“I love that the West is attainable and that anybody can win it. I’m gonna work my tail off to make sure it’s us.”
— Jake Maier

Every year at this time, you see players that are new to the CFL, heading into their first Labour Day Classic. I’m going into my fourth one on Monday, so believe me when I say that there’s nothing like it for a football player.

I played my college football at UC Davis. We had Sacramento State and Cal Poly as our rivals and we played them both in annual games. They were both fun, good environments and great competition. Those kinds of games produce a better product and they make us better players. But Labour Day is different.

Being in this league and being a part of this weekend every year, it’s such a unique experience. It’s something that I’d never personally been a part of, just because it’s such a big deal for our country and our league.

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A lot of the time, some of these college rivalries are really just between the two schools and the history of the two schools. I think Labour Day Weekend is great for the history of our league. The Elks and Stampeders have played on holiday Monday for a long time. That means something to the two organizations. Bigger picture, it’s just such a great tradition for the league itself and then for the country itself. It’s different. It’s unique in its own special way and I think that’s why it gets so much attention to this day.

Coaches and players will say through a season that the next game is just the next game and that they treat them all the same. Again, Labour Day is not just the next game. What you feel in the stands on holiday Monday at McMahon, I feel it down on the field, too.

You feel it in the air a little bit more. The big situations of the game feel greater, especially when we’re on defence and they’re on offence. You feel the crowd getting more involved. You feel the energy pick up in those critical situations. On offence, whenever we do something well or get a first down, a big play or a big touchdown, the roar of the crowd and the energy that they give you when they see something productive happen, that’s an energy shifter.

It definitely is an environment that elevates you in terms of your energy and your focus and just the overall intensity of the game. I definitely think that’s real, it’s no joke. It’s an increased atmosphere that’s really fun to be a part of.

Growing up playing a bunch of sports, I always wanted to be a professional athlete. My time in Calgary has been a dream come true and it gives you a humbling, grateful feeling to have this life and to be able to do this. Every day, I do my best to not take any of it for granted because you only have so many years in this business. There are times where I do pinch myself a little bit and just try to make the most of it as best I can.

I love this city. Calgary fits my personality type, the way that I try to live my life socially and just try to stay as quiet as possible. Calgary has fit that for me. Anybody can live here and get what they want out of it. My family loves it. It’s definitely not a small town, but it’s not necessarily the biggest city in the world, either. I think it’s just the best of both worlds. My daughter, Everly was born here, my wife Amanda enjoys living here. My family loves visiting.

When you spend time here like we have, you get the sense of what the Stampeders mean to the city and what this game means on Monday.

In 2021, I lost my very first Labour Day game that I was a part of and it stung. I learned the hard way, pretty quickly on how that game goes. In the last two years, I’ve been fortunate enough to be on the winning side of it. That’s given me some of my best memories so far as a quarterback in the CFL.

This year, with Edmonton right behind us in the standings, it feels like it could be the most fun Labour Day game I’ve been a part of.

I think what makes this year so cool is that everybody’s kind of the same in the West Division right now.

We’ve all had our moments where we’ve looked really good. We’ve had our moments where we’ve come up short. Most of these West games are determined by a possession. We’re going into a weekend where legitimately, all five teams can win the division.

We’re about to find out how great that is for our league.

I personally think it’s really great. I think it’s really fun and as players you’re extremely motivated by that. I love that the West is attainable and that anybody can win it.

I’m gonna work my tail off to make sure it’s us.

See you on Monday, Stampeder fans. I can’t wait.

BUY NOW

On the heels of posting their worst record since 2004, Dave Dickenson and the Stamps aren’t taking their standard approach to the off-season. Free agency? The Stamps might dive into the market. New coaches on Dickenson’s staff? He’s open to it all.

In conversation on Monday, a sense of openness was abundant from Dickenson. While the Stamps posted a 6-12 record, they salvaged their season and pushed their playoff streak to 18 seasons, before bowing out to the BC Lions in the Western Semi-Final.

For Dickenson, who has amassed a 79-43-2 record over the last seven seasons and has been a part of the Stamps’ wildly successful organization for 15 years now, squeaking into the playoffs isn’t close to satisfying.

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“We’re open to getting better in all positions,” Dickenson said on Monday from Nashville, TN where the CFL is holding its annual president and general managers meetings. Coaches and GMs are also at the American Football Coaches Association’s annual convention, where over 6,000 coaches at multiple levels of the game gather to learn from one another and network.

“Everyone’s talking certain (positions), but we’re looking, we have to. Then we have to coach better and we have to find ways to keep improving because if we don’t, that’s not how you get back to playing the type of football that we want to play. We were 6-12 last year, so we need to we need to be a better team from top to bottom.”

Normally smaller movers in the free agent market, Dickenson said that’s not necessarily going to be the case in 2024, as he shifts into his second season as the team’s GM. There’s still just over a month for teams to try to extend the contracts of their pending free agents, which makes for a cloudy picture of what the actual market might look like when it opens on Feb. 13. It’s something he and the Stamps are watching closely.

“I think when you didn’t have your best year, I think you should be a little more active,” Dickenson said. “We’ll see how many of the guys that we’re targeting make it free agency and we’ll see if we can find a deal.”

Dickenson is using these days in Nashville as an opportunity for some exposure to fresh coaching faces and ideas as well. He lost quarterbacks coach Marc Mueller to the Saskatchewan Roughriders, when former Stamp and now Saskatchewan head coach Corey Mace made him his offensive coordinator.

“I do have a couple of young coaches on my staff that I believe can coach quarterbacks,” he said. “Then the other side is whether or not you want to bring in some new thoughts, new blood?

“I’m here at this convention, maybe it’s some guys that are new to the CFL. Quarterback play is certainly different in Canada, but is it good to provide someone that has a different feel or has been around different things? I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do but I thought it was best for me to come down here with an open mind and talk to as many people as I can and broaden my network of coaches as well.”

If this year’s off-season work results in the Stamps getting back toward the top of the West Division standings, it’ll be worth it for Dickenson. The 2023 season had him experience almost 50 per cent as much losing as he has in his career as a head coach. The day-to-day work of serving as head coach and GM becomes a lot more enjoyable when you’re winning.

“It was not the most enjoyable year but we just kept grinding, kept pushing. I never felt like anybody on our team didn’t show up and work and put it out there,” he said.

“In our league you can you can stay alive longer than other leagues if you’re having a rough go, so we just kept grinding. Even heading into the playoff game we felt like our team had a chance to beat anybody. It just didn’t happen.”

DICKENSON REMEMBERS DALES AS A GREAT TEAMMATE

Dickenson made the trip to Nashville with a heavy heart. News of former Stampeders’ punter Burke Dales’ passing hit home for him. Dickenson spent three years with Dales while he played for the Stamps. Dales’ family announced his passing on Sunday. He was 46.

“Burke was a really good person, a guy that was a great teammate. I enjoyed coaching him and getting to know him and (this is) a big loss. I don’t think you’re going to find too many guys that didn’t really enjoy having him on the team,” Dickenson said.

“That was sad, sad news to hear and I just want to acknowledge him. He’ll be missed.

“You look back on your teammates, who you played with, who you coached and I think Burke left a very positive mark basically on most, if not all (people). He’s just a really just a great teammate and a great guy and a guy that I certainly wish we had around longer.”

The University of Guelph receiver came out of the CFL Combine presented by New Era seen as the best pass catcher on the turf in Edmonton. The six-foot, 198-pound Brampton, Ont. native felt like come draft night, he wouldn’t be waiting long before his phone rang.

In the big picture, he wasn’t. The Calgary Stampeders took him with their third round pick, 24th overall. The competitor in him got antsy, though, as the first round led into the second. TSN had just made the jump from its on-air broadcast over to its TSN+ feed when Clark was chosen. The draft party he had put together — family and friends, some of his Guelph teammates — got their moment to celebrate his official leap to the pros.

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On Friday, there was more cause for celebration. Barnes was one of six members of the Stamps’ 2023 draft class to come to terms with the team. He’s officially a pro football player now.

“It is definitely surreal. I don’t think it’s totally sunk in all the way yet,” Barnes said on Friday, shortly after he’d signed his contract.

“It’s a real dream come true for sure.”

Landing with the Stamps, the 22-year-old felt it was worth the wait in the end, but it was still a tough one for him. Every vibration of his phone sent a pang of nervousness through him and every time he saw that it was a Snapchat notification or texts from friends, it just added to his nervousness.

“Definitely expected to go a little higher in the draft, but it wasn’t too much of a toll on me,” he said. “Once it happened I was just excited to go and thankful honestly, that Calgary gave me the shot.

