J.J. McCullough
Published 22 Jul 2017Let’s take a look at a couple of weird things only Canadians will understand.
O Canada ending music care of SuperNIntendoGameboy, check out full version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0qmP…
December 4, 2020
5 strange Canadian objects
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July 23, 2020
Edmonton’s CFL team will abandon the “Eskimos” nickname that’s been in use for over 100 years
Anything that happens in the United States tends to also happen later in Canada. The Washington NFL franchise has abandoned their “Redskins” nickname (although to many the “Washington” part is at least as offensive) but have not yet announced their new moniker. Edmonton is in the same situation, with no new name yet decided upon:
“Edmonton eskimos wordmark” by Pabstheiniker is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
I said an anticipatory farewell to the name of the Edmonton Eskimos football club in this space in 2017; on Tuesday the team’s front office executed the sentence, announcing that the team’s nickname, in use for Edmonton sports clubs for over 110 years, will be retired. (Note that the Canadian Football League is only 62 years old.)
But there is always some kind of minor surprise on the scaffold, and in this case it was that the team has not yet decided on a new name. This, I see, is where I made a mistake back in 2017.
I saw that getting rid of “Eskimos” was a relatively simple problem with an affordable cost that would have to be paid eventually. In the event, the final push was supplied, unsurprisingly, by corporate sponsors — themselves all in a state of vulnerability and panic in conditions of pandemic disease. The CFL team had played public-relations defence whenever the issue was raised aggressively before; they were, self-evidently, playing for time.
I noted in 2017 that the same P.R. apparatus was obviously trying to propagate “Empire” as an alternative by-word for the team, and it filed a trademark application for “Edmonton Empire” in 2018. The team can start selling new green-and-gold gear to fans as soon as it settles on something, and a new nickname beginning with “E” would preserve the team’s stylish double-E logo. “Empire” might even work well with the team colours if “gold” were interpreted more literally in the uniform, rather than serving as sales talk for “yellow.”
[…]
Speaking as an Edmonton-born fan of Edmonton Ellipsoidal Ball Sport Sodality, I see now that I may have prepared adequately for the end of the Eskimos, but my heart didn’t anticipate the dual nature of this decision any more than my brain did. I know — hell, my friends and my readers know — that I will dislike whatever they pick. Contests and polls of the public produce embarrassments like “The Toronto Raptors,” so the mere thought of any such exercise plunges me into despond.
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September 27, 2016
Bud Grant to be added to Winnipeg’s Ring of Honour
Given that Bud Grant is a legendary coach in both Minnesota and Manitoba, I’m surprised this hadn’t already happened:
Legendary coach Bud Grant, a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Vikings Ring of Honor, is joining another distinguished group.
The Winnipeg Blue Bombers on Monday announced Grant is the seventh inductee to the team’s Ring of Honour presented by the Insurance Brokers of Manitoba (IBAM) at Investors Group Field. He will be formally inducted on Friday.
Grant first came to the Bombers as a player in 1953, and played for four seasons before hanging up his cleats and becoming the team’s head coach at the young age of 29. In those four seasons, Grant was named a West Division All-Star three times (1953, 1953 & 1956), and set the still-standing league record for most interceptions in a playoff game with five.
“I enjoyed playing so much. I enjoyed Winnipeg so much. I enjoyed my teammates so much. I enjoyed the atmosphere around the Bombers, Canadian football… everything,” Grant said in a press release from the Blue Bombers. “The town, the people… It wasn’t only the football, it was the whole experience.”
Under his guidance, the Bombers appeared in six Grey Cups from 1957-66, winning four in 1958, 1959, 1961 and 1962. He racked up 102 regular season wins – still tops on the Bombers’ all-time list – and was named the CFL’s top coach in 1965.
“Bud Grant is not only a legend around these parts, but a legend in Minnesota and across both the CFL and NFL as well,” said President & CEO, Wade Miller. “After his career here in Winnipeg, he left for the Vikings and became an icon with that franchise, too. He is the first coach in history to appear in both the Grey Cup and Super Bowl. His accomplishments are truly incredible, and we couldn’t be happier to add his name to the Ring of Honour.”
