Rageahol runs through Rider Nation when Roughriders lose

Head coach and GM Chris Jones, centre, and the Roughriders lost a bad one.

    It is almost comical the way rageahol runs through Rider Nation when the Saskatchewan Roughriders lose.

    On June 15, the Roughriders opened the CFL regular season with a 27-19 victory over the defending Grey Cup champion Toronto Argonauts in the friendly confines of Mosaic Stadium. Everything was great, and Roughriders fans seemed to have visions of a memorable campaign ending in a Grey Cup triumph.

    On Thursday, the Roughriders played their second regular season game traveling to Ottawa to face the host Redblacks. Before 24,224 spectators at TD Place Stadium, the Redblacks rolled to a 40-17 victory.

    The Redblacks played great, but the Roughriders put on one of their classic stinkers. It seems like Saskatchewan is good for three of those a season even in championship campaigns.

    All of a sudden, it seems like a huge vocal group of Roughriders fans collectively push the panic button. The comments on sports talk radio and social media lines seems to be similar every time the Roughriders lose.

    There are calls for players to be traded and coaches and managers to be fired. At times, it seems like no one is immune to criticism in the Roughriders organization.

    If you search hard enough, you will probably find blame getting spread to the waterboy, Gainer the Gopher and the Rider Cheer Team.

    When you look at the schedule, the Roughriders were heading into a buzz saw in their match with the Redblacks.

Charleston Hughes (#39) and the Roughriders had a rough day in Ottawa.

    Saskatchewan was going into that contest on a short week with five off days between games and had to travel. Ottawa had a bye to start the 2018 campaign resulting in the benefit of an extra week to prepare for Saskatchewan.

    In most incidents where that type of situation occurs in professional football, a blowout occurs where the club with the extra rest wins by a lopsided score.

    For those that are part of Roughriders organization, it becomes a daily part of life seeing fans react in extremes with their emotions. The players try not to get too caught up in how the fans react and work on getting better for the next game.

    Thursday’s loss made me flashback to a bad setback the Roughriders had in the 2008 CFL season. On Oct. 13, 2008, the Roughriders were heading to Calgary to play the host Stampeder at McMahon Stadium.

    Both teams went head-to-head 10 days earlier at Taylor Field in Regina, where the Roughriders pulled out a 37-34 victory.

    Both clubs were sporting 9-5 records and the winner would sit alone in first place in the West Division. The squad that lost would fall in a three-way tie for second to fourth in the division with the Edmonton Eskimos and British Columbia Lions, who were both 9-6.

    It felt like the clash on Oct. 13, 2008 at McMahon Stadium was over minutes into the first quarter. The Stampeders romped past the Roughriders by a 42-5 final score.

    At the time, I had a number of friends who were playing for the Roughriders. After the game, I visited with a few of them outside the stadium where they boarded the bus.

Rider Nation had a tough day in Calgary on October 13, 2008.

    One friend, who was a fan favourite and a regular starter, came to me and he said he didn’t know why the team played so flat. He said everyone was pumped up and motivated for the game and the wheels basically fell off.

    The social media platform Facebook was still fairly new at this time and a lot more basic than it is now. My friend mentioned early in the season he went into Facebook after a loss and there were 30 direct messages waiting for him.

    He pretty much knew most of the messages would be negative so he selected all of them and hit delete. He expected he would have to do the same thing after that loss to the Stampeders.

    My friend on the team said you just had to correct mistakes and move on as nothing could be done to change the outcome of that defeat to the Stampeders.

    To show how long ago that was, most professional squads and high level amateur teams didn’t have policies regarding social media. Twitter was around but wasn’t widely used and Instagram didn’t exist.

    In the current day, most of the fans do their social media venting on Twitter and Facebook. There might be some harsh words in the comments section in the pictures teams post on their Instagram sites, but that isn’t a regular place where displeasure is shown.

    On a side note, I remember one other friend taking that loss in 2008 hard in Roughriders special teams coach Alex Smith. He came out of the stadium door, said “hi” and walked aimlessly into the distance.

    To this day, I think he came back to one of the two team busses, but I am not sure.

Members of Rider Nation leave McMahon Stadium on October 13, 2008.

    Whether it be 2008, 1958, 1968 or 2018, fans in Saskatchewan seem to project getting too high emotionally when the Roughriders win and too low emotionally when they lose.

    What seems to be forgotten is that when the Roughriders win, they still aren’t going to be the second coming of Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers NFL dynasty teams. When the Roughriders lose, they won’t be the current day version of the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers sad sack NFL expansion team.

    All that matters is the 2018 CFL season still young.