“I was told to expect the first two rounds,” he said. “But you never know what to expect. You always know that anything could happen. Regardless, it’s not too much of a difference per round. Everybody has to earn it at camp so it didn’t really matter to me too much.”

When the phone finally did ring and general manager/head coach Dave Dickenson gave him the good news, Barnes got the fit that he was hoping for. The Stamps continue to be a model franchise in the CFL, even if they haven’t hoisted a Grey Cup since the 2018 season. Dickenson and team president John Hufnagel continue to find talent and develop players at a high level. For someone like Barnes, who has shown tremendous potential as a receiver (14 games over three seasons with 516 yards and six touchdowns) and returner (four touchdowns on 23 kickoff returns) in his time at Guelph, Calgary is a perfect landing spot.

“Especially when you’re going out of town and not somewhere close to where you’re from, knowing that you’re going to be in good hands with a great organization, it’s definitely comforting knowing that,” he said.

He’ll head into Stamps’ rookie camp next week with a ton of opportunity in front of him, as well. On Wednesday, the Stamps announced that receiver Jalen Philpot, last year’s fifth overall pick, would miss training camp as he continues to rehab from a hamstring injury that required surgery. That’s bad news for the team, as Philpot was primed to take a leap from the impressive rookie season he had, but as he’s already learned in receiver meetings, it opens up a need and a chance for players to step in and fill the void.

“I’m just focused on doing whatever I can in camp and doing the best with what they’re asking of me,” Barnes said. “It’s really all you can focus on, making sure that you’re taking advantage of any opportunity that comes up.”

He’s more than happy to be with an organization like the Stamps, but that competitor in Barnes is still stewing a little. Ready to put in the hard work for his new team, if he ends up showing some others on what they missed out on, that’s fine by him too.

“I have a pretty big chip on my shoulder, honestly,” he said.

“I want to prove a lot of people wrong in how the draft went but I’m trying not to pay attention to that chip on my shoulder too much and get filled with a lot of negative energy. So I’m just trying to stay positive, just focus on football and not a lot of outside talk and assumptions and stuff like that. I’m just excited to play ball.”

As we come out of this long weekend, there’s something interesting on the opposite end of the flurry of signings we’ve seen that we haven’t fully talked about yet. The Calgary Stampeders have been the second-most quiet team thus far, having signed defensive lineman Julian Howsare on the opening day of free agency, re-signing defensive back Branden Dozier on Feb. 15 and adding linebacker Micah Awe on Feb. 17.

As CFL.ca’s Jim Morris wrote when he looked at the addition of Howsare on Sunday, freshly-named general manager and longtime head coach Dave Dickenson went and got himself a player that can do a lot of things well.

“Julian brings a little more versatility that we lost when (Folarin Orimolade) didn’t sign back on,” said Dickenson.

“Julian is a hard-nosed and versatile player. He’s always played well against us.”

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Dickenson mentioned the other side of the free agency coin for his team. They’ve seen six of their players sign with other clubs this past week. Linebackers Jameer Thurman and Fraser Sopik, d-linemen Stefen Banks and Orimolade, receiver Shawn Bane Jr. and defensive back Javien Elliott have all moved on.

Similar to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, the Stamps have stayed quiet and made effective moves with their few signings this past week. In the same way that Dickenson sought out a do-it-all d-lineman in Howsare, Friday’s announcement of Awe’s arrival is one that here in February feels like a perfect fit for a team that has a history of making these matches.

Awe, 29, has been a hard-hitting and productive linebacker in each of his previous four CFL stops. Last year with the Montreal Alouettes, Awe had 47 tackles, an interception and a forced fumble in 13 games. A shoulder injury kept him out of the team’s final regular-season game and both playoff dates. He makes the move to Calgary, where he should fit in perfectly with defensive coordinator Brent Monson and linebackers coach Bob Slowik.

He has 250 tackles, four sacks, two interceptions and five forced fumbles through 63 career games in the CFL.

Instant Impact @AweNChardonnay scoops up the Behar fumble and nearly takes it to the !#CFLGameday | @MTLAlouettes pic.twitter.com/ovsPNcwaq3

— CFL (@CFL) July 22, 2022

“I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface of anything I can do,” Awe confidently told CHQR in Calgary on a Friday night interview.

“I’ve yet to get an All-Star, an MOP. I think — I know — I have all the ability in the world but I have not yet scratched it. I’m on my sixth year but I feel like a rookie. I have the same feeling I had (in 2017) as a second string behind Solomon (Elimimian). I thought, ‘He’s a future hall of famer, I don’t care. I’m going to take his spot.’ I ended up playing next to him instead. I plan on getting closer to my potential.”

Lining up next to Cameron Judge, who went through a career-defining season himself in Calgary in 2022, Awe is in position to have a great season and will get a chance to help fill the void left by Thurman. If Awe can partner up with Judge as well as Thurman did, the Stamps’ defence may not skip a beat this season.

“Cam is defintely someone I’ve looked at. If he’s making plays I want to make plays next to him and make it a competition in itself,” Awe said.

Awe told CHQR that the Stamps were an organization he’d long admired, starting with his first exposure to the CFL through Wally Buono, whose ties to the Stamps run deep, with the Lions six years ago.

“Of all the teams in the CFL, Calgary has been that one team that’s a flagship of how to run an organization. Every single year, even when it’s a struggling year they find a way to make the playoffs. that’s sometime I’ve respected from afar,” Awe said.

The Stamps, as they often are at this time of year, have been quiet but made moves that suit them well. As they’ve shifted from John Hufnagel to Dickenson making the moves as GM, they appear to have offset some key personnel losses with players that can fit in and contribute right away.

On paper and in theory, the Toronto Argonauts were a smart pick for an upset.

Their record aside, the Argos had played relatively well over the last month or so, going 2-3. They were rested, coming off of a bye week and went into that bye on a high note, having throttled Ottawa 46-17.

Then there was their opponent. Yeah, the Calgary Stampeders are the Calgary Stampeders. The defending Grey Cup champs were riding a three-game win streak with their starting QB, Bo Levi Mitchell back at the controls after a pectoral injury took him out in Week 3.

But if you looked at their depth chart, you saw their issues. Reggie Begelton, the league’s leading receiver, was out with a pulled groin. Markeith Ambles and Richie Sindani joined him on the one-game injured list. A quartet of youngsters, in Josh Huff,  Aaron Peck, Michael Klukas and Colton Hunchak found themselves starting. Eric Rogers was the only veteran in the starting receiving corps.

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Add in running back Don Jackson and linebacker Cory Greenwood — the league’s leading tackler — being out and you could start to think that maybe the big cheese of the CFL might be taking on a Swiss look.

Depth charts and the theoretical sometimes don’t hold up to reality.

It wasn’t pretty, but the Stampeders controlled the game on Friday night at BMO Field, gutting out a 23-16 win. They leave Toronto at 9-4, with the same 18 points that West-leading Winnipeg has (the Bombers can add some distance with a win in Montreal on Saturday).

The result had them looking every bit the part of the team that has dominated the league for the last decade; even if many of the faces were unrecognizable.

“If you look at our roster, we’re probably 70 percent different from last year. It’s unbelievable,” Stampeders head coach Dave Dickenson said. “I mean, I don’t even know if people know all of the names on the back of the jersey. But we’re playing for the horse, we’re playing for Calgary and we want to come in and work hard and play well. When we do that we do expect to win every game but right now the guys have no clue on history.

“They don’t even understand what we do, whether we’ve had success here or not because it’s just such a young, fresh team.”

The lead was comfortable most of the night, save for the final two minutes when James Franklin found Derel Walker for a 35-yard touchdown to make it a one-score game.

Mitchell spoke on Thursday of having to be patient at times with his receivers and acknowledging that mistakes would be made. Mitchell looked to Rogers 17 times and the 28-year-old produced eight catches for a game-high 119 yards with the Argos’ defence keyed in on him all night.

It was a comfortable lead most of the way, but the game could have been put away much earlier. Rogers had a surefire touchdown slip through his fingers and a couple of other contested passes that he couldn’t hang on to.

“You’ve got to understand at times (mistakes) are going to happen and I think frustration comes out definitely at the most crucial times,” Mitchell said. “But it’s not like I was perfect. I didn’t have my stuff today, again.”

Mitchell made 33 of 48 passes for 342 yards and a touchdown, with two interceptions.

Huff, Hunchak and Peck combined for 151 receiving yards, but Calgary’s running backs, Ka’Deem Carey and Terry Williams scored the team’s touchdowns. Mitchell said he gave Hunchak the game ball.

“I think guys made some big plays and obviously we had drops as well but ultimately I told them that it was a close game. We did enough to win and it’s hard to win in the CFL. It feels good,” Mitchell said.

