May 27, 2017

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for Chris Jones

There is no time like the present for Chris Jones.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders are to open training camp Sunday in Saskatoon and Jones — the CFL team’s head coach, general manager and vice-president of football operations — can’t wait.

“It’s go time,” he says. “It’s kind of like Christmas Eve. Santa Claus is coming and Christmas is coming, so you get all nervous because that energy is there.

“I can’t wait to get started. I wish we were playing so we could see where we stack up. We have a very competitive staff, I’m very competitive and we want to show it.”

The Roughriders went 5-13-0 in 2016, which was Jones’ first season at the team’s helm. The on-field struggles were compounded by league-wide scrutiny of some of Jones’ tactics and the fallout from those incidents.

For Jones, the season was difficult to absorb. Saskatchewan finished last in the West Division and missed the playoffs — the first time in Jones’ 15-year CFL coaching career that his team failed to qualify for the post-season.

“It’s like when you lose the Grey Cup; it takes about a month to get to where you can even stomach getting up in the morning and thinking about football,” says Jones, who joined the Roughriders after guiding the Edmonton Eskimos to the 2015 CFL title.

“My players are very important to me and a lot of them came here with us with one thing in mind — winning. The coaching staff followed me over here (from Edmonton). When you start thinking of the people who depend on you to win, it was frustrating thinking about (2016).

“But you can’t sit there and dwell on it too long. You’ve got to figure out exactly what you need to do and where you need to go from here, because there ain’t no fixing yesterday. It’s over with.”

After the season, Jones sat down with his staff to figure out what was needed to repair the Roughriders’ roster. The solution decided upon involved signing veteran players in free agency and beating the bushes to find new talent.

On the day in December of 2015 when Jones was introduced as Saskatchewan’s new football boss, Roughriders president-CEO Craig Reynolds said his new employee “works as hard as anybody I’ve ever seen in my life.” So it wasn’t a surprise that Jones threw himself into his work this past off-season.

In previous years, Jones would take December off and then rest again around his teams’ mini-camps. That wasn’t the case this winter.

“I had three weekends off: One at Christmas, one at Easter and one around the Cornbread Festival where I volunteer in my hometown,” says Jones, a product of South Pittsburg, Tenn. “The rest of the weekends, I was working.

“I’ve never been in a situation where I only won five football games in a season, so I took that very personally,” he adds. “Nobody holds themselves to a higher standard than I do. I went to Florida three times. I went to Texas three times. I went to Atlanta twice. I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned.

“It’s taxing, physically and mentally. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time at home like normal. I didn’t have any time off because we started our workouts two days after our last game, so it didn’t leave a lot of time to relax. But that’s the last thing I’m worried about.”

The Roughriders conducted tryout camps across the United States throughout the off-season. The best players at those camps were signed and invited to a mini-camp in April in Vero Beach, Fla., with the top players there earning spots in training camp in Saskatoon.

Jones and his staff have staged more tryout camps since mini-camp — the last ones wrapped up this week — and found other prospects who could get opportunities this season.

“We’ve got about 12 names on the board in there (a room in the football operations area at Mosaic Stadium) that we don’t have spots for on our roster,” Jones says. “If we have injuries or whatever, we’ve already tried them out. We’re ahead of the game from where we were last year because of it.”

The price for all of that scouting was a lack of time with his family. Jones and his wife have two daughters, but he wasn’t at home with them much in the off-season.

“My family’s probably glad I was gone,” Jones says with a grin. “My little girls are teenagers now, so I’m not very smart (in their eyes) — and I never have been very smart with my wife.

“It’s hard being away from home, but this is what construction workers do. Guys who work on power lines get called out when there are storms and they have to do it. This is part of football.”

Christmas has arrived for Jones and he once again is feeling the nerves.

“It’s time, man,” he says. “This is what I do. When I stop getting butterflies and stop getting anxious, that’s when I’ll get out of it.

“I can’t wait to see Zavian (Bingham, a rookie defensive back) line up and guard (receiver) Caleb Holley in a real one-on-one. I can’t wait to see (receiver) Duron Carter line up against Kacy (Rodgers Jr., a cornerback). It’s time to get going.

“It’s time to create our new identity and move on from there.”