CFL Report: July 25, 2008

Career of many colours

He has, in his 12 CFL seasons with the Montreal Concordes, Toronto Argonauts, B.C. Lions, Ottawa Renegades and Saskatchewan Roughriders, received a black eye from a boss, a public insult in which he was called a “red-headed piss ant” by a rival and a pink slip from an organization whose head coach stopped speaking to him.

It certainly has been a colourful front-office career for Eric Tillman so far.

And he’s gone green now – reflective of both the team colour of his Roughriders and the megabucks the club recently gave him in an unprecedented contract extension. It’s an incentive-laden deal that could, if Saskatchewan continues to excel, keep Tillman around as the team’s general manager until 2020.

“I want to finish my career here,” the Mississippi native told me Thursday via telephone, as he celebrated his 51st birthday. “I have the best job in the CFL now. No fans have the passion and devotion ours do. Football is the unifying force in Saskatchewan. When people are born here, they don’t get birth marks. They get (Rider) logos.”

It helps Tillman, of course, that the Riders captured the Grey Cup last season and ranks as the only undefeated CFL team (4-0) this season. Still, Tillman takes nothing for granted.

“The CFL season has 18 challenges, just like golf,” he told me. “How often have you hit the first four tee shots on the fairway and then hit two out of the next three in the woods?

“Our coaches and players are doing a great job, and we’re much better than most people predicted. But it’s important to keep it in perspective that we’ve only played four games and there are 14 remaining. And this is a highly competitive league. The truth is the Western Division could still finish in any order.”

Sunday reunion

Attempting to spoil the Riders’ unbeaten record this Sunday will be the Argonauts, who are led by a QB Tillman recruited to the CFL in 2003. Kerry Joseph, who excelled last week in leading the Argos to a last-minute, dramatic triumph over the Edmonton Eskimos, was signed by Tillman when the latter was the GM of the now-defunct Renegades.

Joseph was coming off a five-year career as a safety in the NFL. There was little reason to suspect that he could succeed as a quarterback in the CFL.

Not that Tillman believed that.

“I brought him in as a quarterback,” Tillman said. “This isn’t an exact science, as you know, but I knew Kerry had a big arm. I saw him play university football. I saw him play in NFL Europe. I knew he had the skill set to play the position. He’d been away from the position for five years, though, so I wasn’t sure if he could actually play it well enough.”

It didn’t take long for Tillman to start encouraging his then-coach, Joe Paopao, to replace Dan Crowley at QB with Joseph. And, sure enough, in his first CFL game, Joseph tore apart the Argos en route to an Ottawa victory.

Joseph was Saskatchewan’s QB under Tillman last season and the Riders captured the Grey Cup. And Joseph was chosen the CFL’s premier player.

Then one of those only-in-the-CFL kinds of things happened. Joseph was deemed expendable by Tillman because the QB had asked for a raise that the GM knew he couldn’t afford.

So Tillman traded Joseph to the Argos, where he was struggling and embroiled in something of a quarterback controversy with Michael Bishop until he sparkled last week. He was chosen the CFL’s offensive player of the week after his demonstration against Edmonton. And now Joseph returns to Regina for revenge, right?

“It’s a big story that Kerry is coming back this week, and it’s taken on a different dimension,” Tillman acknowledged, “but I don’t think Kerry gets all caught up in the hype about playing his ex-team. This is a big game for different reasons – because we’d like to stay undefeated and because Toronto needs a win.

“It may just end up that the end result may be that everybody’s happy with the trade.”

 Rich in the pocket

Replacing Joseph as the Riders’ starting QB was supposed to be Marcus Crandell, but the knock on him is that he’s injury-prone and, sure enough, he injured his hamstring early on.

Darian Durant, a North Carolina graduate, filled in for Crandell the past two weeks and won both games in impressive fashion. Tillman said Thursday that his starting QB against Toronto remains undecided.

