If you have been watching the Calgary Stampeders in action this season, what you’ve witnessed is a mobile magic act. And an act that would stun even Penn and Teller in Las Vegas. And with the leadership this club has, the future looks promising rather than depressing.
Having covered this squad since 1965, I can safely say there have never been as many serious injuries as there have been this season.
This is a team that remains in the hunt to win a Western Division title, although the British Columbia Lions will have something to say about that. At last check, the Stamps had no less than 12 players, five of them starters, on the nine-game disabled list and four others on the regular injured list. Yet they still have a winning record.
And I’m about to tell you why. It’s because of head coach John Hufnagel and his staff.
Not long ago I asked “Huf” if he’d ever been with a club with as many injuries and his reply was: “What injuries?” I pointed out the disabled list. His response was that he had no control over the injury situation.
“Billy,” he said, “my job is to put 46 players on a game-day roster and decide on which 42 will play that game. If a player is on the injured list, I can’t be concerned with that at all. I have a team to put on a field that will be competitive and, although I feel for those that are hurting, I have to look for healthy bodies.”
And he has done so all season long starting with No. 1 quarterback Drew Tate who has been replaced, some might say, in a surprising way by Kevin Glenn. Glenn who was brought over from the Hamilton Tiger-Cats as a backup to Tate. But he was thrown to the lions early, so to speak, and has the club close to securing a playoff position in short order.
But “Huf” also had to replace offensive linemen, defensive linemen, defensive backs a star kick-returner and even receivers on a club that was knee deep in receivers at the start of the season.
One player, who will remain nameless, told me the other day that as long as Hufnagel coaches the Stampeders there will never be a “bad” football club, which is what you could call the Winnipeg Blue Bombers of this season. The player said the head coach knows how to adjust on the run and that is the difference.
One thing about John Hufnagel that is different from other coaches we have seen over the years: he will never blame a bad game or even a bad run on the injury factor.
Over my years and years and years on various southern Alberta ball diamonds, I was in the middle of many a dispute. In fact, someone once wrote that there was not one umpire working commercial or industrial diamonds that had not tossed me from a game.
And, yes, at times I did get into it with the fans. But never, and I mean never, would I have resorted to doing what Stampeder running back Jon Cornish did in response to derisive remarks from Saskatchewan Roughrider fans not long ago. Some didn’t know what had happened when Cornish came into a news conference and apologized to everyone in the world, save one janitor working at a small school in Australia. You had to know he was told to say he was sorry.
So one reporter asked just what he had done and Hufnagel explained that: “he pulled his pants down in front of the Roughrider fans.” The term is “mooned” the fans.
He might have thought it was a wise thing to do at the time but Cornish will pay for this for a long, long time. It was as dumb a move as I’ve ever heard of on a football field, having not seen it myself.
You have to love a success story, and, one that kind of touches home.
When Brandt Snedeker won the Fed-Ex Cup of golf on the PGA tour in late September, with it he took the series prize of $10 million. The normal pay for a caddy is 10 per cent and Snedeker came through with $1 million for caddy Scott Vail, the son of former Calgary Flames forward Eric Vail. It really wasn’t all that long ago that the same Scott Vail was toting the sticks for Canadian tour pro Derek Gillespie at a Nationwide event at Cochrane’s GlenEagles layout.
Good on Scott.
My joke of the day is, to some, a fact of life according to Publisher Jack. It’s a definition of memory. Any married man should forget his mistakes, there’s no use in two people remembering the same thing.
