Third Annual Rider Prophet Awards

They say good things come in threes. Apparently mediocre at best things do as well since its time to present the 3^rd Annual Rider Prophet Awards. This year’s award winners will receive a no-expense paid trip to a destination of their choice along with a coupon for 10% off a Rider Prophet T-shirt.

Best Player Name
This year there was some tough competition in this category from the likes of Jamaica Rector and De’Audra Dix. They ended up being no match for this year’s winner…Winnipeg receiver Craphonso Thorpe. I wonder what made his parents go “Man! What a great idea for a first name!”. Unfortunately for Craphonso, he played like the first syllable of his name and got cut by the Blue Bombers midway through the season.

Previous winners: Charleston Hughes, Chijioke Onyenegecha

Quote of the Year
With perennial winner Mike Abou-Mechrek out of the picture, this category was wide open. It ended up being another Roughrider to step up and steal the spotlight… though not one I would have expected.

While Jason Clermont’s contributions on the field may have been fairly limited, his contributions in the media were anything but. His weekly column in the Leader Post was always a good read, mainly because it steadily transitioned from well written articles on relevant football matters to the random (and often hilarious) musings of a man with too much time on his hands. This year’s quote of the year comes from his column before Labour Day when he unleashed this gem while explaining the meaning of “making it rain”…

The No. 1-rated definition from UrbanDictionary.com defines making it rain as: "When you're in da club with a stack, and you throw the money up in the air at the strippers. The effect is that it seems to be raining money."

Apparently a "stack'' is equal to $1,000, and Pacman (Stackman?) Jones had close to 100 "stacks'' when he made it rain inside a Las Vegas strip club in February of 2007, during the NBA all-star weekend.

Previous Winner: Mike Abou-Mechrek x 2

Play of the Year
The moment I saw this play back in August, I declared it the hands down winner of this award regardless of what happened in the remaining 3 months of the season. For reaching hilarious new lows in ineptness, I award Michael Bishop the Play of the Year Award for knocking himself unconscious on his own blocker.

Seriously that just never gets old.

Botched Call of the Year
Despite the fact that the Riders were on the wrong end up a couple botched calls this season, all of them pale in comparison to this year’s winner (as sad as that is).

It was Labour Day weekend and the heavily favoured Alouettes were in BC to take on the struggling Lions. BC had the lead in the dying minutes of the game. Calvillo drove the offense down to the redzone and in the dying seconds of the game Avon Cobourne ran off-tackle for a game tying TD… but hold on a second there were flags thrown. I assumed it was holding but I was wrong and the actual call amazes me to this day.

The referee ruled that the game clock was not properly set and therefore the previous play did not count. That’s right, a game tying TD for Montreal was negated due to an error by the timekeeper. The worst part was that the ref asked that the game clock be reset to 1 minute which is exactly what it was set at already. Absolutely ridiculous!

The Commercial I Didn’t Get Sick Of Seeing Even Though TSN Made Me Watch It 54,297 Times Award
The season started out with so many bad commercials that I was worried that I might have to cancel this award this year. Then out of nowhere came this commercial which instantly became my favourite because of what the walrus does at the start of the commercial.

It took me a while to actually find the clip of this commercial because I was always laughing too hard at the ass tapping to notice what the commercial was actually for. And when you have nothing to go on except “walrus tapping ass” for an internet search… let’s just say the results tend not to be what you had intended… though an alarming amount of the search results feature Man in the Bush. Those are some mighty fine tusks.

Fans Choice Douche-Bag of the Year
You the fans have spoken and with an overwhelming 66% of the vote (the largest majority ever) have chosen Mike Kelly as your Douche Bag of The Year.

Kelly’s achievements in the field of douche baggery include: cutting Kevin Glenn in favour of Stephan LeFors; sending a spy to a Hamilton practice (though that was a non-issue that was handled internally); making disparaging remarks towards league officials, refs, fans and the media; attempting to sign Pacman Jones; referring to Saskatchewan as the Crotch of Canada; trying to force Barrin Simpson on to the 9-game; dismissing the shotgun formation as something for less intelligent coaches; and all this while fielding one of the most embarrassing teams in the CFL (with apologies to the Argos).

Previous winners: Jason Jimenez, Rob Murphy

Most Insulted Sports Figure
For the 2^nd year in a row Michael Bishop has defied the odds and managed to go from not even in contention at the start of the season to “insurmountable lead” in the middle of the season in mere weeks. The great thing about this year was that he was on a different team and so I was able to enjoy watching his failures without having them negatively affect my team… that’s win-win (unless you are the Bombers in which case it was more like INT-loss).

If I didn’t have Bishop jokes to fill the space on this blog I would probably have to cut back to a once a week post that was no more than a paragraph. Fortunately, the early indication is that the Bombers intend to bring Bishop to training camp next year so it looks like I’ll be alright for the foreseeable future.