Jeremy O’Day has seen a lot of football — and a lot of football players — this month.
The Saskatchewan Roughriders’ assistant vice-president of football operations and administration has just returned to Regina after a three-week-long scouting excursion through the United States.
O’Day attended three NCAA all-star games (the College Gridiron Showcase in Addison, Texas, the East-West Shrine Game in St. Petersburg, Fla., and the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala.) as well as free-agent camps in Tampa, Fla., and Montgomery, Ala.
Like O’Day, members of the Roughriders’ front office and scouting and coaching staffs have been on the road throughout the off-season, looking for players who can add something to the CFL team.
Living out of a suitcase is just part of the job.
“There are worse things to do than travelling around looking at football players, that’s for sure, and it’s something I definitely love to do,” O’Day said. “But it can turn into a grind.
“The actual work part is the fun part, when you’re working at a free-agent camp or scouting at a game. It turns into a grind when you’re going to a different hotel or a different city every two or three days or you’re doing laundry in the hotels. As much as I enjoy food, you wish sometimes that you were at home eating normal food rather than figuring out where or what you’re going to eat.
“The hardest part is being away from my family for that long period of time. It’s nice with FaceTime and all that, but it can’t beat being at home with the family.”
O’Day’s first stop this time around was the College Gridiron Showcase, the first all-star game of the college football post-season.
He said the majority of that game’s invitees will get NFL contracts as lower-round draft picks or priority free agents, but players who participate in that contest could be available to CFL teams sooner than the higher-profile players who attend events like the Senior Bowl.
This year’s Showcase also featured eight Canadian players, including a handful from U Sports teams. The organizers polled CFL teams to identify which Canadians they wanted to have a closer look at — and some of those players were invited to participate. That might help CFL teams as they prepare for the draft in May.
O’Day noted that CFL scouts see only “a limited amount” of Canadian-born players in the NCAA all-star games. For the most part, then, the bird dogs are attempting to project which of the American players they’re watching have futures in the NFL and therefore aren’t likely to sign with CFL teams.
“You’re trying to figure out exactly where they’ll fall,” O’Day said. “You’re trying to get guys who are on the bubble or maybe guys the NFL will overlook. Maybe it’s a size thing or maybe they’re not getting much attention.
“It’s easy to walk out of there and say, ‘This guy did great,’ but the problem is that there are 32 NFL teams that are watching the same thing.”
Many of the players in the all-star games are on the negotiation lists of CFL clubs, so team officials could make changes to their lists after watching the practices leading up to the all-star games or after witnessing the games themselves.
Some CFL teams are more active than others when it comes to changing their neg lists, but O’Day noted each organization has its own philosophy.
“If you have room on your list or you have guys who are already on NFL teams and who you want to remove, then you can switch them out for guys who are coming out in that (graduating) class,” O’Day said.
“Usually when you go to a game, you’ll have a couple of guys in mind who you can take off (the neg list) just in case you want to replace them. In some cases, it happens right on the sideline. You see a guy and you want to put him on right now because there are eight other CFL teams standing there watching, too.”
Player personnel types also meet with player agents at the all-star games to find out if they have clients who might be interested in heading north if they don’t get a look from NFL teams. As O’Day noted, that networking could prove to be as valuable to a CFL organization as the scouting itself.
The Roughriders also have been active with free-agent camps, which head coach-GM Chris Jones has been running since shortly after Saskatchewan’s 2017 campaign ended.
Jones has discovered a number of CFLers at free-agent camps over the years, including receiver Derel Walker in 2015 (when Jones was the head coach of the Edmonton Eskimos) and defensive end Tobi Antigha last season.
Antigha was a receiver when he attended one of Saskatchewan’s camps last season, but Jones saw a pass-rusher in the 215-pound product of Presbyterian College.
Jones told Antigha to head home, put on some weight and attend another of the Roughriders’ workouts. Suitably impressed by what he saw, Jones signed Antigha — and the then-225-pound defensive end went on to become Saskatchewan’s most outstanding rookie in 2017.
O’Day said the number of attendees at the camps fluctuate (“You can go to one and there are only 10 guys there and you can go to another one that has 50 guys there,” he noted) but every player is presented with the same opportunity to land a job.
“Sometimes, we’re contacted by agents,” O’Day said. “If we’re not 100-per-cent sure we want to sign the guy, we’ll tell him to come to our workout. We have them all over the place, so it usually works out that they’re close to one of the places and it’s not too far of a drive for them. They can come, get in front of Chris and work out for us in person.
“You’re just trying to find that one guy who has slipped through the cracks.”