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December 1, 2014
Vikings dominate Carolina Panthers, 31-13
Another game that wasn’t broadcast in the Toronto area … but this time they had a good excuse, it being Grey Cup weekend. In the Maple-flavoured game, the underdog Hamilton TiCats lost to the Calgary Stampeders by a score of 20-16. Well, #oskeeweewee guys and good luck next year!
In Minneapolis, the Vikings were the beneficiaries of not just one but two blocked punts run back for touchdowns. This is the first time the Vikings have scored on a blocked punt since 1986 … longer than almost all the current members of the team have been alive. It had been the longest ongoing span of games in the NFL when Adam Thielen blocked the punt, scooped it up and ran 30 yards to the end zone for six points and a Vikings record. The record — the longest TD scoring run off a blocked punt lasted less than 20 minutes before Jasper Brinkley blocked another punt which was run back by Everson Griffin for 46 yards to set a new record.
.@athielen19 with 1st blocked punt returned for a TD in #Vikings history since 10/12/86 (vs. SF by Issiac Holt).
— Vikings PR (@VikingsPR) November 30, 2014
Last time Vikings returned blocked punt for TD Isaac Holt vs. 49ers. 10/12/86. 453 games longest drought in league.
— Chris Tomasson (@christomasson) November 30, 2014
The special teams did so well that it pretty much overshadowed the improved performance at quarterback by Teddy Bridgewater: not record setting numbers, but two touchdowns and no turnovers along with a 120.7 passer rating. Derek Wetmore looks at the special teams heroics:
Adam Thielen and Everson Griffen etched their names into team history books, and they combined to pull off a rare feat.
First, Thielen blocked a punt in the first quarter and scooped it up with one hand as he returned to his feet and raced to the endzone. The Vikings already led 7-0 at that point, so the longest blocked punt returned for a touchdown in team history put Minnesota up by two scores.
But his 30-yard return didn’t stand as the franchise-long for very long.
With the Vikings leading 14-3, Jasper Brinkley got his mitts on a punt and Everson Griffen was there to recover it and take it into the endzone, setting a new Vikings record for the longest blocked punt returned for a score: 46 yards.
One of the weirdest things about the game is that even with the win, the Vikings are at the bottom of their division with a 5-7 record and only mathematically alive for a wildcard spot in the playoffs. Even with the loss, Carolina (at 3-8-1) still has a chance to win their division and host a playoff game!
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June 30, 2014
Differences between NFL and CFL rules
Current Chicago Bears coach (and former Montreal Alouettes coach) Marc Trestman talks about his time in the CFL and what the differences are between real maple-flavoured football and the NFL variety:
There are now nine teams in the CFL, and because of that there is a great deal of familiarity between the organizations. The league itself is tradition-filled and more than 100 years old. Each team plays each other up to three times during the 18-game season. Here are some more CFL nuances:
- The game is played on a 110-yard field with 20-yard end zones.
- The field is 65 yards wide (compared to the NFL’s 53 yards), with a 20-second time clock between plays. That leads to action-packed football.
- There are only three downs to make 10 yards, not four.
- They play 12 players to a side, and the defensive line must line up a yard off the ball.
- Six eligible receivers can be in motion prior to the snap.
- On kicking teams, there are no fair catches, which makes for a very exciting punting game with the wide field.
[…]
Another important difference between the CFL and NFL: the makeup of the teams. In the CFL, you have a 42-man game-day roster, and 20 of the 42 players must have Canadian heritage. The two quarterbacks don’t count against the ratio and you have to start seven Canadians among your 24 starters. But, there is no difference in the competitive makeup of each player. The men in the Montreal locker room were essentially no different than the men in our Chicago locker room. The players truly love the game, train extremely hard in the off-season, are highly competitive and “football intelligent,” and the game is as important to them as the NFL players I have coached. The only difference is the CFL player salary is significantly less than the NFL player. The CFL has a collective bargaining agreement, but the salary cap is $125 million lower than the NFL’s this year.
