Ed Gainey took his show on the road during the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ bye week.
The veteran defensive back flew from Regina to his home in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Saturday to spend a few days with his family. On Wednesday, he piled into his 2015 Dodge Charger, picked up his friend Argie Lewis and started the long drive back to Regina.
After motoring along for 28 hours straight, the duo made it to the Queen City.
“It’s a time to just sit back and reflect — and talk to yourself,” a grinning Gainey said after Monday’s closed practice at Mosaic Stadium. “Actually, it’s like a concert in the car. You turn up the music, you rap every word to every song and do whatever you can to try to stay awake.”
Gainey and Lewis saw the sights while travelling through numerous states en route to Saskatchewan. The duo stopped every now and then for food and to answer the call of nature — and to pay the piper.
“There were a lot of toll booths,” Gainey recalled. “That was getting on my nerves. It was like every 10 minutes. I’m like, ‘Yo. C’mon, man. We can’t drive for free?’ ”
The toll booths were only one problem along the way. Looking back on the trip, Gainey believes he took “the worst route” from North Carolina to Saskatchewan.
“I had to go through the mountains at night,” he said. “I had to get (Lewis) to drive. I drove a couple of hours through those mountains and was swerving around. It was nighttime, I had my bright lights on and it just wasn’t working for me.
“I had him drive for most of the night but after that, I hit it throughout the daytime.”
Gainey kept his followers on social media up to date on his travels, posting a few videos as part of an Instagram story.
“You know how social media is nowadays, showing your every move every second,” he said. “But I was on the move, so if anybody wanted to find me, they were going to have to keep up.”
Gainey once drove from Montreal (where he used to play for the Alouettes) to Oklahoma, so he’s familiar with long road trips. He’s going to have to take another one at some point, when he makes the return trip with his Charger to North Carolina.
“I’m definitely going to take a different route next time,” said Gainey, who bought Lewis an airline ticket home. “I’m not going around again (like last week). I don’t know the actual route, but I’m going through North and South Dakota and straight down.”
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Brandon Bridge and David Watford remained in Regina during the bye week, but it wasn’t a week off for the Roughriders’ quarterbacks.
The duo worked out with the team’s receivers and watched film in hopes of increasing the offence’s effectiveness.
“If anybody was in town, they were here with us,” Watford said. “We were all grinding.”
The decision to stay was a no-brainer for Watford, who’s still learning the nuances of playing quarterback in the CFL. His previous pro experience was as a receiver with the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles.
“(When) some guys go home (on bye weeks), they get kind of lazy and they lose half a step — and that half a step could be the difference in winning and losing a game,” Watford said. “You want to keep that edge, that same focus, that same grind and that same mentality.”
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The Roughriders are well aware that they enter Week 6 with one of the league’s more sluggish offences.
Saskatchewan has scored a CFL-low four offensive touchdowns and is tied for last in the league with one rushing TD. The offence has league-worst averages in points per game (14.8) and passing yards per game (205.3) through four games.
“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out when you’re not playing well on one side of the football or the other,” head coach-GM Chris Jones said. “We know what we have to improve on.
“We’re not just going to sit there, stick our head in the sand and act like it’s not an issue, so we’re going to work on the things that we need to work on.”
That said, Watford noted the work of the offence “hasn’t been a concern.” The quarterbacks in particular know that improvement is required, so they’re trying to correct things.
“It’s not like any flags are being raised or anything like that,” Watford said. “We know what we need to do and, as a unit, we know that we need to put points on the board — and it starts with us. We just have to execute better and lead our team better.”
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On Monday, Jones reaffirmed the Roughriders’ plan to rotate Bridge and Watford during Thursday’s game against the host Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
When the teams met July 5, the quarterbacks took turns running the offence in Saskatchewan’s 18-13 victory at Mosaic Stadium. Jones plans to rotate the QBs again in Hamilton — just as he did when he had Jordan Lynch relieve Mike Reilly at times with the 2015 Edmonton Eskimos.
“We firmly believe in what we do as far as certain packages using certain quarterbacks,” Jones said. “We have two really good young guys … They’re not perfect but they both do some very good things. They’re both very unique, so we try to utilize their talents.”