    The Roughriders get to go out and try to be a little bit better in their next game on June 30, when they host the Montreal Alouettes (0-2) at 7 p.m. at Mosaic Stadium.

Awards loss by Rams’ Cross a “ho-hum” thing

Rams LB Nick Cross (#9) runs down Thunderbirds QB Cole Meyer.

    University of Regina Rams linebacker Nick Cross had a bit of an awkward week.

    During the 2017 U Sports football season, Cross entered his rookie campaign for the Rams starting at outside linebacker right out of high school. He appeared in all eight of the Rams regular season games recording 46 tackles, three tackles for a loss including a sack, two pass break ups, a forced fumble and an interception.

    For his efforts, he was awarded the Peter Gorman Trophy as the U Sports rookie of the year and a second team U Sports all-Canadian all-star.

    On Wednesday, Cross was stripped of both of those honours by U Sports due to testing positive for cannabis. The graduate of Regina’s Dr. Martin LeBoldus High School was subjected to a random drug test following the Rams final regular season game on Oct. 28, 2017, when they dropped a 44-15 decision to the University of British Columbia Thunderbirds in Vancouver.

    While cannabis will soon be legal, it is still on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s prohibited list. It will still be a banned substance during the U Sports competitive season when it becomes legal.

    Cross was suspended two months, and he became fully active to return to team activities on Jan. 4.

    Before being suspended, Cross appeared in the Rams 28-21 Canada West semifinal playoff loss to the Thunderbirds in Vancouver on Nov. 4, 2017.

    Cross was also stripped of his Canada West rookie-of-the-year award and his Canada West all-star honour.

    The Canada West reward the rookie of the year award to University of Calgary Dinos offensive lineman Tyler Packer and the all-star award at linebacker to Cyril Iwanegbe, who is also from the Dinos.

    At the U Sports national level, quarterback Tre Ford of the University of Waterloo Warriors became the new rookie of the year. The second team U Sports all-Canadian all-star award at linebacker went to Bailey Feltmate of the Acadia University Axemen.

    Of course, Cross tested positive for a drug that doesn’t enhance on field performance. If he battles with mental health issues regarding anxiety, it is possible cannabis might help him get calm before a game, so that technically would help improve performance.

    There would have been a time in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when this would have been a more major story. In Saskatoon, the sanctions against Cross would have been well known due to the fact he played for the Rams, the Rams had an intense rivalry with Saskatoon and there were more people in the mainstream media that would track such a story.

    The fans in Saskatoon would be out in full force to heckle the Rams the next time they played the University of Saskatchewan Huskies at Griffiths Stadium, and Cross would have been a target. The rivalry between Saskatoon and Regina was very heated back then.

    These days, there likely aren’t very many people in the general public in Saskatoon who know Cross is. The news of the sanctions against him are pretty much “ho-hum” thing.

    A year ago, Rams linebacker Michael Stefanovic removed himself from the 2017 CFL Draft after an alleged doping violation. On May 4, 2017, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) announced that a urine sample provided by Stefanovic during the CFL’s western regional combine in Regina on March 23, 2017 revealed the presence of drostanolone, which is a prohibited anabolic agent.

    At the time, a violation of the CCES’s anti-doping rules had not been confirmed, but the news about Stefanovic was disclosed due to the fact he was eligible for the CFL Draft.

    On October 23, 2017, the CCES confirmed Stefanovic’s doping violation. He was given a sanction of four years ineligibility from sport. He is ineligible to participate in any capacity with any sport signatory to the Canadian Anti-Doping Program including training with teammates.

    The news around Stefanovic barely made a ripple outside of Regina. Thanks to the fact he had exhausted his U Sports eligibility at the time of his drug infraction, there were very few follow up pieces if any in the mainstream media when his suspension was announced.

    It is highly unlikely Stefanovic would play any sort of competitive sport again, so there wouldn’t be any motivation to do any follow story in most media outlets.

    If what happened Stefanovic occurred in the late 1990s or early 2000s, that would have added fuel to the fire for Saskatoon fans to heckle the Rams.

    Also during that period of time if members of any Huskies teams went through situations like Cross and Stefanovic experienced, the Huskies teams would receive biting heckles by fans in Regina when they arrived in the Saskatchewan capital for road games.

    In the grand scheme of things, what Stefanovic was found guilty of was likely worse than what Cross was found guilty of. Cross’s infraction will likely be more of a small bump in the road.

    Thanks to the fact U Sports doesn’t have as high of a profile as it once did due to the media cut era of today, stories like the situations involving Cross and Stefanovic will be viewed as minor and will likely be quickly forgotten.

    If you have any comments you would like to pass along about this post, feel free to email them to stankssports@gmail.com.

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