johnzo

hoping you're right, but I think CFL level DBs are gonna close windows a lot faster than USports guys. question for the guys who know: do USports defences run the same schemes as CFL defences? Will Elgersma have a leg up in his presnap reads and recognition having played USports, or is it a different world in the CFL? (edit: just saw that Gcn20 says that CFL is indeed a different world when it comes to scheme a few posts back.)

🧠: CFL preseason means nothing, it's just nice to have football back. 💙: YEHAW RIDERS LOSE! 🎉 🎉 🎉

Also, all that game manager stuff that people hang on Nichols is unfair because his OC was always Lapo, and Lapo would turn Doug Flutie into a game manager if he got the chance.

I was at that game. Matty Ice was red-hot, we were up and down the field all game. Classic CFL playoff game except it ended sad for us. 100% Matty deserves recognition and fan love but he's not an all-timer.

all high profile defensive free agent new team tweets must feature a photo of free agent forcing a Blue Bomber fumble.

That would be the greatest "Osh trolls MBB" moment ever.

That MOS poker face is in midseason form.

I won't make excuses for the losses but I think that the 2019 playoff run when Zach went from a barrel-scraping emergency replacement to a Grey Cup winner was the stuff of legend.

I don't think you can rank them, I think you've gotta tier them. S-tier is Flutie and Moon A-tier is Ray and Calvillo B-tier is the rest of the top ten plus a ton of other guys. Lulay and Durant are on the bubble of B-tier for me. C-tier is Nichols, Glenn, Pierce, Bell, Maas, Slack, K. Joseph, Jarious -- guys who could start and win games and who had extended careers in places, and who occasionally shoot the lights out. D-tier is Bishop, Q. Porter, Jyles -- guys who showed just enough to win a starting job for a season or three, but never found their home. Would put the one-season wonders like Printers or J. Jennings in there too. The tweeners are the interesting guys. Glenn is a C-tier quarterback who had a B-tier career. Allen was a B-tier quarterback who had an A-tier career. That dude won a lot of Grey Cups in a lot of different situations, was freakishly durable despite being a pretty little guy, and went out on top.

So I was thinking about peak Collaros vs. 1992-1994 Dunigan and for me, it's Zach because peak Zach was much more durable and more clutch. Matty had teams good enough to win Grey Cups, but in 1992 the Calgary D owned him and 1993 he had an Achilles tear. Thinking about durability, though -- if you look at games before the 2000s, there was very little official protection for the QBs. Pass rushers would routinely torpedo a QB two or three steps after he delivered the ball, no flag. It's astonishing to see some of the hits that old-school QBs would pop up from. So it's kind of a function of the era that makes Zach more durable ... tho Zach doesn't seek contact like Matty did.

I am a big enough Clements fan to have him as my avatar, but I dunno how 1987 MOP Tom Clements would stack up nowadays. Hard to compare QB play over the years. Quarterbacks are so much more careful with the ball now. Watching vintage Clements games, once or twice a game he'd make a ridiculous backfoot prayer throw into a crowd of DBs just because throwing a pick or three was no big deal back then, picks were just something that happened. QBs had to be really good at throwing picks, like Vince Ferragamo good, before their careers would suffer. Hell, Sonny Wade stuck around for a decade with the Alouettes despite throwing 2x many interceptions as TDs.

his on-air sideline reporting has been solid. He breaks down failures in a way I can understand and calls out underperformers, especially repeat underperformers. He's a little bit more aggressive than the usual CFL color (except when Matty was in a mood to talk ****) but I'll take it. Just needs to leave that Twitter persona at home.

yeah, let's turn out the lights on this one tomorrow and fire up a training camp / preseason thread!

The old football fan rule is that the most popular guy on the team is the backup quarterback, but it seems like on MBB the most popular guy is the monster DT or NT.

the thing I want to know: what clubhouse bet did Vega lose to end up modelling those abortions?

Let's not be hasty. Before we cut Goalie we need to make sure his replacement is in the MBB new member pipeline. Don't want to pull a Mike Kelly and replace Goalie with Stefan Lefors!

I do not understand the problem that the revised playoff format is attempting to solve. Every year when the playoffs come I'm glad to be rid of the bottom third of the CFL but now two of those three teams will be hanging around. A divisional winner might not even get a bye in the playoffs, if they lose the "showdown" game, and they'll lose their home field advantage in the semifinal round if they lose the showdown game. In the past, winning a division vastly increased a team's odds of going to the final, but now? Seems like the regular season is kind of an afterthought here. I'm not sure why the East always gets the eighth seed in their play-in game while the West gets the seventh seed.

(deleted. wrong thread)

I think I might have been too fast to dismiss this. Did any established Canadian players try to catch on down south during the expansion era? Canadians heading south for lower taxes and harder currency is totally a thing, so it's hard to imagine that someone didn't try.

It wasn't about work visas. The CFL's roster rules are illegal in the US. No business in the USA can have rules that reserve roster / staff spots for foreigners. -- a semi-related story -- When I was returning to Seattle from the 2024 Grey Cup, I told the USA border guard that I'd been up in Vancouver watching Canadian football. "That's the league with a Canadian quota?" he asked. I told him yes, he was right. "Doesn't work like that down in the States, only the best play," he said. What I wanted to say was "I hear that's how the Border Patrol works too," but I did not say that.

Osh trolling mbb.

yeah, Powell didn't look like the second coming of Jeff Garcia or anything ... but in 2023 he went from QB3 to starting half of the games in Hamilton. He went 4-5 on an 8-10 team and had 10 TDs and 9 picks and massively beat expectations for a QB3 who becomes the emergency starter. I agree with SpeedFlex that he was the best young FA QB in the CFL this offseason and he could've maybe possible been a successor to Zach for us. But now he is in Edmonton and I hope for the sake of the league that we haven't seen his ceiling yet.

Masoli looked like he'd aged out really badly -- was a step behind everyone else on the field last year. Too bad because I think the guy's got guts and he gave us a game to remember in the 2021 Grey Cup, but Father Time is undefeated. When I saw Tyree Adams play, both before his injury and after, it didn't look like he was running the offence, it looked like he was running around. I am definitely not a QB coach, though.

The most notable memory I have is Chris Brazzell Sr. was his dumb awkward tackle-from-behind on the Milt Miracle play.

yeah, I felt the same about Kevin Glenn after the 2008 season. Good thing we moved on from that guy!