Monday Morning Sentimonies: No Mo Mo

Getting cut by a professional football team must be hard to take for a player. It must be even harder when you are cut before you even get to so much a stretch for the team. That’s like getting dumped on a blind date by an actual blind person before the introductions. Such is the life for former all-star Mo Lloyd and likely to never be an all-star Kolton Solomon. Both were signed in December and evidently managed to work themselves of the training camp depth chart by May by doing absolutely nothing.  (Which is ironic because doing nothing managed to turn into quite the little career for Jason French).

                                          

Now 2 major things likely played into this. First is both Lloyd and Solomon were signed before Chamblain was hired so he would have had no input into the decision to ink them. The second is the new league rule limiting the number of transactions teams are allowed during training camp. This means teams are doing extra scrutiny ahead of time (with things like mini-camps) so they can be reasonably sure of the guys they do bring to camp. Obviously Chamblain didn’t think Lloyd and Solomon were worth one of his precious training camp spots. Solomon is somewhat surprising since he is a junior and wouldn’t count towards our numbers. Lloyd is surprising since I think we all assumed we at least give him a look in camp given his resume.

I guess it boils down to the fact that Taman/Chamblain are confident enough in the new recruits to deem a vet like Lloyd expendable. I wish I shared their confidence.

Kye Stewart also got the axe. After having an extremely promising rookie season derailed by injury, Stewart never regained the form that had me thinking he had a bright future. The only thing that really concerns me about his departure is the fact that outside of McCullough we are committing to a completely brand new set of LBs.

To replace these cuts we added a couple. One you’ve probably never heard of. It’s Dominic Noel a Canadian DB. I know nothing about him but the fact that we are bringing in competition behind Butler makes me happy (still no sign of life in the defensive tackle department but I guess we should celebrate the small victories). Word is undrafted free-agents WR Bogdan Raic (earlier contender for oddest first name) and RB Nathan Riva will also be coming to camp.

The other one is far more famous… or at least infamous. Receiver Dwayne Jarrett who was a former 2^nd round pick of the NFL but that never really panned out and a few unspectacular seasons and DUIs later and he’s been relegated from biggest college receiver not named Calvin Johnson to a CFL wannabe. With Willis and now Jarrett, I guess the Riders are trying to get enough guys to run AA meetings in house. I suppose that would be handy.

I would like to get excited about all the former NFL draft picks we will be bringing to camp but if CFL success was correlated to the number of NFL washouts on the roster, the Toronto Argos would have started a dynasty a few years ago that would now rival the Eskimos in their heyday.