff.
“As a CFL, we want to be a league that tries to be pretty open to our fans. When I was in the NFL, no one watches practice, nobody. So there can be an advantage gained ... maybe just as innocent as someone puts something on a page saying ‘they ran this play’ or ‘it was good to see so-and-so out there’ and it’s innocent. It’s not like people are trying to give away information, but it can hurt us.
“We know there’s obviously a big Roughriders contingent here, so we’re just trying to be a little more careful with what we do.”