Regina and most of Saskatchewan has experienced a very mild winter thus far and that good news for better with a Sunday evening announcement. TSN’s Gary Lawless, who has ran point on this story since he surfaced it, is reporting the Saskatchewan Roughriders have come to terms with the former head coach of the 2015 Grey Cup winning Edmonton Eskimos. Chris Jones has been hired as the Riders’ general manager and head coach.
Lawless brought to light a week ago the fact that the Riders had offered both roles to Calgary’s John Hufnagel. Hufnagel declined and the Riders interviewed the Esks head coach on Friday. They have now inked and tagged him for both roles with the club in 2016. No other details of the contract are known at this time.
One has to wonder, how many of his assistant coaches and players will follow him to the Saskatchewan capital? I have to think many in keeping with past moves made by Jones and the recent successes and relationships he has had and built with people in Edmonton.
He has really worked hard in three notable areas: developing relationships with his players and his assistants, recruitment and development of personnel, and polishing his media acumen.
Some of the words he chose and the actions he took early on in his CFL career weren’t popular with everyone. Handshake-gate garnered a lot of criticism. To me it’s clear that he is not that same man.
I think the vast majority of Rider Nation is happy, if not just on one front, then on two fronts.
They have a winning head coach inbound to help rebound from the an awful couple of years. Jones has four Grey Cup rings on his hand and he’s won everywhere he’s been. Even a 9-9 season for the Riders in 2016 would surely earn Jones consideration for the Coach of the Year.
Rider Nation can also rejoice for what this potentially takes away from the defending Grey Cup champions, the Edmonton Eskimos. The Eskimos have two or three guys on their coaching staff that Coach Jones feels very comfortable with. They also have a slew of potential free agents and come early February many of them could have a new area code on their phone number. The wrong one if you’re an Eskimo fan.
These are definitely two reasons that the phrase, “early Christmas”, just got a new meaning for the people of Rider Nation. Let the CFL winter meetings commence next week in Las Vegas, Nevada. When more details come in we will have them for you.
Note: the commissioner, Jeffery Orridge promised we would see the new website last week. We didn’t. A new week has brought a new promise that it will be introduced this week.
@letstalkcfl New CFL.ca website will begin to be rolled out tomorrow,12/7.
— Jeffrey L. Orridge (@JlOrridge) December 7, 2015
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