Medlock isn’t going anywhere
Justin Medlock has decided retirement isn’t in his immediate plans after all.
The Winnipeg Blue Bombers announced Thursday that the Canadian Football League club has signed the kicker to a one-year deal.
Medlock was a pending free agent. After the Bombers lost the CFL West Division semifinal 39-32 to the Edmonton Eskimos on Nov. 12, the seven-year international kicker said he’d go home to Florida and take some time to decide if he even wanted to continue playing.
“I want to take a second to kind of think about what I want to do, whether I want to play, whether I want to play somewhere else, whether I want to play here,” he said at the Bombers’ season-ending locker cleanout.
The 34-year-old will head into his third season with Winnipeg after joining as a key freeagent signing in 2016.
He has made 116 of 138 field-goal attempts (84.1 per cent) and is 88-for-89 on converts in two seasons with the Bombers, leading the CFL in scoring both years.
“Simply put, Justin is one of the best to ever do it and is a significant part of our team’s success,” Blue Bombers general manager Kyle Walters said in a release.
“He’s been at the very top of his craft, hit a rough patch for a few weeks this past season, but rebounded back to his normal self quickly. That’s what pros do, and he is without question one of the elite professionals in our league.”
In his first season with Winnipeg, the UCLA product was named the CFL’s most outstanding special teams player and all-star kicker after hitting a league-record 60 field goals.
He set a new franchise mark with 227 points, tied the Winnipeg record for longest field goal at 58 yards and established a careerhigh punting average of 42.7 yards.
This past season, Medlock was good on 56 of 70 field goals (80 per cent) and set a new career-high in punting with an average of 43.7 yards.