They didn’t look like runaway favourites on Friday, but Calgary’s combination of banged-up bodies and fresh-faced fill-ins got it done. That’s what championship-calibre teams do.

“I don’t know the numbers (for the receivers),” Dickenson said immediately after the game. “The number that matters is more points than them. We made the plays when we had to but it got dicey.

“There’s so much to learn. I watched the tape at halftime and it just felt like to me we were just not quite doing things at the championship level; now, we’ve got a lot of new parts but if you look across the board we know our execution needs to be better.”

Overall, Dickenson sounded optimistic about his team and the challenge/opportunity that so many young players can present.

“You can tell we’re building,” he said. “It’s a lot of two steps forward a couple steps back, but I do feel like the guys are really playing hard and the effort is intense.”

I’ve watched the play at least a dozen times and I’ll probably watch it at least a dozen more. Not to take away from Rod Black and Duane Forde’s call of the moment or analysis on the replay, but all I can think of when I watch the clip is Kevin Harlan’s booming, rumbling voice notifying us that we’d just seen a man fly.

Tre Roberson’s blocked field goal attempt is the perfect highlight. It’s freak athleticism, it’s perfect timing and it’s peak drama, a play that preserves a win for his team. It was a no-brainer as the No. 1 in our Timbermart Plays of the Week and (in my eyes, at least) it’s a frontrunner in the highlight of the year race.

At the risk of being one of those people that puts their phone in your hands and step-by-steps you through the minute details of something that they care about more than you do, let’s go through a few of the finer points of this clip.

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It’s like he’s floating. When TSN shows you the replay of the block, they have a tight shot of the ball being snapped. Dane Evans catches and plants the ball down, laces out for Lirim Hajrullahu’s swinging foot. The shot pans out as the ball is kicked and there’s Tre Roberson, with more than his waist floating above the scrum. More. Than. His. Waist!

When he was a senior at Illinois State in 2016, his vertical leap was measured at 37.5 inches. To my uneducated eye, he’s added to that leap in the last three years.

Roberson told reporters after the game that they knew Hajrullahu kicked a low ball. Which brings us to the next point.

It hit his elbow. You see things like this in lower levels of other sports sometimes. A man-child on the volleyball court that overjumps a pass from his setter that’s meant for regular human beings. A foolish guard drives to the basket and thinks they can quickly lob a layup over a player that’s a foot taller than them. Roberson just hung there in the air like a character in the Matrix. They might have anticipated a low kick, but no one may have anticipated Roberson skying the way that he did. The ball might have been able to go upwards of a foot higher and he still would have gotten a hand or finger or two on it.

Tell Danny Austin he was right. In covering the Stamps for Postmedia, Danny Austin has watched the league’s preeminent franchise closer than just about anyone in the country. He was vocal (to say the least) about the rest of the media voters not choosing Roberson as the West rookie of the year in 2018.

He had three interceptions and two forced fumbles last year, along with 54 tackles. He’s been on a mission to make his name a household commodity this year. Twelve games in, he’s sitting at seven interceptions — one behind Winnipeg’s Winston Rose for the league lead — two touchdowns and 36 tackles.

Rookie of the year isn’t an option anymore, but Roberson is making his name known across the league, first with a breakthrough 2019 and now with the kind of highlight play that can live on for weeks, months, sometimes years. We saw a man fly on Saturday and it feels like he’s just getting started.

Romar Morris is fast on the football field. Really fast.

There is one place where the former track star might be even faster and I’m not talking about the sprint events he once dominated while in high school.

I’m talking about an area where he has stunned the Calgary Stampeders and most every football observer who has ever witnessed someone suffer the painful setback of rupturing an Achilles tendon and that is in recovery time.

Eight and a half months is all it has taken the native of Salisbury, North Carolina to get back into a game.

Eight and a half months for an injury that usually keeps a player out for a calendar year, sometimes a little more.

Some never make it back, the lingering damage slowing them up, taking away the explosiveness that they need in order to compete in pro football.

But Morris, the running back and kick returner that burst onto the CFL scene like a racehorse from the gate in 2018, has defied the odds a little, looking ahead to the second game of his 2019 season when the Stampeders play the Blue Bombers in a first-place showdown in Winnipeg on Thursday night.

His first game back – last Saturday’s – came less than nine months after he took a step back on a punt return during the 2018 Western Final, and felt “like a baseball bat hit me in the calf muscle.”

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The 26-year-old’s rushing numbers from last Saturday’s game weren’t much, a far cry from the yardage he’d begun to pile up as a Stampeder last season, but never mind that. The yards will come, and they’ll come from a guy the Stamps figured would miss the entirety of this season before adjusting those expectations to, perhaps, Labour Day.

Morris, then, is back in the game, way ahead of schedule.

“I don’t know what the science behind it is, but I’m a quick healer,” says Morris, crediting good DNA with at least part of his speedy recovery. “Whenever I get a cut, my skin heals so quickly,” he added with a little incredulity in his voice.

After surviving the rigours of game action against the Eskimos in Week 8, when he rushed nine times for 14 yards and caught five passes for 49 more, Morris is feeling confident that he can quickly regain the form that made him such a threat during the Stampeders’ drive to the Grey Cup, before he was cut down by that baseball bat on November 18th.

Just 14 yards? Not the point. Nine carries with nine opportunities to cut hard and accelerate, with nine opportunities to take a hit for the first time since last November, that’s the point.

“It helped me out immensely, just to get that feeling,” he says of the game action. Any queasiness about testing that right foot of his and the tendons that keep it and the ankle functioning just kind of disappeared. It felt normal after that,” he says.

“It was a mental test that I had to overcome for myself. So I don’t have to be afraid that it’s gonna happen again so I can just play comfortable.”

Morris played ten comfortable regular-season games for the Stampeders in 2018, rushing 78 times for 376 yards and catching 24 passes for 167 more, while wowing with his return abilities too. With 813 punt and kick-off return yards, the man who was an all-state 60-, 100- and 200-metre track star while attending Salisbury High, had given the Stampeders yet another velocity demon in the backfield and on specials, to go along with Terry Williams and Don Jackson.

Then came the Western Final and the fateful punt return. As Morris prepared to drive forward to get under a short kick, he first took one step back to plant hard so he could launch forward. The pain came immediately.

“I just fell and lay there. I pretty much knew, when it happened, what it was,” he says.

While he’d never before suffered an Achilles injury, Morris remembered a teammate who had and figured he was in for a long road to recovery.

Maybe, though, with his propensity to heal quickly, he could make his way back much sooner than everybody thought.

“They told me anywhere from ten to twelve months,” says Morris, who did more than just put his faith in good genes, although that was part of it.

“It was just doin’ all of the right things as far as taking care of my body. Eating right, going to rehab every single day and getting a lot of rest.”

He also allowed his physiology to do its thing. “I got tons and tons of rest,” he says. “I was able to just let my body heal.”

If Morris was pleased with how swiftly his recovery was going, the Stampeders, as you’d reasonably expect, weren’t listening all that closely when he showed up to training camp pronouncing himself on the cusp of being ready to take part in drills. Six months? You’ve gotta be joking.

“I knew even before I came up here that I was gonna be able to play this year,” he says. “I knew at month six that I was gonna be able to play. That’s how confident I was in my Achilles.

“I was out there doin’ things that you wouldn’t think I should be doing. I was out there running routes at month six. I was out there doin’ running back drills. I was out there sprinting. Doing all that.”

That kind of progress surprised the Stampeders’ brain trust. Perhaps they weren’t able to fully trust their eyes, considering the accepted norms when it comes to an Achilles injury timeline. They told Morris to, um, cool his heel, I guess, as they wanted to ensure that he had as much time to get back to one hundred percent.

It was thought that the Battle of Alberta on Labour Day Monday, or the follow-up game in Edmonton the weekend after might be a good ballpark target date to hit. Instead, Morris, who’d gotten up to full speed in sprints during the month of July, bested even that optimistic outlook by a month.

Against the Eskimos last Saturday, Morris eased back into things, as much as a guy can ease back into things when angry men in the other team’s colours are bearing down hard. Head Coach Dave Dickenson was impressed and optimistic about Morris’ trajectory.

“To get through a game without taking, really, one snap – anything with pads on – for eight and a half months, I feel like Romar’s one of the guys that’s happiest,” Dickenson said after the game. “He’ll get better and better but, c’ mon, he hasn’t practiced or played in so long. We did feel like he did a good job.”

The Stampeders have an abundance of backfield and return talent.

