CFL HAS ALWAYS BEEN HOME TO BIG BOMBERS
Football has evolved through the years but Canadian game remains pass happy
Ricky Ray completed his CFL season with some very fancy passing stats: more than 5,500 yards in the air and 25 touchdowns, among the league leaders in both categories.
His numbers this past season with the Toronto Argonauts were strikingly similar to 12 years ago, when he played for the Edmonton Eskimos: 5,546 passing yards — 31 more yards than in 2005 with the Eskimos — and 28 touchdowns (compared to 25 with the Eskimos).
He also had nine fewer interceptions this season, evidence of those wily veteran smarts.
But while those statistics say something about Ray, specifically, and his freakish consistency, they also say something about the CFL as a whole: this has long been a bomber’s league.
Evolutions are all the rage in many sports. The NFL has never been more of a passing league than it is today and the high tiers of the U.S. college game have become dominated by wild spread offences that can look like video games with the defences turned off.
Even the NBA has given itself over to an offensive revolution: teams bomb away like never before and very little scoring comes from players pounding away inside. It’s the basketball version of having done away with three yards and a cloud of dust.
But the CFL has been immune to such wholesale change. If anything, the Canadian league is less pass happy than it used to be.
Of the 10 biggest single-season passing totals in CFL history, only one — Edmonton’s Mike Reilly, last year — took place in the past 14 years.
In the NFL, the opposite is true: of the top 15 passing seasons (by yardage) in that league, all but one of them — Dan Marino in 1984 — has taken place in the past decade.
Fully 23 of the top 25 passing seasons have happened post- 2000 (Dan Fouts in 1981 was the other exception).
So, does the CFL need a revolutionary who will kick off a new era of even more downfield passing, or was it always just ahead of the evolutionary curve?
Did the CFL not become pass happy because it was already pass happy?
Jim Popp, general manager of the Toronto Argonauts, considers the question.
First, he notes, the CFL is bound to pass more just because of the nature of the game. The bigger, wider field means there is simply more space to defend and therefore more holes and gaps.
“Defensive co-ordinators in this league,” Popp says, “I mean, it’s tough.”
Plus, the lack of a fourth down in the CFL means offences find themselves in must-pass situations more often. It’s pretty easy to find yourself in second and eight or worse.
But even with all that baked in, seven of the 10 biggest passing seasons in the CFL all took place in the early 1990s.
Why have the league’s passers become less prolific here when they are lighting it up in other leagues?
“It’s all trends,” says Popp. “As we change rules, as we adjust rules, it changes.”
Then he explains himself a bit more.
“At one point, receivers could push off, shove guys, knock ’em down. When I started in this league (in 1992), Ray Elgaard was in Saskatchewan. He was like (Rob) Gronkowski in New England (today) — he could just run down and totally throw a guy out of the way, turn around and Kent Austin would throw the ball to him. It wasn’t hard to complete a pass.”
Popp says offences still had that advantage as recently as his East powerhouse era in Montreal.
“We had such a big receiving corps before that rule was changed,” Popp says. This was when the Alouettes had S.J. Green and Jamel Richardson as wide threats.
“They were just plowing (defensive backs) and turning around and, boom. But the rules changed. Receivers can’t do that any more.”
The Argos GM says it’s the constant churn of adjustments, more than anything else, that causes leagues to swing back and forth between periods of offensive and defensive dominance. He notes that the NFL is throwing a lot today, but says that can be a reaction to defences stacking the line to stop the run as much as it was some kind of new philosophy.
“It’s trends,” Popp says. “There will be big receivers and then all of sudden everyone wants big DBs. Then coaches want smaller, shifty guys because they can cause problems for bigger defensive backs, and so those guys become more in demand,” he says.
A team pushes one way and then the rest of the league figures out a way to push back. It has ever been thus, really.
“It’s a chess match between offensive co-ordinators and defensive co-ordinators and head coaches on what’s trending and what’s working,” Popp says.
“That’s just the history of sports, period. But that’s definitely the case in football.”