Another Sunday morning smorgas-bored…and I wonder if I’ll still be breathing when River City gets another championship parade…
Well, that didn’t take long.
Three snaps of the pointy ball into the Canadian Football League season and a starting quarterback was on his wonky way to the repair shop, not to return to the fray.
Sigh.
How silly of me to expect head shots on QBs to go the way of the rotary-dial telephone and hand-written letters.
Let’s face it, there are certain things we now check for at the end of each week’s skirmishing in the CFL: 1) who won; 2) who lost; 3) how horrible East Division outfits not named Hamilton Tiger-Cats are; and 4) the QB body count.
Zach Collaros was first on the quarterback casualty list in this freshly minted 2019 crusade, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders signal-caller has become three-down football’s latest hard-luck case. I’m not sure how many damaging blows to the belfry Zach’s taken, but when he, Matt Dunigan and Buck Pierce get together you’ll hear more bells ringing than on Sunday morning at the Vatican. They’ve taken to calling him QuasiQB on the flatlands (“The bells…the bells…”).
Naturally, the villain of the piece on Friday night in the Hammer, Ticats linebacker Simoni Lawrence, delivered a post-match mea culpa, insisting the collision between his shoulder and Collaros’ melon was unavoidable and he’s “super sorry.” And, hey, he’s really, really fond of the Riders QB, don’t you know.
“I love Zach to death,” he told TSN’s Matthew Scianitti.
He just doesn’t love him enough to ignore an opportunity to take Collaros out of a game with the kind of dirty, cheap shot that the CFL is supposedly trying to eliminate.
I trust commissioner Randy Ambrosie wasn’t moved to tears by Lawrence’s warm-and-fuzzy sentiments, and he has no choice but to instruct Lawrence to take a seat in the timeout corner. I’d say anything less than a two-game suspension will confirm that Commish Randy has lost the plot in the quest to keep QBs upright and out of dark rooms.
The punishment for head shots like that which Lawrence laid on Collaros should be chiseled in stone: 25-yard penalty, ejection, suspension. Every time.
Reducing or ridding the CFL of head-hunting isn’t strictly down to Commish Randy. This is very much on the players, too. It’s supposed to be a brotherhood, yet they insist on doing 100 km/h in a 15-km/h school zone, even though their reckless and callous indifference is apt to end a career. The CFL Players Association, it seems, is a brotherhood with very little r-e-s-p-e-c-t between the lines and even less going on between the ears.
The good news is, the attendance-challenged B.C. Lions hijacked QB Mike Reilly from Edmonton. The bad news is, nobody in Lotus Land gives a damn. Just 18,058 folks found their way to B.C. Place Stadium on Saturday night for a marquee matchup between the Leos and Winnipeg Blue Bombers, and that head count is down from their home opener a year ago (-2,124) and down on their 2018 average (-1,917). A 33-23 loss to the Bombers in the lid-lifter certainly won’t do anything to attract new customers. The Lions are paying Reilly $2.9 million over the next four years, but owner David Braley might have to start a GoFundMe account to cover his QB’s salary.
Attendance took a dive across the board in Week 1 of the CFL season. Here are the numbers compared to 2018 averages:
Calgary: 26,301 (26,339)
B.C.: 18,058 (19,975)
Edmonton: 25,263 (31,107)
Hamilton: 22,287 (23,523)
Just what I had hoped for—the return of the CFL season means the return of Kirk Penton’s scribblings in The Athletic. All is right with the world again.
In view of recent developments, many young people have discovered that a Canadian, John Naismith, was the dude who thought tossing a round ball into a peach basket would be a swell way to kill time. So welcome to Canada—home of the NB-Eh champion Tranna Jurassics.
So, this is how I learned that the Jurassics had captured the National Basketball Eh-ssociation title: I awoke at 1:22 Friday morning after six hours of sleep, turned on my flatscreen, and there was the Insufferable Courtside Clown, Drake, wearing a champions cap and flapping his gums in front of a TSN microphone and camera. Since I didn’t have my ear buds in, I have no idea what blah, blah, blah the Jurassics’ resident groupie was spewing, but I’m sure it was as idiotic as it was irrelevant. The Sportsnet/TSN/Republic of Tranna media infatuation with the rapper is as much a mystery as the Cadbury candy bar.
That was some wild celebration following the Jurassics’ Game 6 win over the Golden State Juggernaut on Thursday. The way people were carrying on, I thought something historic had happened. You know, like maybe the American women’s soccer team had scored another goal to make it 14-0.
Some folks are puzzled by my indifference toward the Jurassics. Allow me to explain. As a sprig, we sometimes played hoops at school, but never on the playground (we’d arrange a rousing game of tin-can cricket before considering basketball). And, being a squirt, I quickly discovered that the requirements to arrive at an acceptable level of on-court competency escaped me. So hoops wasn’t my thing. Still, I developed a great fondness for the Los Angeles Lakers and their marquee performer in the 1960s, NB-Eh logo-boy Jerry West, and my appreciation and admiration for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar dates
back to his days at UCLA, when we knew him as Lew Alcindor and his Bruins seldom lost. I believe it was after Kareem left the Lakers that my interest in hoops began to dwindle, and it didn’t help that HIV took Magic out of the game. By the time guys like Shaq and Kobe stopped bickering long enough to divorce each other, it was strictly meh. So blame it on the Lakers. Anyway, you’ll have to forgive me my failure to embrace the Jurassics. Try as I might, their climb to the top of the hoops heap was not exactly a Beatles-arrive-in-North America occasion for me. But if you’re on the bandwagon, I’m happy for you. Enjoy the parade.
Quiz me this, kids: Which is the most-difficult chore, winning the Stanley Cup or the Larry O’Brien Trophy? By the numbers, both are daunting tasks. Consider:
The National Hockey League playoffs faced off on April 10 and ended on June 12. The St. Loo Blues played 26 games (16-10), two below maximum, in that 64-day time frame. The NHL plays 60-minute matches.
The NB-Eh playoffs tipped off on April 13 and ended on June 13. The Tranna Jurassic played 24 games (16-8), four below maximum, in that 62-day time frame. The NBA plays 48-minute matches.
Personally, I think the Stanley Cup is the harder trinket to win, if for no reason other than the fact hockey players are walloping each other with clubs almost every second night for two months.
If Kevin Cheveldayoff does nothing more than twiddle his thumbs this week, the NHL’s annual garage sale of freshly scrubbed teenage boys will be a bummer for the rabble in River City. I mean, watching the entry draft when Chevy doesn’t have a first-round shout-out is like going into a pub that doesn’t sell beer. Like, what’s the point? But that’s where the Winnipeg Jets general manager sits today. C’mon, Chevy, do something other than sign European no-names to fill Manitoba Moose jerseys next winter. We need a reason to tune in to the cattle call next Friday night in Vancity.
And, finally, to all the news snoops who’ve been covering the NHL or NBA playoffs for the past two months, take a deep breath, pour yourselves a cocktail or pop a top off a brown bottle, then relaaaaaaax. You’ve earned your day(s) of rest.
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