ESKS’ ROSTER FINALIZED
Maas excited for CFL season
They took their turns standing in the south end zone of an empty stadium on an off day in the middle of the afternoon on Father’s Day.
Their audience was one newspaper columnist, a Global TV reporter, her videographer, the two-man broadcast crew from 630 CHED and a two-man crew from esks.com.
“I slept like a baby Saturday night. That was the first time in three months I’d slept that well,” reported Edmonton Eskimos head coach Jason Maas after making his cuts by 8 p.m. on the previous evening.
“I’d been thinking of cut-down day for three months and I went to bed feeling good about the decisions we’d made. Ultimately I am truly, truly excited.”
It was a day for big-picture statements to be made.
Sophomore head coach Maas and rookie general manager Brock Sunderland, reflecting a return to an era of access in Edmonton, were there for an availability to talk about their newly selected team.
Unfortunately, it’s still the CFL, so they weren’t going to actually say who had made it in terms of which players were going to start and which guys were going to get kicked on the shin and go on the injured list to get down from 54 players to the 46 they’ll take to Vancouver for Saturday’s lid-lifter against the B.C. Lions.
Funny the way it works in this league after three weeks of training camp.
Teams produce lists to announce who has been released. Nobody ever announces who MADE the team, which is the whole purpose of the proceedings.
Football fans are different in Canada than hockey fans. They aren’t 24-7-365. They won’t get themselves worked up for weeks to find out if the Oilers are going to lose maybe a Griffin Reinhart or a Jujhar Kahria to the Las Vegas Knights in the NHL Expansion Draft.
When it comes to the offseason and training camp, unless you are talking quarterback, football fans have mostly casual interest.
But when the time comes to dial up passion until the end of November, they won’t tell them who really made the team because of “competitive advantage.”
The Eskimos don’t practice Monday so you can’t even track reps until Wednesday.
So big picture statements it was going to have to be.
What made Sunday interesting was that there was an actual general manager available to make those statements and a head coach who had already made one after the final pre-season game in Winnipeg before they gathered to decide players fates.
“Deepest team I have ever been around in my 16-17 years in the CFL,” said Maas.
Sunderland offered his own statements Sunday.
“We think we have the best defensive line in the league. We’ll see. We also think our defensive backs are as good as anybody in the league.”
This is a team that with an entire change in coaching staff and the loss of five starters on defence gave up 155 more points under defensive co-ordinator Mike Benevides last year than Chris Jones the year before.
Last year the defensive line produced 15 fewer sacks. The defence made eight fewer interceptions. As a group they were worse in every single statistical category than the year before.
“We wouldn’t have them starting if we didn’t think they could win games for us. Anyone we put out there this year we have full confidence we can win a championship with,” said Sunderland.
Maas said the 155-point thing is not an honest stat.
“You can look at it as 155 points worse but I like to look at it as getting to the East final with that defence and that in the second half of the season we were in the top category with everybody else. I look at how strongly we finished as a defensive unit and how much better we’re going to be cohesively coming through the off-season.
“There’s no question we didn’t start off fast as a team last year. But by the end it would be hard to argue we weren’t a better team at all three phases.
“We’re a proud group here and there’s not one worry in our locker room that we’re not going to be a great defence.”
He knows that because he slept so well Saturday night. Not once did he dream about being up by 25 points on the Hamilton TigerCats at home and blowing the lead to create the most colossal collapse in Eskimos history.
As for the roles of new players like D’haquille Williams, Travon Van, L’Darius Perkins, Da’Quan Bowers, Euclid Cummings, Terrence Bullitt, Forrest Hightower and all those other guys … well, you’ll have to wait until the weekend.