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 post2000 (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.”
It’s a chess match between offensive co-ordinators and defensive co-ordinators and head coaches on what’s trending and what’s working.
The astute head coach that he is, Marc Trestman could tell quarterback Dave Dickenson was done. Toast. Finished. Kaput. Shot.
So he offered him a coaching job.
Dickenson declined.
But Trestman was right. Dickenson was washed up.
And he was right again. Dickenson was going to make a great coach.
Sunday they meet in the 105th Grey Cup game, Trestman returning from the NFL to totally transform the Toronto Argonauts into a championship contender and Dickenson back in the Grey Cup for a second straight time in his second year as head coach of the Calgary Stampeders.
“I knew Dave as a quarterback and as someone interested in a career in coaching, and I knew his brother Craig,” Trestman said, referring to the specialteams co-ordinator in Saskatchewan who won a Grey Cup while performing the same job in Edmonton in 2015.
“My recollection is that we did have a discussion and it worked out the way it did. Here he is. That says a lot for who he is. I have a lot of respect for what he’s done, how he handles his team, how he handles the media and how he handles the game,” added Trestman, the former Montreal Alouettes head coach who won back-to-back Grey Cups in 2009 and 2010.
Dickenson remembers the discussion well.
“Back when I was cut by B.C., Marc reached out to me,” Dickenson said as the two sat in personalized directors chairs separated by the Grey Cup at the coaches’ press conference on Wednesday.
“I knew I could learn a lot. But I just hadn’t at that point given up the dream of playing. So I told him I was going to keep this going. As it turned out, the career was pretty much over as a player, but then I stayed in Calgary with Huff,” he said of then head coach John Hufnagel, now his general manager.
“I’d love to sit down with Marc now and see how he handles himself as a head coach. He’s probably as proven as any guy in our league for a long, long time. Football people love talking football and I’d love to compare notes.
“Not this week, though.” Trestman, at this time last year, had no thought of being back in the CFL, much less taking over the worst team in the league and guiding them to a Grey Cup berth.
“It happened so fast. Once Jim (Popp) got the GM job, I thought it was kind of interesting that he got it and I’m sitting out not coaching football. And it was a family decision as well. It was the right job at the right time. It was, ‘OK, let’s go up there. We love this league.’
“I mean, part of it is the love of the league and the type of players in the league. This is an amazing league. I say it all the time. It’s the grit and the heart of the players. I love the type of men that are playing in this league. And I love being part of it.
“I knew that by having Jim, I could coach and let him do what he does. I don’t want that job.”
Trestman was asked about the minor miracle of taking over the team so late, putting together a staff and finding a half-team of new players and getting to the Grey Cup game.
“Honestly, there was a lot of luck involved. I was able to keep Marcus Brady, who I knew, as an assistant. I was able to keep Corey (Chamblin) to come out of retirement. The stars were aligned for that. He did a really excellent job of helping me vet the defensive staff. I think coaching-wise there was a little bit of luck involved in getting the right guys at the right time. The luck was that I didn’t just get coaches who love to teach the science of football, but some really amazing men.
“And then player-wise I knew we were getting Ricky Ray at quarterback. I knew what we were getting with Ricky. I knew that I knew enough. I knew the man and the leader and the type of guy we were getting.
“And Jim came in with the addition of Armanti Edwards, S.J. Green and Bear Woods. Jim did a great job of alleviating a lot of the first-year problems that you have, trying to get the wrong people out of the locker-room as quickly as you can. We didn’t have any of that. We started with good people, guys who love the game and were hard-working.” First and foremost, he had Ray. “Ricky shows you that leaders come in all different ways,” Trestman said.
“Ricky never says anything. I mean, if we’re not in the quarterback meeting, he’s not saying anything, other than calling the plays. Ricky Ray is really the surgeon. He just does it. But the words are not there. The vocal part of him is just not there. That’s just not who I’ve found him to be.
“I know this. When I go to work every day, I can’t wait to get there because I get to work with Ricky Ray every day. And everybody in the building knows that we have hope because when we walk in the building, Ricky Ray gives us hope.
“And when you walk into the meeting room, you want a quarterback who not only loves football, but really loves football and will do whatever it takes to prepare properly. And he brings out the best in everybody because we don’t want to let him down.
“When I walk in there to a meeting, I want to make sure I’m totally prepared because I can’t let him down. If I’m not prepared, he’s going to know it and that’s going to affect him.
“And that’s the way it affects our players. They have to be prepared because they know how prepared he is. It’s just energy that feeds on itself because we don’t want to let Ricky down.”
Earlier in the conference, Dickenson said a coach is only as good as his quarterback, especially in the CFL.
Trestman picked up on that in his eloquent testimonial to the former Edmonton Eskimos quarterback that, in one of the all-time dumbest deals in CFL history, former Eskimos general manager Eric Tillman traded away.
“As Dave said, as a coach, you are defined by your quarterback. And if our quarterback wasn’t playing at a high level, we wouldn’t be here,” Trestman said. “It’s the bottom line. The defence can play great and you can have a great running game and all of that, but if the quarterback is not functioning at an efficient level, none of that stuff matters.”
Dickenson was asked about the last time he was in Ottawa for the Grey Cup with the B.C. Lions when the big question going in was whether Casey Printers or Dickenson should start at quarterback.
“I remember Wally (Buono) making the right decision. He decided to start me,” Dickenson said with a laugh. “That was a weird week, a weird, weird week. I remember the losses more than the wins and 2004 still stings. We did a lot of things wrong from strategy and players ... we had a fight on the bus the day before the game. It wasn’t the type of situation I’d want to have happen for our team this year.”