Monday Morning Sentimonies: Football-less Void

We have officially reached the painful final stretch of the offseason. Free agency is over, the draft is two months away and the NFL is even over so there is no football whatsoever. If we can just make it through this final stretch then football will be back and life will be good again.

God bless the Argos and Chad Kelly for trying to keep the CFL in the new cycle but there were likely better ways to go about it. A wrongful termination lawsuit was filed against them by a female trainer who Kelly allegedly made advances at. Since the news broke both the Argos and CFL have made themselves quieter than people who have run out of candy on Halloween and are trying to pretend like they aren’t home. It’s a media strategy that works about as well as Craig Dickenson’s coaching tactics in October.   

As someone whose day job involves human resources, things like this just make me shake my head. Rather than deal with an issue that was raised, they tried to sweep it under the carpet. Literally all they had to do was do some kind of internal discipline to Kelly for his alleged inappropriate behaviour and this probably never gets spoken of outside of Argo facilities. Instead they opted to make things much worse and turn it into a public story. The court of public opinion is always much harsher than actual court… and in the world of human resources both should be avoided.

I am willing to bet that since the Argos have no interest in losing Kelly’s services they will find a fall guy in management (John Murphy has previous experience getting turfed for doing dumb things) and give Kelly a slap on the wrist and have him do a super fake apology (that I can tell you right now will include “that’s not who I am”, “I found the lord through this” and maybe even “I have many friends who are women”). I will add a bonus prediction that given some people’s addiction to finding a way to tie the Riders to bad new stories, the headlines will read “Former Rider Assistant GM forced to resign in disgrace from current CFL team”.

In more positive CFL news, Vernon Adams signed a long-term extension in BC. Good for him. I am actually glad to see him have success. Remember that his CFL career started with more trades (BC->Montreal->Sask->Hamilton) than starts. Also remember that for a period in 2017 the Riders had him 3^rd on the QB depth chart behind Kevin Glenn and Brandon Bridge. Excuse me while I go silently weep for a few seconds.