GCn20

I am hopeful we get both back and fairly confident we will.

Dust has settled on most of FA, and flying under the radar is the pretty staggering lack of NAT talent on the Riders. O'Day has a ton of work to do there. There starting 7 is a very generous of me below average, and I see no depth behind them at all. I get it, sounds like I'm piling on the RIders, but that is what this thread is for. I look at our losses this offseason and it hurts, but then I look at the Riders adds vs losses and it cheers me up quite a bit. Hope they stay quiet, but I think they have to make more moves...many more moves...just to field a roster that doesn't see Gainer in as a NAT roster counter.

Lat year Grant and Hansen were both late adds. Perhaps we have verbal commitments with them already. Hansen is playing Polish ball right now so it is highly likely he re-signs after their season, and Grant for some reason has been signed late the past 2 seasons. Maybe he goes abroad or something this time of year? Just speculating. Grant could be a guy who likes to keep the NFL option open as long as possible too. Grant could definitely be a guy we want to take a physical as well after his injury setbacks last year, maybe we are waiting on that.

He makes good cuts, but yea...he's not particularly quick and is definitely vertically challenged for wideout. Very smart receiver, guess he'd have to be at his size.

I would think he still has a roster to fill out with foot soldiers with a lot of the rest of open cap space. I doubt when all is said and done that we have the SMS room to make any kind of big splash, but certainly guys like Grant, Hansen etc should be targets.

Damn, Trumaine Washington to Ottawa. Was hoping that he would be this year's Winston Rose type signing.

Can't go wrong going vintage...my 85 still looks as great as the day I bought it.

I hope Andrew steam rolls over everybody except us....especially the RIders though. Can't go wrong going vintage...my 85 still looks as great as the day I bought it. My Poplawski 71 is a little beat up but comes out of the closet once in a while too. The way I figure it is current players need to see that Bomber legends are never forgotten, it may inspire them to be life long Bombers knowing that their jersey might still be in the stands decades after they retire because that is the kind of fans we are.

I mentioned it 4 days ago and got shouted down. However, in situations such as this it is completely reasonable for any fan not to believe it until they heard it straight from the horse's mouth. Nothing Riderfanish about that at all. Booch is correct this was no big national secret and yes the condition Andrew may/may not have been in was discussed here last year and no one believed it because there was no proof other than heresay. When heresay becomes proveable fact though, it illicits a completely different response that's not Riderfanish that's just a simple basic truth.

A very quick resolution to the argument for sure. I had heard what Booch was saying too but I can't remember where I heard it or even if I was correctly remembering what I heard. lol Not many....but how many call up the media to discuss it and then have it looked favorably on them by the fan base? Not sure Harris thought that through before doing it.

We were spoiled by having Harris doing doubles 1000s and thus earning an extremely high salary for a RB....but once those days are over and he isn't putting up 2000 yards it's tough to justify that kind of money on one RB. Some people have expressed disappointment in how Harris has handled the situation. Others are suggesting that is akin to shitting on him. Not sure that is a particularly fair assessment of the discussion.

He said his contract offer wouldn't even have made him the highest paid RB on the team. Augustine's contract is believed to come in at 130k. Thus the belief that his contract offer was just below JA's and above the 120k we offered to BO....and yes, I'm not sure that the Bombers could have been more transparent than discussing their concerns.

Might be he has a business agent for things outside football like endorsements etc. Guess I heard wrong, not sure where I heard they had the same agent but I know I heard it somewhere. Maybe, it was Jeffcoat and someone else.

I agree. However, there are many reasons why players leave teams and why teams leave players and it's not always about money. Harris says it wasn't about the money. That's why we are discussing it. If anyone here felt it was strictly about the money this conversation would not be taking place. Harris went to the media, said it wasn't about the money. Are you calling him a liar?

We have a locker room chock full of leaders. The void left by Harris will be closed very easily. I am not worried about that in the least.

I don't think anyone in the locker room will view it as anything other than Andrew looking after Andrew and the Bombers looking after the Bombers but the fans will definitely view it as Andrew putting himself ahead of the team because that's what he did. However, it should be stated that going to Toronto for more money is totally his right and we should bear no ill will towards him for that. Players have to look out for themselves in contract time. What's most disappointing is how and why we had to make him an offer that he felt he had to walk away from. It didn't need to go down like that, and most of the responsibility for this falls on Harris himself. I don't think that is entirely true, in fact, Harris himself has said that is not entirely true. It was not about the money according to Harris. He said he was willing to play for the offer the Bombers made him. If we are to believe him, and we have no reason not to, the reason he left is because he felt disrespected. A lot of the fans here not agreeing with that perspective is not pulling him off his pedestal. It is discussing whether we think his viewpoint on this is correct or not.

Weird because I thought Walters said that he was able to do the Jeffs negotiations at the same time because they had the same agent.

The number on Augustine is rumored to be somewhere in the 130k range. That alone should tell you all you need to know about your viewpoint. lol

I don't think the fact he left for more money is what is of concern to most around here. The very public airing of laundry is the issue at hand as well as the validity of the request by the Bombers for Harris to undergo a physical and the fact that Harris deems this as being an act of disrespect to him and most of us are failing to understand why he feels that way.

I would hope we do this with every player coming off a season with multiple non contact injuries.

You are clearly confusing the forum agreeing with the decision to move on from Harris based on new information that came from Harris himself, with us crapping on him. Not the same thing. Not a single person here minimized his contribution to the team. Disappointment with the way he handled the exit? Absolutely and deservedly but that's 100% on Harris not on the fans. If that offends you or makes you feel gross well I don't know what you would expect from any fan base in the same situation. Harris opened up this can of worms, he went public, when he did so he opened himself up to an evaluation of his story.

First of all, many players re-signed this year did so well below market value. That's just an undeniable fact. You think Biggie couldn't have got more than 160k on the open market? Secondly, Harris himself admitted to these deep issues. They are HIS words not ours, we are simply discussing them. Look, obviously you are a massive Harris fan, and that's fine, but comparing us to Riderfans is ludicrous and over the top and quite frankly makes you look bad...not the rest of us.

I feel bad for Andrew that he didn't get the opportunity to end his career here. I do not for one second think that he didn't play a big role in that though. If we had not won the Grey Cup last year, how steamed would we all be at him right now after learning he didn't show up in shape or focused last year. We had a good enough team to overcome that, thank goodness.

At the risk of being called a Riderfan, I will suggest there is only one plausible reason for not doing the workout. Ego. I never really thought of that, but yea, it takes a crap load for MOS to lose trust in his players.

Sure....but that's not always the right thing for all players. Harris is an emotional guy, and might have been better served with an agent to buffer those discussions. Not that special? They ended a 30 year Grey Cup drought and became the first team in the league in 20 years to repeat, Not sure what your definition of special is but that qualifies in my books. There were great stories about culture written before Collaros was signed. We might not be discussing back to back Grey Cups but certainly the culture of the team would still be looked on as being very favorable. Also, saying something like that is kinda strange, you could literally go back to any team of any era even the most special and say if they didn't sign player X would we be even talking about them. If the Bulls didn't have Jordan, if the Patriots hadn't drafted Brady, if the Als didn't sign Calvillo...etc etc. It makes no sense to play what if we didn't have this player or that player. The fact each of these teams had these types of players is part of what made them special.