Williams, the man who busted open last year’s Grey Cup game with a 97-yard punt return touchdown against Ottawa, hauled back a 103-yard kick-off return for a touchdown against Edmonton last week. Jackson, the second-year man who led the team with 924 rushing yards in 2018, returned to practice this week after missing the last five weeks due to a concussion. Then there’s Ka’Deem Carey, signed last fall by the Stampeders, impressing with his first tastes of CFL action this season before being nicked up in a Week 7 win over Ottawa, relegated to the injured list for last week’s tilt with Edmonton.

“I WAS OUT THERE DOIN’ THINGS THAT YOU WOULDN’T THINK I SHOULD BE DOING. I WAS OUT THERE RUNNING ROUTES AT MONTH SIX. I WAS OUT THERE DOIN’ RUNNING BACK DRILLS. I WAS OUT THERE SPRINTING. DOING ALL THAT.”

– ROMAR MORRIS

When everyone’s healthy, Dickenson will have one of those “good” problems coaches talk about; a bounty of talent that needs to be managed to its fullest, to its most productive.

Now that he’s put his first game behind him, put any lingering doubts about his Achilles on the shelf, Morris is hoping to fully take part in the havoc that Calgary’s running backs and returners are apt to deploy against the opposition.

“I feel pretty fast,” he says. “Just waiting for the proper time so I can open it up and show everybody that my speed’s still there.”

Don’t sleep on Morris’ speed, even in these early stages of returning from an Achilles rupture.

He does, after all, tend to show up ahead of time.

T-Pain and DJ Khaled sat in a recording studio in 2010, trying to make some music.

The problem, according to Khaled, the rapper and producer, was that his singer was preoccupied.

During an interview with Genius in March 2019, T-Pain was shown a clip of Khaled telling a story of how the studio was full of people and that T-Pain wanted to watch cartoons. T-Pain would later add that there was a lot of lobster served up in the room, which added to the distractions.

Khaled eventually cleared the room to try to kickstart the song.

“We’ve got to win. I’ve got to turn my album in. We’ve got to win, man. We’ve got to win.”

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T-Pain listened to the music Khaled had put together and started adding individual words. Up! Building. Yeah. He was piecing together a skeleton of what would become this generation’s in-arena victory celebration and a pop culture fixture for years to come.

The process may have been unconventional, but when talented people that know what they’re doing are working together, we should just let them work and give them the benefit of the doubt.

John Hufnagel and Dave Dickenson may not have the same outward swag of T-Pain and DJ Khaled, but they’ve built plenty of opportunities for the Calgary Stampeders to blast that song through the speakers at McMahon Stadium (last we checked, for the record, the Stamps were more of a Mo Bamba team).

Despite all of their success over the last decade, it’s almost become an annual tradition to spend the CFL off-season doubting that Huf and Dickenson will be able to continue to do what they did the year before (and the year before that and the year before that, etc.).

That gives way to an annual July/August tradition of looking at the Stamps record and the adjustments that they’ve made and realizing that maybe that big sky above the team isn’t falling on them, afterall. Going on a month into the 2019 season — admittedly it’s still early days — the Stamps are 2-1 and seem to be in position to clear some of their biggest off-season hurdles yet.

The defending Grey Cup champs let one get away in their season-opener against Ottawa but came back with a theft of their own, erasing a BC 11-point lead for a win a week ago. Then they went on the road and thumped Saskatchewan this past weekend. It’s a modest two-game win streak, but the Stamps are showing some of the familiar signs of an organization that always has the answers to the offseason questions that hover over them.

They lost Alex Singleton, Jameer Thurman and Marken Michel to the NFL. They lost Ja’Gared Davis, Lamar Durant, Ciante Evans and Micah Johnson to rival CFL teams in free agency. Then in the late stages of their epic comeback against the Lions, they lost Bo Levi Mitchell to a pectoral injury.

With Mitchell on the six-game injured list, the team turned to backup QB Nick Arbuckle. Heading into Saturday’s game in Saskatchewan — arguably the toughest for a quarterback to get his first-ever CFL start — Arbuckle had just 233 career yards in seven games (six in 2018, one in 2019). With Mitchell offering advice from the sideline, Arbuckle did the most Stamps thing possible and looked like a seasoned veteran in his debut as a starter, making 19-22 passes for 262 yards and two touchdowns with zero interceptions.

Some adversity undoubtedly awaits Arbuckle in the coming weeks. If he starts the next five games he’ll get a tour of the East: Hamilton (2-1), Toronto (0-3), Ottawa (2-1) and Montreal (1-2) and a date against 3-0 Winnipeg. As a team, though, the Stamps seem to be trending toward the good things they’ve done year-in and year-out. Their 101 points for and 74 against are both second-best in the league.

Singleton’s replacement, Cory Greenwood, leads the league in tackles with 25. Cornerback Tre Roberson continues to grow into one of the top defensive players in the league and is in front of everyone with five interceptions. He scored his first touchdown of the season on Saturday, taking a Cody Fajardo pass and dancing into the end zone. The sacks aren’t there like they have been in the past and the offensive numbers, be it passing, receiving or rushing yards don’t have a big Calgary presence in the top-10, but the one thing that the Stampeders know — whoever they have playing on the field — is winning. Early in the season, it seems like the Stamps are poised to continue to do what they do best.

J.C. Sherritt gets it. An Edmonton Eskimos linebacker — one of the organization’s best to ever suit up — for eight years up until he retired on Jan. 15, he holds a special place in fans’ hearts.

Retired now for going on two weeks, he was named the Calgary Stampeders’ linebackers coach on Monday. That’s rubbed some of those who value green and gold over any other colours in the CFL the wrong way.

“I understand. I have Twitter, I see that some fans are pretty upset and that’s what being a fan is about,” he said. “For me it’s starting a career that I’ve wanted to start for the last 25 years. This is a prime opportunity and right now, (my approach is), ‘What can I do to help Calgary?’”

It’s not weird for Sherritt, but it will feel weird for just about everyone else that’s gotten to know him over the last eight years. It will take time for Edmonton fans to get used to hearing Sherritt worry about Calgary’s wellbeing. Wait until you see those first pictures of him on the field at McMahon this spring in training camp, wearing Stamps’ colours as he runs the linebackers through drills.

Change in sports hits us harder than it should, really, and it seems to hit harder and matter more in Alberta, where Edmonton-Calgary can very easily feel like the inspiration for the Springfield-Shelbyville rivalry.

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Players and coaches might get sucked into that on game days, but beyond that, business sense prevails. Sherritt had been looking at NCAA and CFL coaching opportunities this winter and when he retired, the Stamps quickly reached out to him.

“After my official retirement on the 15th I got a call from Huf (John Hufnagel) and Dave (Dickenson) saying they’d like to interview me, which was obviously something I was extremely interested in,” Sherritt said.

“I flew up, the interview went great and they offered me the linebackers job. It was a no-brainer for me, for that opportunity.”

In Calgary, Sherritt gets to start a coaching career with an organization that has shown itself to be the benchmark of success in the league for the last decade. Sherritt saw that firsthand as a player. He spent his eight years in the CFL thinking of it in part as an internship for his own coaching career. He’s watched Dickenson take the coaching reigns from Hufnagel, watched Rick Campbell go on from Calgary to a successful head coaching gig in Ottawa, watched DeVone Claybrooks leave the roost this past season to take his first head-coaching role in BC.

“At least through the last decade, through my time in the CFL they’ve been the most successful franchise. I think there’s a reason behind it,” he said. “So to even come in and meet those guys and go through the interview process was a huge learning experience. It was the same as when I got offered a scholarship in high school. It’s just a great, great feeling and you feel fortunate.”

This will be Sherritt’s first professional coaching opportunity but he feels ready. He’s spent off-seasons helping out at his alma mater, Eastern Washington University. He and former CFLer, Greg Peach, run the Pro Vision Academy in Spokane, Wash., where Sherritt worked extensively with linebackers.

He’ll dig into this new job with the same tenacity that he used as a player. Undersized and underestimated at each of his football stops throughout his career, he proved he belonged. Working at the job won’t be a problem for Sherritt.

“It’s like anything. I know there’s going to be a huge learning curve,” he said. “There’s going to be probably a new thing every day that I’m going to have to try to improve and get better on.

“You look at the staff I’m on, I think three of the coaches have been in that organization for over a decade. There’s going to be a lot of experience that I’m going to have there to lean on.”

He lists off monumental figures over his time in the CFL, coaches that he’s learned from and taken notes on. Rich Stubler, Chris Jones, Jason Maas. He was with the Esks through good times and bad, from the end of the Ricky Ray era into a new stretch of prominence with Mike Reilly at QB. He learned from it all.

