All eyes will be on one position — and one man, for the most part — during the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ upcoming mini-camp.
“We’re certainly hunting a quarterback,” said Chris Jones, the Roughriders’ head coach, general manager and vice-president of football operations.
“We want somebody who can command our offence and who can be the leader that we need for our football team. That’s first and foremost what we hope to see.”
And that’s why the focus will be on one particular player.
Ex-NFL quarterback Vince Young will be scrutinized at the camp, which runs Tuesday through Thursday in Vero Beach, Fla.
The Roughriders signed the former University of Texas Longhorns standout on March 9, giving the 33-year-old pivot another chance to play professional football. Young hasn’t played in a regular-season game since the 2011 NFL season.
“I told Vince just to be Vince and not to worry about trying to be anybody but Vince,” Jones said. “We’ll have to see what he brings to the table.
“He threw the ball decently when we first saw him (in March). I just need to know that he’s got a grasp of our offence, that he can call our plays, that he can get us in and out of the huddle and that type of the thing. I need to know that the game is coming to him.”
And if it isn’t? Is mini-camp a make-or-break situation for Young?
“He’s like everybody else: He’d better show good,” Jones replied. “There’s no room for error.”
All five quarterbacks the Roughriders currently have under contract — Young, Bryan Bennett, Brandon Bridge, Kevin Glenn and G.J. Kinne — are to participate in the camp. They’re to be joined by some rookies as well as some players who are entering their first seasons in the CFL.
Roughly 40 players are expected to attend, and Jones said he expects “20 to 25” of them to move on to Saskatchewan’s training camp. That camp is set to open May 28 in Saskatoon.
The coaches will use the mini-camp to install some systems and see how the participants fit into the Roughriders’ game plan.
Jones wouldn’t identify specific players he wants to watch at mini-camp — “Every time in the past that I’ve mentioned one particular guy, he has ended up being terrible at mini-camp or camp,” the veteran coach said with a chuckle — but he noted there is talent at virtually every position.
Now it’s up to the players to show the skills that the Roughriders’ coaches and scouts saw from them in games, on film or during tryout camps.
“We only took two or three days off after our last football game,” Jones said of the team’s staff. “We’ve basically had only two weekends off the entire off-season, so we’re looking forward to seeing the fruits of our labour.”
The players attending the mini-camp will be out to land jobs with a team that is in the midst of a rebuild. Jones added several new players prior to the 2016 season — his first at the team’s helm — and brought more on board during free agency this off-season.
One hurdle for those players attending the mini-camp at Historic Dodgertown is that they’ll have just three days to captivate the Roughriders and earn an invitation to main camp.
“It isn’t that hard,” Jones said when asked about making an impression in such a short period of time. “If you come out and play solid football, that’s going to impress us.
“Consistency is the key. Last year, that’s one of the things that hurt us. With all the youthful players we had, we were a little bit inconsistent at times. We’re looking at who can be the most consistent.”
To do so, the coaching staff and personnel types will have to evaluate players who in many cases don’t have any experience with the CFL and its nuances.
The pre-snap waggle won’t be familiar to many of the receivers and defensive backs at the mini-camp, most of the offensive and defensive linemen won’t be used to defenders lining up one yard off the line of scrimmage, and the size of the Canadian field will be an adjustment for all of the newcomers who were born and trained in the United States.
For Jones and his staff, though, the camp will mark the resumption of a familiar process.
“It’s a downhill slope from here (to the regular season),” Jones said. “It’s like a roller-coaster. We’ve been going up and down and up and down. Now we’re at that final part where you hit this, you hit the draft (May 7), you hit the last couple of free-agent camps after the NFL draft to see if there’s some straggler out there, and then we’re into the season.
“It’s time to get started. We left a lot on the table last year (when the Roughriders went 5-13-0 and missed the playoffs), so everybody involved has been looking forward and licking their chops to get started.”
• The Roughriders announced Friday that they had released international linebacker Greg Jones.
Jones had 70 tackles and two sacks in 16 games for Saskatchewan last season after signing as a free agent in February. Canadian Henoc Muamba supplanted Jones as the starting middle linebacker late in the 2016 campaign.