[…]
The rules in Canada were brilliantly conceived. It’s more of a mental challenge on game day. For example, on a missed field goal, the kicking team gets a point. But if the opponent runs it out of the end zone, the point is taken off the board. There are many tedious rules like this that make it challenging to manage a game. But the rules make sense and are tied to making the game extremely challenging from a game management point of view.
Because you have three downs to make a first down instead of four like U.S. football, most people would say, “You’ve got to make a first down in two downs, or punt on third down.” But because the defense is a yard off the ball, if you are third-and-one or less, most teams go for it. So if you make nine yards on two downs your chances of moving the chains are very good. The kicking game is extremely exciting. Because there are no fair catches, the covering team has to leave a five-yard halo around the returner so he can catch the ball. The return game therefore has more chances for explosive plays. With the wider field, the quicker players can make more things happen.
This may all be of interest to US television viewers, as ESPN just announced a deal to allow them the US broadcast rights for the CFL:
ESPN has acquired exclusive rights in the United States to Canadian Football League (CFL) games through a multi-year agreement, beginning with the 2014 season. ESPN will present at least 86 games in 2014 with 17 or more contests to be televised on ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNEWS, including the 102nd Grey Cup. An additional 69 games will be carried on ESPN’s live multi-screen sports network, ESPN3.
The TV schedule kicks off Saturday, June 28, at 3 p.m. ET on ESPN2 when the Calgary Stampeders host the Montreal Alouettes, whose star wide receiver is Duron Carter, son of ESPN NFL analyst and Pro Football Hall of Famer Cris Carter. Canada’s Sports Leader TSN will work with ESPN on game productions and their team of commentators will call the games.
ESPN’s relationship with the CFL spans more than three decades. In 1980, ESPN televised its first live football telecast ever – the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts vs. Montreal Alouettes – and continued televising CFL games from 1980-84, 1986-89, 1994-97 and in 2013. Additionally, ESPN3 has carried CFL games since 2008, including 54 games in 2013.
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June 11, 2014
Winnipeg Blue Bombers to honour Bud Grant with a statue
Gordon Sinclair, Jr. reports in the Winnipeg Free Press:
I had lost hope in the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
Not the team.
Not the hope of the Bombers winning a Grey Cup in my lifetime or even having a winning season.
No, I’d lost hope that my campaign to have the organization erect a statute in honour of Bud Grant and all that would represent and mean to the organization and the community, had not only failed, it had been ignored.
Board chairman Brock Bulbuck had suggested when we spoke last year that it was an appealing idea. But it was a year ago this month that I wrote the first of three columns explaining why a statute to the iconic Bomber coach should be placed outside Investors Group Field.
I went on to say I had heard there had already been talk of a statue to Grant among those tasked with honouring the team’s tradition, but the statue concept needed a nudge.
“Consider this a big nudge,” I wrote. “Furthermore, consider this: The Bombers should start a fund to commission a statue to Grant…”
A year passed.
The team, I reasoned, had more pressing matters, and gradually I lost hope the statue would happen in Grant’s lifetime, if ever.
Then last Friday an email arrived, it was a courtesy message delivered by Kim Babij-Gesell, the team’s co-ordinator of communications.
