johnzo

Can you even fire a guy midseason when he's wearing four different hats in the organization? Replacing a head coach is hard enough, but simultaneously replacing a VP, a GM, a HC, and a DC ... sounds like pure org chaos. I wonder if firing a coordinator is even more damaging than firing a coach ... thinking back to the bad old Bombers of 2005 who had a promising D for a couple games until Rod Rust had to take a leave, and then they became instantly, historically bad. (weirdly, the Roughrider website doesn't list a DC, it only lists a few defensive assistants and position coaches, so maybe Jones only has three hats now?)

Yeah, Bobby G. was a great receiver ... I watched him for a year in Ottawa and he got his thousand yards even with a bunch of terrible QBs. Hard to cut him in favor of a promising sophomore.

One thing to remember about the Affordable Care Act is that it substantially expanded Medicaid (basically, federal gov't health insurance for poor folks, handicapped folks, people in nursing homes, etc.) I can't find a simple nationwide expansion number, but in Washington state, 600,000 more people were enrolled in Medicare post-expansion, and in California and NY, 6 million more people were enrolled. So you have millions of people who could almost certainly not afford private health insurance (Medicaid is means-tested) now having coverage. Medicaid isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than being uninsured and relying on an ER for your chemotherapy. The individual mandate part of the law -- the part that says you either have health insurance or pay a tax penalty -- is the part that everyone is attacking, the one that creates a weird and freaky partnership between the government and the insurance business. This could definitely use reform, but there are success stories. Two of my close friends rely on the Washington state insurance exchange for coverage, and they are definitely up **** creek if that market destabilizes. I want single-payer too, and I'm prepared to pay higher taxes for it .. but there is a baby in the Obamacare bathwater. Just rolling back the clock to 2009 will hurt an awful lot of people. It's really hard to make drastic and fast change in the USA. It's not like Canada, where a single small committee in the PMO can unaccountably run the country as it sees fit. The American government is set up to be slow and incremental. Look at how much trouble Republicans are having with rewriting health care in the USA .. and that's with single-party control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Republicans are a largely disciplined machine and even they are breaking down on the health care question. The New Deal was probably the most radical government plan in USA history .. and it would have fallen apart had not two Supreme Court justices decided at the last minute that federal intervention in the economy was not unconstitutional. And Roosevelt had a landslide mandate as well as a friendly Congress. The system is deliberately set up to allow people to jam sticks into legislative spokes. But yeah, be thankful for Canada. I have a ton of blessings in the USA, many friends, a great wife, and a solid career in a field that capitalism finds useful, but it could be very different very quickly for me.

Sure love the SJ Green comeback, though. Dude was vintage in his first game back. Great to see. Hope he stays healthy and vacuums up a lot of those soft Ray throws.

I am not a football coach but if the DL is only rushing three against a run between the tackles, you're gonna have at least one run blocker in the second level, right? Seems like Sutton was eating them alive last week...

Yeah, I thought he was done in the CFL.

watched Calgary/Ottawa with nary a bump. this service looks solid. Just finished a python script to download VOD games so I can save them locally (mostly so I can skip commercials...the supplied player lacks a +30s button, mysteriously!) if anyone is a deep nerd and wants to see the source, lemme know.

Atomic, you just made my day, I was hunting for a youtube of that play the other day after watching the Casey Creehan video in Training Camp Memories. YOU AIN'T GONNA HURT LOBENDAHN, HE'LL BE ALRIGHT! What a great backer.

Senate Republican health care plan is out. It makes deep cuts to Medicaid. Nearly half of newborn deliveries in the USA are funded by Medicaid. What the **** does "pro-life" even mean to these people? The Congressional plan cut almost $900B in government health spending over the next decade. Strangely, it only reduced the deficit by $100B. Where is the other $800B going?

When you watch games from before the replay era, it's amazing how fast they move wihout those regular delays and appeals.

Jones detonated hard after that Demski play. Was losing his mind on the sidelines. For Mike O'Shea, that would've been an arm-around-the-shoulder teachable moment; for Jones it was just a tantrum prompt.