“If Marcus is 100 per cent healthy, he’ll play,” Tillman said. “But we’re very comfortable going with either guy. Darian’s played as well as you can hope for a young quarterback. He’s highly intelligent and he has tremendous poise. Those two attributes have been evident. This is his third year here. He learned a lot (backing up) in the previous two years. Our coaching staff has done an excellent job of managing the game with Darian in there. The truth is we have a lot of athletes. The key for Darian to be successful is to read the defences well and to get the ball in the hands of our athletes. And he’s done that.”

One of those athletes is running back Wes Cates, who ranks perhaps second only to Calgary Stampeders quarterback Henry Burris as the CFL’s early top candidate for outstanding-player honours.

Cates was obtained last year in a trade with Calgary. Tillman dealt the Stamps lineman Rob Lazeo for Cates.

“I’m sure the Stampeders are happy with Rob,” Tillman said. “He’s started every one of their games for them since they acquired him.

“But, in Cates, we think we have one of the premier backs in the league. He’s done everything our coaches have asked him to do.”

Hits and misses

Tillman doesn’t consider the Cates deal among his best. There were far more lopsided deals, of course, like the one before last season, when he unloaded a backup quarterback, Rocky Butler, on the Hamilton Tiger-Cats for a starting offensive lineman, Wayne Smith, and a starting receiver, D.J. Flick. While Smith and Flick were key ingredients in the Riders’ ascent to the Grey Cup last season, Butler didn’t make the Ticats and is now out of football.

He considers his best deal, however, to be one he completed before the 1994 season, when he was the GM of the Lions. In a 3-for-4 trade, Tillman picked up Less Browne, whom he still ranks as the most talented defensive halfback in CFL history.

(Browne went on to be a terrific CFL analyst for TSN, serving on the same panel as yours truly, and then became a first-rate assistant coach in the CFL, but is now looking for work, mysteriously, but I digress.)

But Tillman, by his own admission, wasn’t always correct in his assessment of talent.

Last decade, for instance, Tillman told me he didn’t think his kicker with the Argos, Mike Vanderjagt, was good enough to play in the NFL. Then he wound up in the NFL, establishing himself as the most accurate field-goal kicker in NFL history.

This year, Vanderjagt returned to the Argos and will be kicking against Tillman’s Riders on Sunday.

“I don’t remember saying that about Mike back then,” Tillman said Thursday. “I know he did a terrific job kicking for us in 1997. And then I remember (agent) Gil Scott and (Argos head coach/football chief) Don Matthews getting into an arm-wrestling match over his contract, so Mike decided he would leave. And I remember Gil asking to use me as a reference for Mike in the NFL. I made several phone calls on his behalf. It worked out great for Mike.

“I don’t remember saying he wouldn’t make it in the NFL but, hey, I have trouble remembering what the score was in our opening game this year. I prefer happy endings, anyway.”

Butting heads

Matthews and Tillman never could get along well. And that, of course, didn’t exactly put Tillman in rare company.

Matthews, the winningest head coach in CFL history, never lacked adversaries or outright enemies, but he and Tillman made strange bedfellows from the beginning of their days together in Toronto and it reached the point where Matthews stopped talking to Tillman.

They didn’t like to speak to each other then. They don’t like to speak about each other now.

Tillman, however, doesn’t mind talking about his “happy endings” with the late Bob Geary and Cal Murphy.

Geary was a tough guy with a temper. He was a lineman for the Montreal Alouettes and a competitive boxer before becoming Montreal’s GM. In the early 1980s, after the Als folded and briefly became the Concordes, then head-coach Joe Galat brought in Tillman as the club’s player-personnel director. Galat knew Tillman when the two were with the NFL’s old Houston Oilers. Tillman ran the club’s magazine while Galat was an assistant coach.

In Montreal, Tillman raised the ire of Geary in a front-office meeting, to the point where Geary flattened him with a right hook.

Tillman wound up with a black eye.

“But the happy ending is that Bob and I became quite friendly after all that,” Tillman said.

“Heck, I remember after we won the Grey Cup in B.C. in 1994, Bob was one of the first guys to call and congratulate me. He was an interesting guy. I was so saddened by his death.”

Murphy was running the Winnipeg Blue Bombers when Tillman decided to sign his quarterback, Danny McManus, as a free agent. That prompted the fiery Murphy to suggest Tillman was a “red-headed piss ant.”