“I know how much coaches adapt. I think all of the great coaches do adapt. They learn from the people around them, good or bad and you just constantly have to try to improve and be the best coach you can possibly be,” he said.

“That comes from really just learning and staying humble and knowing that there are guys out there that have done it longer than you, better than you and you need to learn from everyone.”

“Basketball is my first love,” Brescacin, the young Calgary Stampeders receiver said. The Mississauga native was enjoying his bye week in Toronto, running a mid-week media gauntlet. Over lunch near the CFL office, he briefly revisited his basketball days.

“I’d say I was pretty good. I think I was good. I played with a lot of guys that are playing now. I think at one point I was one of the best in the country, maybe.”

You can hear the caution he’s exercising as he says it, but it’s a valid statement. Before he was duplicating OBJ-like receptions on the field in the CFL, Brescacin was applying that athleticism on the hardwood. And he was doing quite well.

The players he rubbed, or maybe traded elbows with is a high profile one. He played on Toronto-based club team CIA Bounce with Portland Trailblazer Nik Stauskas and Tyler Ennis (now in Turkey after a four-year NBA career). Other teammates included former first-overall pick Anthony Bennett, the Bhullar brothers, Sim and Tanveer, both of whom are over seven-feet tall. Brescacin’s best friend, Naz Mitrou-Long, signed a two-way contract with the Utah Jazz over the summer.

JUWAN BRESCACIN PULLS AWAY FROM A WOULD-BE TACKLER ON HIS WAY TO THE END ZONE EARLIER THIS SEASON IN A DOMINANT CALGARY WIN OVER OTTAWA (JOHANY JUTRAS/CFL.CA)

Brescacin was well into that mix himself. He started out playing football, but around the sixth grade put his focus into basketball and that paid off quickly.

“I could score a bit,” he said casually.

He had a 47-point game as a seventh-grader in Mississauga. By the time he got to Loyala Secondary, 30 and 40-point games came easily. Another teammate and good friend, Jermaine Myers, was recruited to go to high school at the Culver Academy in Indiana. While the coach was watching Myers, he saw Brescacin.

“The coach was at the practice watching (Myers) play and he saw me and said, ‘I have this great opportunity for you academically,’” Brescacin said.

The coach spoke of the life-changing potential in the offer. How the alumni of the school helped its graduates out, even when they were done college. On the court, he could offer something that any kid that ever picks up a basketball thinks about: high school basketball in Indiana.

“We went and visited the campus and it was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen,” Brescacin said. “My mom loved it and i just ended up going there.”

That it was a military school probably wasn’t lost on Brescacin when he saw that campus, but he had a tougher adjustment ahead of himself than he could have imagined. He went there for his grade 11 year, but was new in the school’s system, which had a rank like the army.

“So I came in as a junior and I’m being bossed around by these guys younger than me and smaller than me,” Brescacin said.

“Coming from Mississauga, my parents taught me not to take anything from people. I was just like, ‘Why do I have to listen to you?’ I had to buy into it. The first day there, I had to learn how to make the bed military style, how to fold my clothes a certain amount of inches. You have to expect it every day that you can’t have stuff on your floor.

“I was raised well, so I was always respectful but there were certain things that you would question. You also had to deal with different people’s leadership styles. Some people are demanding that you respect them or listen to them because they had a rank, but that’s not how it works with me. You have to earn my respect and kind of lead by example.”

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Through the course of his first year at Culver, his coaches encouraged Brescacin to join the football team as well, to get him more scholarship opportunities. After moving all over the field as a kid playing in the Mississauga Football League, Brescacin was set in as a receiver and he fell in love with the game again, earning a letter in both football and basketball each of his two years in Culver.

He took his scholarship with Northern Illinois University, where Jordan Lynch — a Heisman finalist in 2013 and who would later enjoy a two-year run with the Edmonton Eskimos — was his quarterback. Over four years as a journalism major, Brescacin established himself as one of the top receivers on his team. His junior year was his best, starting 12 of 13 games and finishing second in receiving on his team, with 445 yards and tied for a team-leading six TDs. He finished his career with 99 catches for 1,465 yards and 13 touchdowns.

After watching his former college teammate and close friend Courtney Stephen go to the Tiger-Cats in 2013, Brescacin was paying more attention to the CFL, but six years into his stay in the States, he was thinking about NFL opportunities when he graduated. He didn’t take part in the 2016 CFL Draft Combine and held a pro day at Northern Illinois. Only one CFL team showed up for it: the Stampeders.

He watched the draft that year and was scrambling to keep up with it after TSN’s airing of the first round had wrapped up. While he and his family were waiting for the livestream to start on their laptops, Brescacin’s phone started to buzz with texts from friends and teammates. The Stamps called him a few minutes later to tell him they’d taken him 15th overall.

He grew up and kind of built a hate-by-proxy for the Stampeders. He’d watched great Calgary teams come through the GTA for years and take out the Argos and Ticats. Now Dave Dickenson, the conductor to so many disastrous moments for Brescacin the young fan, would be his head coach.

“I remember watching coach Dicky play for them and I was like, ‘Man, these guys are good and they’re always winning they’re beating Toronto. I hate these guys,’” he said. “Now I’m playing for them and I understand why there’ such a great organization.”

Like so many other people around the CFL, Brescacin compares the Stamps to the New England Patriots, or the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA. There’s a longstanding system in place, with scouts that go and find guys to keep their teams stocked with talent. He thinks back to his pro day and seeing the Stamps there.

“That’s a testament to the lengths they’ll go to see if someone’s worth drafting or not. They ended up drafting me and (Alex) Singleton so I feel like that was a pretty good draft year,” he said.

Unlike Singleton, Brescacin’s impact wasn’t felt immediately. Like many other players on that Calgary roster, he had to play the waiting game.

“As a receiver, sometimes I’ve gone games where I didn’t have a ball thrown my way,” he said. It kind of just keeps you hungry and humble and working hard. So when you do get that opportunity you make the most of it.”

Year by year, game by game, it’s getting there for Brescacin. He played in seven games as a rookie in 2016, but played more on special teams. He got into 15 games in 2017 and had 260 yards and figured he played 45-plus snaps in their crushing Grey Cup loss to Toronto. With injuries ravaging the receiving corps, an already increased role this season is continuing to develop. With DaVaris Daniels breaking his collarbone on the field this past week in Hamilton, Brescacin stepped up and had a career game, pulling in five passes for 109 yards.

“I thought our Canadian guys balled out,” Dickenson said after his team won its 10th game of the season. With questions of bringing in a veteran free agent swirling after the game, Dickenson was more focused on what he already had.

“I thought Bres had a great game. Sometimes you get all into this American-Canadian, the American should be better. Let’s just play the best guy,” he said.

“I’ve got to give credit to Bres, having a great game. He was sore and he was blocking his butt off making those great catches.”

After pulling away from the Ticats in the second half, Mitchell marvelled at the job his targets have done this season. With Eric Rogers out for a large chunk of the season (the Stamps are confident he’ll be back on the field this year), Kamar Jorden out for the year and now Daniels presumably joining him, those scouts and that system are being put to the test and passing.

“It’s just amazing to watch these guys continue to plug and play all year,” Mitchell said. “We spoke about it in the beginning of the year. When we talked about having the best receiving crew it wasn’t just our top-five. It’s the fact that we had starters, starters starters sitting on the bench waiting in the wings.”

Brescacin said Mitchell has been a big part of his success this year, too.

“In the offseason I went out (to Calgary) to throw with him before camp and he let me stay with him and his wife, Maddy, they treated me like family. I didn’t have to worry about anything,” he said.

“Having a guy like that off the field be a genuine, nice person, welcoming you into their house and taking care of you for a week (when) he has a baby girl…I feel like it showed a lot about his character. He’s just a genuinely nice guy and a great leader, a great friend.”

BACK IN HIS COLLEGE DAYS, BRESCACIN LINED UP IN THE ORANGE BOWL ACROSS THE FIELD FROM CURRENT ARGOS RB JAMES WILDER JR. (SCOTT WALSTROM NIU ATHLETICS)

Bright lights and high-pressure games roll off of his back at this point. He played for a state championship in Indiana against now Charlotte Hornet Cody Zeller. At NIU, he played at Ohio Stadium in front of 104,000 people.

In 2013 he played in the Orange Bowl against James Wilder Jr. and Florida State in front of 72,000 fans. Right now, his focus is on more games like the one he had last week and hopefully, getting the job done in November in Edmonton in front of a crowd of 50,000-plus.

“There’s still that one step that we‘ve got to take to finish, closing the book on the chapter,” he said.