H/T to The Viking Age, who helpfully rounded up a few career highlights for Grant:
If you’re not familiar with Mr. Bud Grant, here are some astounding facts about the man:
- 1st round draft pick in 1950 (#14 overall)
- Played for the Philadelphia Eagles from 1951-1952
- Played for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers from 1953-1956
- Coached the Winnipeg Blue Bombers from 1957-1966
- Coached the Minnesota Vikings from 1967-1983
- Returned to coach the Vikings for the 1985 season
- 1965 CFL Coach of the Year
- 1969 NFL Coach of the Year
- Holds the CFL record for most interceptions in a playoff game (5)
- Member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame
- Member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame
- Coached the 1969 NFL Champion Vikings
- 3rd most successful professional football coach in history (290 wins)
- Played in the NBA for the Minneapolis Lakers (4th round draft pick)
- Only person in history to play in both the NFL and the NBA
After looking over that huge list of accomplishments, it isn’t hard to believe that a statue would be put up in Bud Grant’s honor. The statue will be erected at Investors Group Field in Winnipeg, Manitoba this fall according to Kim Babij-Gesell, the coordinator of communications for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers
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May 20, 2014
Happy 87th birthday, former Viking and Blue Bomber coach Bud Grant
On the official Minnesota Vikings page today, an infographic to celebrate former coach Bud Grant’s 87th birthday:
Click to see full infographic
Update: Minnesota will host SuperBowl LII in 2018:
Shocker. Minnesota wins the bid for Super Bowl LII. Breaks New Orleans streak.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) May 20, 2014
First loss ever for New Orleans, which is now 10 for 11 in Super Bowl bids
— Brian Murphy (@murphPPress) May 20, 2014
Minnesota WINS! http://t.co/TQZpFSZc8g pic.twitter.com/m31LTkB8Mw
— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) May 20, 2014
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May 2, 2013
Warren Moon says Tim Tebow couldn’t hack it in the CFL
And if there’s anyone in the NFL’s Hall of Fame who also knows what it takes to be a great quarterback in the CFL, it’s Warren Moon:
Hall of Famer Warren Moon said in a radio interview Wednesday that the Canadian Football League is not a viable option for Tim Tebow to prove he can play quarterback, as the former Heisman Trophy winner doesn’t throw the ball well enough to play in the league.
“You have to be able to throw the ball up there, if anything. They throw the ball a lot. It’s only three downs, so the passing game is much more important up there, and there’s a lot more field to cover,” Moon said in an interview with KILT-AM in Houston.
“If you can’t throw the football, it doesn’t matter where you play quarterback,” he said. “You have to be able to throw it. That’s his biggest problem, just being able to complete passes, be an accurate passer. I think he’s a really good athlete playing the position, but I don’t think that’s enough sometimes.”
Tebow cleared waivers on Tuesday after being released by the New York Jets. The Montreal Alouettes, who own his CFL rights, have said they would welcome Tebow to the league — provided he’s willing to compete for a job as a backup quarterback.
[. . .]
Moon played six seasons in the CFL after going undrafted out of Washington in 1978, leading his Edmonton Eskimos to five consecutive Grey Cup titles, throwing for 21,228 yards with 144 touchdowns and 77 interceptions. In 17 NFL seasons, he threw for 49,325 yards, 291 touchdowns and 233 interceptions. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006.
Moon said he thinks that if Tebow wants to continue playing in the NFL, he’ll have to switch to another position. Moon told ESPN Radio’s “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” on Monday, “I don’t think it’s going to happen at the quarterback position for him, at least not in the National Football League. You have to be able to throw the football before everything else happens.
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November 22, 2012
Tim Tebow … future CFL star?
Edmonton is crying out for a quality quarterback to take the Eskimos back to glory (or something that might pass for glory in poor light). Colby Cosh explains:
Tim Tebow. Say what you want about the man, and you will, but he is good copy. I got into a Tebow discussion the other day on Twitter after I started wishing aloud that he would come to Edmonton and save our CFL Eskimos from the wretched, dare I say almost Rider-like, state into which they have fallen. I was not really being serious. Well, OK: maybe ten percent serious.
About a year ago our genius general manager Eric Tillman decided to risk all on one turn of pitch-and-toss and trade our longtime quarterback, Ricky Ray, for magic beans from a passing pedlar. This decision was second-, third-, and nth-guessed at the time, and it was, we now know, rabidly opposed by head coach Kavis Reed. Ray does not throw the ball very far, or in an especially conventional way, but he has supreme accuracy statistics and had won two Grey Cups in Edmonton with pretty underwhelming teams. (The once-proud Eskies have not had a 12-win season yet in this century.)