Tillman laughs at the remark now.

“Heck, Danny was a free agent,” Tillman said. “I was just trying to improve my team (the Lions).

“But I see Cal a lot now and we’re friends. Cal lives here in Regina and he’s a good guy. Again, this is a happy ending.”

Looking ahead

And a happy ending is precisely what Tillman expects in Regina, where he recently signed a contract extension, the type of which no other CFLer has.

“Technically,” Tillman explained, “it runs through 2010. It’s a rollover contract, common at the NCAA level, I guess, but not in the CFL. It’s based on achieving certain benchmarks. If we achieve those during the course of the contract each year, the contract will automatically extend. Conceivably, it’s a contract that, if we play well, could run all the way to 2020.”

For now, Tillman is focusing exclusively on 2008, and specifically on Sunday’s game against Joseph and the Argonauts.

And, incidentally, who does Tillman consider his top recruit in all his CFL years?

“I’d say there’s a tie for first spot,” the GM said. “Derrell (Mookie) Mitchell was one of them, for sure.”

The other?

He cleared his throat.

“Kerry Joseph,” he finally said.

Around the league

• After four games this season, QB Casey Printers has yet to throw a touchdown pass for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

“I must say,” Ticats head coach Charlie Taaffe acknowledged, “that I’ve never seen a quarterback go this far into a season without a touchdown pass.”

Printers, at about $450,000 a season, is the highest-paid player in the CFL.

• Future Hall of Famer Geroy Simon needs only three more yards to set the Lions’ record for most receiving yardage.

Simon also needs four more touchdown catches to equal the Lions’ record of 65.

Both records are held by Hall of Famer Jim Young, otherwise known as Dirty 30.

WEEKLY PICKS

Every week during the CFL season, I make my traditional picks against the spread at the bottom of this column. I went 1-3 last week and am 6-10 on the season. Here we go with Week Five:

THURSDAY – Calgary at Winnipeg:

The Stampeders are favoured by 6.5 points. It’s never wise to pick a road team and lay these many points, even if we are talking about the multi-talented Stampeders. Beleaguered Winnipeg coach Doug Berry, whose job may be already be on the line, finally decided to replace the struggling Kevin Glenn at quarterback with Ryan Dinwiddie. The Stamps probably win this game, but maybe only by a field goal. TAKE WINNIPEG PLUS THE 6.5 POINTS.

FRIDAY – Hamilton at Edmonton:

The Eskimos are favoured by 2.5 points. This is my play of the season so far. The Cats are dogs here, and I love them to win the game outright. Workhorse running back Jesse Lumsden is back from his sore knee and will be at running back for the Ticats. The Cats have rested since last Thursday. The Esks, on the other hand, have been in Ontario all week, after losing a last-minute heart-breaker in Toronto last Sunday. They’re banged up, their best defensive lineman (Fred Perry) is out (ankle) and they’ll be playing this game on only four days rest. TAKE HAMILTON PLUS THE 2.5 POINTS.

FRIDAY – Montreal at B.C:

The Lions are favoured by 6.5 points. I love this game, too. The Alouettes never do well in B.C., largely because the three-hour time difference has historically affected them. They’ll be playing this game in the wee hours Eastern time. And the Lions have been roaring lately. QB Jarious Jackson is back in form. This will be a long night for the Als, who will sag to a below .500 record. TAKE B.C. MINUS THE 6.5 POINTS.

SUNDAY –Toronto at Saskatchewan:

The Roughriders are favoured by 6.5 points. Yes, the Riders are flying, but Kerry Joseph excelled as the Argos’ QB in Toronto’s morale-lifting, last-minute triumph last week. No matter what he says in public, Joseph is psyched to beat up the club that dumped him after his MVP season. TAKE TORONTO PLUS THE 6.5 POINTS.

Marty York is Metro's national sports columnist and can be heard each Wednesday night on Vancouver radio station CKNW with Sportstalk host Dan Russell.

He is also an instructor at the College of Sports Media in Toronto.

You can reach Marty at marty.york@metronews.ca