The talented linebacker knew from the time he was six years old, maybe even younger, that he wanted to be one of the guys he saw on TV every Sunday. But first, as a high school senior in Thousand Oaks, Calif., he had to become one of the guys that everyone saw on TV every Saturday.

“Really unique situation with him,” Singleton’s high school coach, Mike Leibin, recalls.

“He started on varsity as a junior and he was a 5-foot-10 outside linebacker and he was OK.”

Alex Singleton is pictures at a young age, before officially earning dual citizenship as a Canadian (Photo provided by Kim Singleton)

Singleton graduated high school at 17. Ask anyone that knew him in those years and they’d tell you the drive was there and that his end goal was always off in the distance. But at the end of his junior year, when most high-end players have film to show college recruiters, all that Singleton’s coaches and any potential college scouts saw was a slim, lanky kid with an unrealistic dream.

“By the time he graduated in his senior year,” Leibin says, “he was 6-foot-3, 215-pounds.

“We played him at defensive end, we played him at middle linebacker. I’ve never had a kid go through a growth spurt like that and be so productive and overwhelming.”

Graduating a year early in the body of a college-ready player, Singleton was left in a sort of no-man’s land.

“I worked my tail off (talking with scouts) but the fact was he had no junior film,” Leibin says. “It’s rare that a kid has an explosive senior year and all of a sudden gets a bunch of offers. That usually never happens.”

To hear Singleton tell it, sitting in the lobby of the Hamilton hotel that the Calgary Stampeders are staying at for a mid-October clash with the Tiger-Cats, it wasn’t a big deal. It worked out. It’s all still working out for him.

“My only offer coming out of high school was from Montana State,” he says. “I met with a lot of schools. I met with all the PAC 12 schools, I met with all the big schools and all the other Big Sky schools and no one ever fully pulled the trigger and offered me (a scholarship). One day Montana State offered me one.

“You hear all these stories about these guys who go on all these (recruiting) trips and that stuff. I took one and I committed right then.”

Singleton went on to play as a true freshman at Montana State, started the next three years and made 246 tackles.

“GROWING UP IT WAS HITTING, GETTING TO HIT SOMEONE. I LOVED THAT . . . I REMEMBER THOSE TIMES. EVERY DAY AT PRACTICE JUST GETTING TO HIT YOUR BEST FRIEND WAS ALWAYS SO MUCH FUN.”

ALEX SINGLETON ON WHAT BROUGHT HIM TO FOOTBALL AT SUCH A YOUNG AGE

In his second professional season, Alex Singleton set a new record for tackles for a Canadian in one year (Photo: Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)

Now 23, this is how Alex Singleton’s football career goes. The West’s nominee for Most Outstanding Defensive Player, a guy who’s a shape-shifting wrecking ball on the field, that many assume will have a direct line into NFL a year from now when his contract runs out in Calgary, has never for a second doubted his ability. Whenever he’s gotten the chance, he’s shown what he can do. Those chances, serious ones, have been few and far between. The rejection has been resounding enough to send others in his situation away from the game and out into the real world.

Singleton? In spite of being offered more walking papers than contract offers since graduating from Montana, he still became one of the top players in the CFL.

On the phone from Thousand Oaks, Alex’s mom, Kim Singleton, quickly falls into a story about how it was love at first sight for Alex and football. She credits her husband Steve and his family, who love the game too.

“I have a picture of Alex, he’s not quite two,” she says. “My nephew Chad, Steve’s nephew, would have been playing in high school. It was Friday night football, which is huge where we live.

“Alex is standing waiting for his dad to come home. He’s wearing the (high school team’s) hat, they’re another neighbourhood over and he’s holding the Friday newspaper because it always had the preview of the Friday night game. I had to buy him soccer cleats. He wanted to wear football cleats but they didn’t have the football cleats for him yet.”

It feels like she has dozens of stories about him, so young and already obsessed with the game. He skipped crawling, she says, and started walking at nine months. When he was around three, he had an Arizona Cardinals uniform, complete with a helmet. He’d sleep in that.

From the Arizona Cardinals uniform to him holding a football, Alex Singleton is pictured throughout his childhood (Photos provided by Kim Singleton)

“He always wanted to play. He tried flag football when he was little, but as soon as he was old enough to play tackle football, he played. There was no stopping him,” she says.

Him and his brother Matt liked a lot of sports. They played soccer as kids and Alex was a left-handed catcher in baseball until his freshman year of high school. He played basketball, he wrestled, but there was nothing like football for him.

“Growing up it was hitting, getting to hit someone. I loved that,” he says. “The rules have changed now for kids, they don’t hit as much. But I remember those times. Every day at practice just getting to hit your best friend was always so much fun. Growing up, I played with the same core group of guys and it was really awesome.”

He’s also grown up with his biggest fan by his side from the first time he picked up a football. His older sister Ashley is another big part of what’s made Alex who he is, on and off the field. She has Down Syndrome and competes in the Special Olympics. She’s competed in swimming and bowling for more than 20 years. It’s Alex’s motivation in being such an eager participant with Special Olympics in Calgary.

“He watched her and her friends and different people. He always helped with volunteer work, coached football,” Kim says. “He’s always seen people that have had so much difficulty trying to do the littlest thing and how they feel, how wonderful it is when they hit what they can do, they’re so excited. He’s always realized he’s lucky to be able to do what he can do.”

Alex Singleton has always been close with his sisters Ashley and Melissa and his brother Matt (Photos provided by Kim Singleton)

“She is the best athlete in our family, by far,” Alex says. “She makes everything better, I guess, and the happiness she gets through everything she does. It makes it easier to not care about the little things that can bug you along the way and just know that everything can be OK.”

Kim says the two of them are very competitive. Ashley loves the Stampeders, but remains a L.A. Kings fan, while Alex has adopted the Flames as his team. They love to taunt each other when their team comes out on top.

“Any time she gets to Calgary we go bowling,” Alex says.

“We always go out and compete and do her events and to watch her compete is awesome. You see the same drive that I have when we go on the field. Same thing with when she’s in the pool. She always wants to win. She gets second or third and she’s mad. You can tell, she’s not happy with it.”

. . . . .

Alex and Kim landed in Bozeman, Montana in January, 2011, straight from their always-sunny home of Thousand Oaks for the only college recruiting trip he’d ever take.

“He wanted to go to SC and play football for SC forever,” she says, remembering taking Alex to visit Trojans’ QB Matt Leinart at spring football practices when Alex was little.

“But it ended up Montana State was the best decision.”

“I remember getting off the plane and it was negative (Fahrenheit) out. From Southern California. It’d be like getting off the plane in Calgary,” Alex says. “It was cold, it was snowy but I fell in love with it. It was the greatest experience of my life.”

Alex Singleton didn’t hesitate to accept an offer from Montana State (Photo provided by Montana State Athletics)

Singleton instantly connected with linebackers coach Kane Ioane, a Montana State alum that played with Travis Lulay. Ioane had recruited Singleton there.

“He taught me everything I know about the game now,” Alex says.

Under Ioane, surrounded by older, talented linebackers like Jody Owens and Michael Foster, Singleton thrived. He had high-level coaching and teammates to learn from that pushed him to be better.

“He showed up on campus as a freshman and physically you were like, ‘Wow, this is what a linebacker is supposed to look like,’” Ioane says. “We were very fortunate that he was I guess you could call a diamond in the rough, where he was under-recruited and we lucked out in that regard.

“That’s the thing with recruiting, you never really know. As far as the formula, with a mix of the immeasurables and the intangibles, a lot of cases those worked out pretty good and in Alex’s case it worked out really well.”

Alex always knew he could play at whatever level he was at. By the end of his college career, people around him believed it too.

“From the time he came in (to Montana) he knew that he wanted to play at the next level,” Foster says. “ He had always committed to doing whatever it took to get there. Of course we had our fun times together, it wasn’t all business, but he made decisions throughout his time at Montana State that other kids didn’t, sacrifices that other kids didn’t make. And it paid off for him.”

“HE WAS DISAPPOINTED. IT WAS REALLY HARD FOR HIM TO COME HOME AND RUN INTO SOMEONE THAT HE KNEW. THEN YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH THE . . . I THINK HE ALWAYS FELT LIKE HE WAS LETTING EVERYONE ELSE DOWN.”

KIM SINGLETON ON THE EARLY LOWS OF ALEX’S PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL CAREER

Alex Singleton is pictured alongside brother Matt during the 2017 CFL Combine in Regina (Photo: Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)

“It’s because of his work ethic. It’s because of his desire to be great and his willingness to learn and soak in as much information as he possibly could even in a backup role,” Ioane says.

“He had the immeasurables that I thought an NFL team and now CFL teams would love to have. You add up the immeasurables and the intangibles and I think that’s what you’re seeing, why he’s so successful going forward.”