I only watched the fourth quarter, but Glenn looked exactly like Glenn: working that quick release, completing lots of passes, piling up some respectable yardage .. and then throwing a killer fourth-quarter pick that led to the Als' winning points. Durant looked real shaky on that throw to Sutton in the flat that forced the Als to settle for a field goal on their final drive. Gotta make that throw, man, he's made it like 100x in his CFL career.

The yaretv stream was beautiful, watched the whole fourth quarter in 720p, didn't buffer once. Pumped! I've been waiting for this service for years....thank you CFL, from this pretend Dutchman.

Wow, there's clever-smart and clever-dumb.

Hey to get back on topic, I've got a solid yaretv stream through my VPN. Turned it on just in time to see Kevin Glenn's characteristic fourth-quarter pick. And yeah, there is a massive divide in the USA between the urban areas and the boonies. And Mark is right, the Puget Sound area is indeed a nightmare to drive in ... we have okay north-south routes but our east-west routes are all messed up by our many urban lakes and waterways and gnarly hills. They've beautiful to have but damn do they screw up traffic. Add to that a rapid transit system that only serves about 150K of our 3.5MM urban population, and then consider that 50 people are moving to King County every day (Amazon alone is hiring about 500 people a week). You wind up with the fourth-worst traffic in the USA.

WOOHOOO THE SEASON IS HERE!

Listening to the Montreal radio broadcast while I finish out the day at work ... those guys are not really high on the Als. They've got big questions at almost every position. "But they're playing Saskatchewan, so it doesn't matter," they said. ouch.

Not just keeping the sack totals low, but Harris really got his running game going after we bonded up the OL. He looked like a brand new back.

We coped last year just fine with Flanders. Wonder what the least damaging ratio change we can make is ... Coates in full time, maybe? Took a look at the Bomber roster and noticed that Richards is back on the active roster; also noticed they don't have an injury list published so I guess he's still hurt?

Love TE82. For a number of years, he was the only bright light in the Bomber offence. No matter what dud we trotted out behind center, Edwards was gonna make his plays. Imagine the numbers he would have put up if he'd had consistent QBs.

Yeah, I haven't done a road trip like that, but if you read Paul Theroux's Deep South you can get some idea.

I've only driven the West once. Drove from Thunder Bay to Vancouver, took about a week to do it. Anyway, my wife and I drove Kicking Horse Pass in fine weather with light traffic in my Mazda3, which corners pretty well for a compact sedan. I still white-knuckled the whole pass. Damn there are some gnarly stretches in there ... that hairpin turn west of Banff must have claimed more than a few vehicles over the years.

Look forward to this thread being closed every year. Shut er down and bring on the regular season!

I used to hang out with a Scottish exchange student when I was at Lakehead U .. he could not believe that our nearest big city was eight hours away. North America is so huge and empty once you get west of Sault Ste. Marie. I've driven the width of Ontario twice and it's astonishing how big this province is.

VPN = Virtual Private Network. When you have VPN software running on your computer, all of your network traffic is encrypted and routed to a computer somewhere else. That computer decrypts your traffic and forwards it onto the Internet, then encrypts the responses and forwards them back to you. This has two benefits: 1) your ISP can't tell what you're doing, so they can't snoop your user data and sell it, they can't filter or throttle or narc your torrents or streams, and they can't tell if you're a Chinese dissident looking up information on Falun Gong. VPNs are very popular in China and with business users who are travelling away from their home offices. 2) this is the good part for you and me: all your internet traffic appears to be coming from the country where your VPN server is located. My VPN server is in Rotterdam, so when I turn it on and connect to the CFL streaming site, what they see is a Dutchman who likes niche sports instead of me, the Canadian in America who doesn't want to pay for a cable subscription just for five months of ESPN a year. I use ExpressVPN (https://www.expressvpn.com) although I didn't shop around much so I don't know if it's the best. Getting it running wasn't too hard.