Redblacks begin building a team
Wide receiver Fred Rouse one of the CFL team’s first player signings,
Hello, Ottawa. Here are the Redblacks. Not all of them, of course, but the city’s new Canadian Football League franchise announced its first free-agent signings Wednesday: wide receiver Fred Rouse; defensive back Nick Turnbull; and defensive end DiMetrio Tyson.
“There will be more” in the coming days, Redblacks general manager Marcel Desjardins said. “How many more, it’s hard to say.”
Rouse, who turns 28 in December, was signed after attending one of the Redblacks’ two U.S. tryout camps in late October. Listed at 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds, he was once a highly sought-after high school prospect, but his U.S. college football experience was turbulent, with one year at Florida State, another at University of Texas-El Paso and one without football at Texas Southern before he finished up at Concordia College in Selma, Ala.
He spent a few weeks on the Calgary Stampeders’ practice roster in 2011 and re-signed with them in 2012 but did not play a CFL regular-season game. Before that Rouse was with the United Football League’s Omaha Nighthawks.
Turnbull, 6-foot-2 and 222 pounds, is a 32-yearold Miami native who became the Florida International University Golden Panthers’ career interception leader, with 16 between 2002-2005, when he also set a school record with three returns for touchdowns. He played three NFL regularseason games with the Chicago Bears and Atlanta Falcons in 2006.
Tyson, 24, is 6-foot-2 and 275 pounds. An Alabama native who played at Jacksonville State, where he had career totals of five sacks and 105 tackles, he was an All-Ohio Valley Conference all-star in 2012. He was later with the Arena Football League’s San Jose SaberCats.
Terms of the three deals were not released.
In addition to signing free agents who were not in the CFL this past season, Desjardins has been getting deeper into the process of hiring the expansion club’s very first head coach.
“We still have people to talk to before we narrow it down,” Desjardins said. “By the end of next week, we’ll have gone through the first stage of the process, and then we’ll go from there.”
Desjardins previously said that a prerequisite for the Redblacks’ first head coach would be previous CFL experience as at least defensive or offensive co-ordinator. He also said it would be ideal to have a coach in place before the expansion draft on Dec. 16, when Ottawa will select 24 players from the rosters of its eight CFL counterparts, but the priority would be finding the right coach, no matter how long it took.
There has been speculation that the list of candidates includes Paul LaPolice and Marcel Bellefeuille.
LaPolice has been working as a CFL analyst for TSN since shortly after he was fired as head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in August 2012. Through a TSN media department staffer, he declined an interview request last week, but the Montreal Gazette reported Tuesday that LaPolice had admitted to speaking to the Redblacks.
Bellefeuille, a bilingual Ottawa native who coached the Ottawa Gee-Gees to a Vanier Cup Canadian university football championship in 2000, was an assistant coach and offensive co-ordinator with four CFL teams before being promoted to head coach of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, whose general manager at the time was Desjardins, in 2008.
He was an assistant coach with the Nighthawks in 2012 and finished up the 2013 CFL season as offensive co-ordinator of the Blue Bombers. He, too, declined a recent interview request.
Another bilingual candidate became available on Wednesday, when the B.C. Lions and offensive co-ordinator Jacques Chapdelaine parted ways.
There had been at least three CFL teams looking for head coaches, but the Edmonton Eskimos filled one vacancy by hiring Toronto Argonauts defensive co-ordinator Chris Jones.
The Blue Bombers only removed “interim” from the job title of general manager Kyle Walters on Tuesday, and he still must find a replacement for Tim Burke, who was fired as head coach at season’s end.
As well, the Montreal Alouettes have yet to disclose whether Jim Popp, who added head-coaching to his GM duties after firing Dan Hawkins early in the 2013 season, will remain on the sidelines.
Scheduled to start play in 2014, the Redblacks were prohibited from signing non-CFL free agents until after the Grey Cup Game at Regina on Sunday. The next big wave of acquisitions will come in the expansion draft, followed by whatever comes when CFL free agency begins Feb. 15.
The next CFL college draft is expected to occur in May. Unless they trade some, the Redblacks will have eight picks: First in each of six rounds and two additional selections at the end.
They were allowed four selections in the 2013 draft: Iowa offensive lineman Nolan MacMillan, 22; Utah State defensive linemen Connor Williams, 22; Eastern Michigan defensive lineman Kalonji Kashama, 22; and Robert Morris University tight end Tyler Digby, 22.
Williams is from Kanata, and he attended Holy Trinity Catholic High School.
The Redblacks will hold a fourday mini-camp in the United States in April, and their first training camp will begin in late May.
The 2014 CFL regular season is expected to kick off in the third week of June.