To many parents, a kid with a dream of being a professional athlete is a nightmare scenario. It’s one of the ultimate longshots and the pursuit of it can eat up other areas of a kid’s life along the way.

“I always thought he could do whatever he wanted to. My only thing with all of them was I only cared if they graduated college,” Kim says. “You get your degree and I’m good with whatever your dreams are.

“He’s had some stuff with the NFL coming out of college and not getting (signed). He’s always had little setbacks but it’s always, ‘If this is what you want, this is what you do.’ And maybe it’s because we have Ashley, but it’ll all work out in the end. I think he believes that and we believe that. He’s the happiest (in Calgary) he’s ever been in his whole life.”

. . . . .

Alex didn’t expect to be chosen in the 2015 NFL draft, but he was confident as always that something would work out. Shortly after, he signed a contract with the Seattle Seahawks. He was cut at the start of September, quickly signed by New England, but cut again two weeks later. These temporary highs and crushing lows would become the norm for a year.

“Full cut and signed I think it was six (times), but I tried out for 13 different teams,” he says. “Those teams didn’t even sign me and I got cut. Seattle four times alone. New England twice and Minnesota once.”

The Stamps’ middle linebacker celebrates after a win over the Eskimos early in September (Photo: Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)

“It was really hard. He’d come back home or he’d call and he’d say (he’d been cut),” Kim says.

“He was disappointed. It was really hard for him to come home and run into someone that he knew. Then you have to go through the…” she trails off and you can almost feel her cringing over the painful memory.

“I think he always felt like he was letting everyone else down. By the end, then he was on the Vikings or whatever and he literally got let go the week before they went to training camp.”

Ioane says he was in touch with Alex after each NFL cut.

“What makes Alex great is his resiliency and his ability to learn from each one of those experiences,” he says.

When he was training for his pro day at Montana State, Alex’s agent, Bill Lower, had asked him if he’d be OK with looking at the CFL as an option if the NFL didn’t work out. When it came up that Kim was Canadian — she lived in Toronto and her family moved to the States when she was still a kid — Alex’s value and the demand for him increased. He became a dual citizen in time for the 2016 Canadian Draft.

“He said no to the Patriots the day of the Canadian draft,” Kim says. “He said, ‘Unless you’re going to sign me, guaranteed sign me, I’m not coming to be a body for the summer. I can’t do it. I just want to play.”

The Stampeders took him sixth overall on May 17, 2016. He played in all 18 games for the Stamps in his rookie season and started 10.

“That’s who Alex is,” Ioane says. “I think part of the reason why he was great for MSU was because he used that extra motivation of only having that one scholarship offer to fuel his fire that much more.

“He plays with that chip on his shoulder, that edge all the time. I think those instances where he had an opportunity in the NFL and each time it didn’t work out for him, it added fire.

“There isn’t a team in the CFL that wouldn’t want him. He’s going to play himself into a position where there could be teams in the NFL that are going, ‘Woah, we missed out on that one’.”

. . . . .

Alex and his family sat in a downtown Toronto restaurant late on Sunday, Nov. 27, 2016. A stunned silence hung over the table, with Alex in shock over his team’s upset loss to the Ottawa REDBLACKS in the 104th Grey Cup.

Kim can’t forget the crowd at the game. Maybe it had made up its mind before kickoff to root for the underdog, but as Ottawa built up its big first-half lead, it ramped up its venom toward Calgary, to her son. The game sits on the family’s PVR in Thousand Oaks, never watched.

“That’s not getting watched,” she says, at least able to laugh about it now.

“The game was on every TV (that night) and…the only places that were open were sports bars by the hotel. It was awful.”

“THE WHOLE SEASON IS ABOUT WINNING THE GREY CUP. I REMEMBER WALKING OFF THE FIELD LAST YEAR WITHOUT IT. TO WIN IT THIS YEAR WOULD CHANGE ALL THAT. THAT’S ALL ANYTHING IS ABOUT. WINNING THE CHAMPIONSHIP.”

SINGLETON TALKS ABOUT LAST YEAR’S DISAPPOINTMENT AND MOTIVATION FOR THIS YEAR

Now a sophomore, Singleton believes he can build on the letdown of last year’s devastating Grey Cup loss (Photo: Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)

Awful is the word that comes up over and over again from Kim and Alex. She’d never seen her son so inconsolable after a loss. All it usually takes, Kim says, is for Ashley to find her brother after a game and a smile quickly finds his face. She’ll hug him and tell him he had a lot of tackles and that he played well and everyone’s mood picks up. It wasn’t like that that night in Toronto.

“She was the one I couldn’t go see (after the game) because I knew she’d be sad that we lost,” he says.

“That’s the hardest thing. She gets into it too, just like everyone else and I think it was hardest on her that we didn’t (win). Those are the times it’s hard I guess, when I let her down.”

He looked back on it that day in Hamilton, on a trip where his team improved to 13-1-1, mirroring its record from that time a year earlier. He doesn’t think his team underestimated Ottawa, with its 8-9-1 record.

“To just go into the Grey Cup as a rookie on the team and how we’d played Ottawa before, I just assumed we were going to win. I’m not saying I didn’t prepare the same, or focused on them the same way,” he says.

“We assumed…it’s not saying that they’re not a good team or that we didn’t think it was going to be a good game. We just knew we were going to win no matter how it happened and it didn’t.

“It was hard in the off-season. It was hard to watch TSN because they always talked about it. Still now, it’s the commercials of them holding it up. We know it should have been us. No ifs, ands or buts about that. But it wasn’t.

“So we have to take that, knowing that it wasn’t and to make sure that it is us this year, that there is no letdown for a second or a millisecond with your focus or your preparation, whether it’s the first play or the last play of the game. Everything leads up to that game. If you can’t close in that game nothing else matters.”

. . . . .

Singleton picks up his phone quickly on Tuesday morning, a month and two days since our last conversation. It’s also a month and a day since the Stamps’ last won a game. They closed the season out with three straight losses. Now, they host the Edmonton Eskimos on Sunday in the West Final.

He would have liked a few more wins to close out the season, he says, but right now that’s not the focus.

“The whole season is about winning the Grey Cup,” he says. “I remember walking off the field last year without it. To win it this year would change all that. That’s all anything is about. Winning the championship.”

He’s excited about hosting Edmonton and the chance to chase Mike Reilly around the field, about playing his team’s top rival at home with the season on the line. He and those players that were on last year’s Stamps team have waited a year for this moment, the first of what they hope is a two-step journey.

Singleton won three team awards for the Stamps this year, including Most Outstanding Player (Photo: The Canadian Press)

Singleton has put together an incredible season. His 123 tackles were a record for a Canadian player and a single-season team record. In Weeks 11-13 he set a league record for three games with 10-plus tackles. Throw in four sacks, 12 QB pressures, an interception, a forced fumble and four knockdowns and you can see why he picked up three team awards (Outstanding player, Canadian and defensive player). He improved upon his rookie season, was named a West all-star and solidified himself as one of the top players in the CFL.

He very well could end up doing a bit of everything on Sunday, but going into the game he sees himself having one role.

“Keeping guys calm. Don’t let the situation get bigger than it is. It’s just a game and we don’t need to treat it bigger than that,” he says.

“I think last year in the Grey Cup that’s why we lost. We almost treated it bigger than a game. It’s not. Everyone needs to do their job every play. There is no secret formula on each play. It’s just doing the job you’ve done all year to get to that point where we won 11 straight games.

“If you can continue or get back to doing those things and doing the little things correctly I think you have a lot better chance of winning.

“Edmonton last week had four penalties, no turnovers and not a lot of mistakes. Those are the things that win games. Against a team like that you’ve got to play perfect football.”

A year later, one thing hasn’t changed for Alex. Ashley is convinced that her brother’s team will win this Sunday and the Sunday after that.

“She has no doubt that we’re going to Ottawa. She says it doesn’t matter what happens, we’re going to Ottawa,” Kim says.

. . . . .

In full proud mom mode, Kim tells a story about how Alex and Matt ended up being extras in a couple of movies when Alex was around 12-years old.

One of them was the 2006 Tim Allen movie, The Shaggy Dog. In it, Alex is part of a football team. He crushes a kid with a tackle in the movie, just a semi-truck rolling over a deer in the headlights.

That scene was filmed in Thousand Oaks, 2,300 km from Calgary, 10 years before this Canadian-born woman in California would watch one of her children go back across the border to pursue his dream.

“He’s actually wearing No. 49 in the movie and he’s on the red team, in red and black,” Kim notes. “All things do work out.”

