Nature abhors a vacuum; so does the CFL Nissan Titan Power Rankings (and dogs). That sucking noise you hear is the sound of mediocre CFL teams being dragged up the Nissan Titan Power Rankings by the power void created by every team in the CFL not named the Calgary Stampeders.
After the number one Calgary Stampeders, no teams deserve to be placed in the top half of the Power Rankings, but someone has to be slotted into the number two to five slots, so here we are. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats lose and move up to number two.
Mr. Cullen over at TSN.CA did not hop aboard the Tiger-Cats bandwagon. Nevertheless, his solution to the dearth of non-Stampeder talent in the league right now was not much better. Winnipeg at number two? Ugh. Well, at least they won their game.
Oh, and by the way, the Saskatchewan Roughriders have the bye so nothing matters this week. Go back to whatever you were looking at before you stumbled upon this dumb blog (porn, I presume).
- CALGARY STAMPEDERS
This is getting boring. What is this franchise’s problem? Do something stupid, wrong, incompetent or otherwise bad. Your season depends upon it!
Look, Calgary Stampeders, if that is your real name, you need to understand how the Football Gods work. They give and they take. Like Icarus, you are flying too close to the sun. Your divinely-mandated comeuppance comes during Grey Cups. As with the 1966 to 1976 Saskatchewan Roughriders, your machine-like regular season success will be punished with a series of Grey Cup losses, and then terminated entirely with a decade-long “Reign of Error” (credit Bob Hughes).
Start losing or face the consequences.
- HAMILTON TIGER-CATS
Oh great and mighty Staff, why do you mock me so?
Last week I wrote that no matter whether the Hamilton Tiger-Cats beat, or lost to, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, they would go down in the Nissan Titan Power Rankings. Yet, lo and behold, after losing to what could be a terrible Saskatchewan Roughriders team, the Staff moved them up to number two.
So this is what it has come to, early in this 2018 season. Teams that lose get boosted up the Power Rankings. Sad!
- WINNIPEG BLUE BOMBERS
Beating up the irrelevant British Columbia Lions, at home, should not be rewarded with third place in the Nissan Titan Power Rankings. But really, who else ya gonna put here? The Edmonton Eskimos? Don’t waste my time.
- EDMONTON ESKIMOS
Last week I asked why the Edmonton Eskimos were ranked at number two. That seemed high to me. This is much better. Well, done, Sacred and Beloved Staff.
- OTTAWA REDBLACKS
If losing to the Saskatchewan Roughriders at Mosaic boosts the Hamilton Tiger-Cats into second place in the Nissan Titan Power Rankings, why is it that the REDBLACKS! are stuck at number five after beating their opponent? Oh, their opponent was the Montreal Alouettes? Okay, carry on.
- TORONTO ARGONAUTS
Hey, fun fact! The Saskatchewan Roughriders beat the Toronto Argonauts in Week One of the 2018 season. So, of course, the Argonauts are ranked above the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Of course.
- SASKATCHEWAN ROUGHRIDERS
The less-moribund and less-doleful Saskatchewan Roughriders crawled out of the basement of the Nissan Titan Power Rankings like how those 12 trapped Thai soccer kids got dragged out of that cave. Now they’re just happy to be alive and waiting for their parents to pick them up.
Matthew Cauz of CFL.CA fame has an article up called Chris Jones: Please Don’t Ever Change. I can’t tell if Mr. Cauz is being ironic or sarcastic or what.
(By the way, sarcasm is just the mean form of irony. You can be ironic without being sarcastic but you cannot be sarcastic without being ironic.)
This leads me to the broader question of whether Saskatchewan Roughriders Head Coach, General Manager, Vice-President of Football Operations, and guy who everyone in the CFL may or may not hate, Chris Jones, is the President Donald Trump of the Canadian Football League.
Listening to the various iterations of the football panel on TSN talk about Mr. Jones is like listening to the various iterations of the political panels on CNN talk about President Trump. The guy can’t do anything right and even if it appears he may have done something right (accidentally or otherwise), he still did it wrong. Rob Vanstone is just the Jim Acosta of the CFL press corps (or press corpse as I like to call them, thankyouverymuch).
Mr. Jones, like President Trump, just keeps doing what he wants regardless of the conventional wisdom and the near-constant outrage of everyone who has an opinion.
Now, to be very clear, Mr. Jones does not make racist statements (or at least statements that sound an awful lot like they are racist) and he does not crap all over the media just for doing their jobs. In fact, everything I have seen suggests Mr. Jones is completely polite and business-like with the media, even at times when he might want to chew someone’s head off. And Mr. Jones does not have a racist bone in his body. Mr. Jones also does not seem obliviously crass, gleefully ignorant, wilfully blind, or just plain reckless for the sake of being reckless.
However, he is stubborn and, as I stated in 2015: “Head Coach Jones is a ruthless sonofabitch”. Get used to it people, he’s not going to change. If he wins, all will be forgiven. If he loses, well, we can expect an ugly Caesar-like impeachment.
One thing I’d like to know is whether the newly-imposed cap on coaching salaries covers situations in which you fire a coach and are still contractually required to pay him for another few seasons. Does the salary of the departed coach count against the cap in future years?
- BRITISH COLUMBIA LIONS
When is this season over for the British Columbia Lions? No one cares about this team. They’re the Montreal Alouettes of the West Division. Yes, a few people are currently showing up for home games, but I suspect a good portion are just confused Whitecaps fans.
Mr. Cullen has these guys ranked higher than the Roughriders. That’s just plain mean (to both the Roughriders and the Lions).
- MONTREAL ALOUETTES
The Montreal Alouettes are back at the bottom, right where they belong.
Does anyone remember the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 2003 season? They won one game. Against whom? The Saskatchewan Roughriders, of course.
See, that’s what the Saskatchewan Roughriders are for. They are the team that will help otherwise terrible teams salvage something from their season. If your teams needs to snap a losing streak or is in desperate need of a win, the Saskatchewan Roughriders will always serve as the sacrificial lamb, especially if the odds are stacked decidedly in the Roughriders’ favour. That’s what the Roughriders did for the Montreal Alouettes in Week Three. Now it’s back to business for the otherwise hopeless Atlantic Schooners.