Ray was divisive, though, Lordy, not Tebow divisive. But the trade united the city in agreement that the return was disappointing, and the unfolding of the Esks’ 7-11 season emphasized this in an especially brutal way. Peaceable Canada has never approved of the American practices of tarring and feathering or hastening the unwelcome out of town on a rail, but Tillman came within about a micron of it.
As with any healthy, anatomically intact young football fan, my thoughts sometimes turn to the curiously saintly, annihilatingly gifted Tebow. Last year’s Denver Broncos hero has entered the metaphorical wilderness of the New York Jets roster, where he spells off starting QB Mark Sanchez for a few snaps a game, plays on special teams, and for all I know mops the locker room. He is paid well for this, but it is not doing much for what you would call his human capital. In practices, Sanchez gets the vast majority of the “reps” — i.e., the work of simulating real plays. Tebow’s experience as a “punt protector” has been unhappy. There is already tremendous prejudice against him in the league, because he throws a football in a faintly silly way, and the longer he goes without running an offence as a quarterback, the less likely he is to ever be asked to do it again. Catch-22.
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September 28, 2011
Toronto: paradise of the high-profit, cellar-dwelling sports franchise
Last year, I posted a bit of Toronto-baiting, referring to the town as the place “where professional sports go to be embalmed”. In the comment thread to that post, “Lickmuffin” set me straight about just why Toronto teams are so bad — the answer is that Toronto fans expect no more of them, and are happy to pay for mediocrity. Stephen Marche goes a few steps further on that line (largely proving Lickmuffin’s point):
It’s a given that the true fan goes to games not for the necessarily occasional thrill of winning, but for the quotidian experience of losing — a truth articulated originally and beautifully by Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch. Losing in Toronto, however, is an unremitting condition. The CFL team, the Argonauts, is so bad that when I recently found a friend of mine betting on it, I immediately wondered if it was time for an intervention about his gambling addiction. As it stands, the Argonauts are
2 and 63 and 9. The Blue Jays this year aren’t completely terrible, but when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. They may be a rising power in the East, as many claim, but they sure haven’t risen yet. The Raptors are still in their post-Bosh wilderness (not that the Bosh period was a golden age), and Toronto FC currently rests at the bottom of the Eastern Conference. The Leafs, who matter to Torontonians more than all the other teams combined, have not won the Stanley Cup since 1967, and they haven’t made the playoffs in a franchise-record six seasons. The only team with a longer dry spell is the Florida Panthers. The Leafs’ major source of hope seems to be Brian Burke himself, but when the major source of your dreams is a front-office guy, you are in a dark place. Cheering a GM, to me, is hitting rock bottom.And this in Canada’s biggest city, where hockey matters more than baseball in Boston or basketball in Indiana or football in Texas. The only other places where sports dwell so near the most profound and abiding national questions are rugby in New Zealand, which recoups the warrior culture of the Maori, and football in Buenos Aires, where the slumdog Boca Juniors battle the uptown Millonarios in a never-ending class war. Maybe Real Madrid against Barcelona could be added to that list, but nobody else. People who were surprised that Vancouver burned after the Stanley Cup playoffs last year are unaware of the history of the sport in Canada. Of the 10 biggest riots in Canadian history, six began at hockey games.
[. . .]
So who can blame Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment, the business that controls the Leafs and the Raptors, for following that oldest and truest of rules: Never give a sucker an even break? The most recently released financial reports, published by the Toronto Star in 2007 and which were neither confirmed nor denied by the privately held MLSE, suggest they run a profit margin of more than 20 percent. Before we start hacking away at the irresponsible evil-capitalist angle, however, we should recognize that the majority shareholder in MLSE is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund (although they are currently looking to sell); the profits of MLSE have paid for the retirement of a lot of hardworking people, so it’s good that they’re good at business. And they are excellent business people.
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