“For lack of a better term, I think he was kind of Mr. Calgary in a lot of respects,” Stampeders longtime equipment manager George Hopkins says of Anderson.

Entering his 46th season with the team, Hopkins first met Anderson when he was just 12 years old, working as a ball boy with the Stamps in 1972.

“He was very proud of his association with the city and I think the city was very taken with Sugar. Everybody had a Sugar story and everyone’s Sugar story was slightly different, but it was all positive.”

Anderson passed away on March 8 of heart failure and it felt like the entire city of Calgary stopped and took a knee to feel the loss. Anderson played for the Stamps from 1949 to 1955 and was one of the first African-Americans to play professional football in North America. In his post-football days, the Nashville, Arkansas native chose to stay in Calgary and put his stamp on the city.

He was a constant presence around the club for the rest of his life, serving as a ticket-account representative and team ambassador. He worked construction in the city and eventually opened Royalite Gas Station. He played in a blues band (The Bluenotes) and opened the city’s eyes to jazz, blues and R&B on local radio, when he worked a disc jockey from 1950 to 1955. He was friends with other trailblazing African-American athletes from his youth, like Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis.

A brief run with a pro football team in LA before his time with the Stampeders led to him into Hollywood parties, which led to a Screen Actors’ Guild card. He had roles in 32 movies, a career unto itself, but Anderson always called Calgary home and the Stampeders family. He was a renaissance man, who used every year of his life to give back to the city that gave him a chance to play a game he loved.

“Everybody could find something about Sugar that they identified with, whether it was opening up the service station or (working in radio) and really incorporating rhythm and blues into a city that was probably (largely) caucasian at the time,” says Hopkins, a native Calgarian.

“Everyone could identify with something with Sugar. That smile was just so infectious. He was always in a good mood.”

Hopkins knew Anderson better than most, but he said it was rare to get him to open up about his life in Arkansas in the 1920s and ’30s.

“I learned a lot just from listening to (former Stampeders assistant GM) Roy Shivers and Shug talk,” he says. “Those guys would get in and there was a whole new world that they talked about, that a white kid living in small town Calgary in 1972 when I started here, that’s not anything that you’re exposed to. But for all the injustice that he had faced along the way, he never carried a grudge.”

Anderson was always regarded as a great listener. It’s something that Hopkins has tried to absorb from years of being around him.

“If there’s one thing that I learned from Sugar a long, long time ago was to not judge anyone too quickly,” he says. “He had told me that as a young guy he was judged too often on first impressions. In this position sometimes that’s hard to do, but I think that that’s a life lesson I learned from him, was to not jump to conclusions based on first impressions.”

To Hopkins, Anderson was the perfect and only choice to be commemorated on a t-shirt this weekend, whether he was still with us or not.

“What you saw with Sugar was what you got. There were no airs about him,” Hopkins says. “He was just larger than life, always had a smile on his face, never really bitched about anything. Those types of people come along very rarely.

The Stampeders will honour Anderson’s life and career with a pre-game ceremony and will have a current Stampeders player lead the team out of the tunnel with a ’00’ flag, to have Anderson’s number run out onto the field on game day once more. His family will participate in the pre-game coin toss and of course, players will wear his t-shirt on the sidelines.

“I don’t think they could have picked a better person to do a t-shirt with,” Hopkins says. “He just embodies the history of the Stampeders.”

The players were a mix of Canadians and Americans in all shapes and sizes, from five-foot-10, 165-pound defensive back Nicholas Taylor, to six-foot-four, 295-pound defensive tackle Zack Evans. Only football could bring such a wide-ranging group of people together and have them all work for a common goal.

Just over four months later, a new ragtag group of players assembled on a warm, sunny morning on a football field in Mississauga, Ont. This group of 10 to 13-year olds was on the field shooting a TV ad to help usher in the CFL’s 2017 season, which will be tagged, “Bring It In.”

Created by Toronto agency Bensimon Byrne, Bring It In aims to tie in Canada’s 150th birthday with the idea of the country being stronger for its differences. These ideas run parallel with football and with the CFL in particular, said Lorne Covant, Bensimon Byrne’s associate creative director.

“You can have a big kid and a small kid on the same team, but the team won’t win without having those different dynamics, because you need that,” Covant said. “So, Bring It In is about those different components of football in the CFL that make it strong and make it fun and make it exciting. On the field, the players, on the sidelines, the cheerleaders, the fans, all of them. All the different parts of what makes up a football game are what make it awesome.

“Football and the CFL are all about the sum of the parts that make it amazing. The message here is bring it in, calling people to bring all of those things in.”

WATCH THE FULL AD BELOW:

“The whole spot is going to culminate with our girl getting a touchdown,” Covant said. The ad will then show the Bring It In slogan, along with the CFL’s slogan, What We’re Made Of.

The ad places a heavy emphasis on flag football; something the CFL is committed to growing in Canada. Last fall the CFL piloted a flag football program for boys and girls with an eye to building out a broader national program.

“Everything we’re doing this year is about bringing it in and the different variations of what that might mean: Kids bringing it in for football, kids supporting kids, fans bringing it in, players bringing it in, the different things they do,” Covant said. “It comes out of that bigger story of football being better because of the differences of the people who play and watch it.”

As the chase for the 105th Grey Cup begins when the season kicks off on June 22, the CFL is enjoying an increase in some key demographics (all numbers courtesy of IMI). The CFL is the third-most popular league in terms of percentage of total fans among Canadians aged 18-69, with 51 per cent of those surveyed saying they follow the league on some level. The NHL came first, at 73 per cent, and MLB was second at 55 per cent.

The CFL saw the largest jump among pro leagues in North America in total fandom among the millennial demographic (18-34-year olds), jumping from 41 to 46 per cent as of January, 2017. One surprising number that IMI’s research turned up: of the 12 million CFL fans in Canada — a third of the population — 4.8 million are in the west, while 7.2 million reside in the rest of the country (including the territories).

The CFL’s ad will launch on May 7, the same day as the Canadian Draft, when an entire new class of players will bring it in and join the CFL. The ad will air regularly throughout the 2017 season on TSN, the CFL’s exclusive broadcast partner since 2008.

Keeping tabs on players from across U Sports and the NCAA is the biggest challenge that the CFL’s Scouting Bureau faces. While the Bureau is tracking the players that have long been on their radar, it often must account for players like Bethune-Cookman offensive lineman Dariusz Bladek, who realize late in their college careers or early in their attempts at a professional one, that they could qualify as a national player in the CFL.

Bladek began to look into his dual citizen status last year, but didn’t have his paperwork ready in time for the 2016 CFL Canadian Draft or the supplemental draft which followed. With everything in order this year, he took part in the draft combine at Mark’s CFL Week in Regina and jumped five spots from the winter ranking up to No. 10.

“(Late additions to the rankings) make it tough because it puts it on us to get it right,” said Ryan Janzen, the CFL’s director of football operations. The Scouting Bureau collects the information provided by representatives of all nine of the league’s teams, evaluates their data, fills in some any blanks that might remain and puts its list together three times a year. The Bureau’s final rankings before the CFL Canadian Draft released on Thursday. The draft takes place on May 7.

RELATED: 2017’s Final Scouting Bureau Ranking | Ferguson: Breaking down the Top 20 Prospects

The Bureau was created in September, 2008 to help generate interest in the next crop of Canadian talent in the league. (Some fun trivia: Now-Edmonton Eskimos’ offensive lineman Simeon Rottier topped that first-ever Scouting Bureau list.) Before the Scouting Bureau, fans didn’t have a good opportunity to get know their team’s rookies until the season started. If it took a long time for a player to develop in a depth role, that could mean years of anonymity on a roster.

“(We asked ourselves) what can we do to get these guys’ names out there more in the media?” Janzen said. “It’s been good. You see a lot of stories about it. It does what we aimed for it to do: Create buzz and get names out there.”

Looking at this year’s draft class, Janzen doesn’t see a clear-cut No. 1 pick.

“Some years the draft will be really deep at one position. From what I’ve heard from teams this is a deep class, maybe deeper than most. There are no clear-cut top guys,” he said. “(Players who might be selected in the NFL draft) obviously plays into that. Who knows where some of those guys go, but there’s no guy, or two guys (that are locks to be taken first overall).

“That’s the thing about this year. The guy projected at nine may go one and the guy projected at one may go nine. I don’t think we’ll know until draft day who’s going to go top-three.”

There’s never an expectation of the top-20 going in the order the Bureau has listed, but when Janzen looks at the names on this final list, he feels confident in it.

“It’s been fairly accurate over the last few years, with most of those guys going in the top three or four rounds,” he said. “It’s got a pretty good track record.”