Ed Tait is a Winnipeg based writer for BlueBombers.com who wrote a blog about CFL week for Global News
The food arrived in a little red wagon. Cheeseburgers, piled up on top of one another in giant stacks, were delivered to a throng of Canadian Football League prospects who promptly pounced on the wagon like looters in a riot.
It was the early 1990s, back in Cal Murphy’s days with the Blue Bombers, and the league’s draft combine was being held at the Golf Dome in Winnipeg. This was the infancy of the event and some of the logistics – like how to properly feed enormous men who inhale red meat around the clock – might have been a little short on the details or style points.
Back then the players, by and large, also didn’t have the strength and speed coaches they do now. And they weren’t all decked out in tights, with spikes for the sprints and different cleats for each event.
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True story from that combine in the Golf Dome: yours truly was standing beside Murphy while the individual 40-yard sprints were being run and we noticed a player slip off his sweats and workboots – yes, workboots – and then promptly cover the distance wearing just a T-shirt and boxer shorts.
Trouble is, on his first attempt the prospect’s boxers weren’t exactly keeping all his parts covered up, so to speak, prompting Murphy to howl: ‘Judas Priest! Tell that kid to put his sweats back on!’
All of this is to point out that while the combine testing hasn’t changed over the years – prospects are still put through a series of drills including the bench press, vertical jump and the 40 – the bells and whistles surrounding the event has undergone a dramatic transformation.
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So, too, has the entire league.
The CFL’s National Combine is being live-streamed now as part of the league’s inaugural CFL Week, a six-day event that has seen players from each of the nine teams flown into Regina to schmooze with fans, featured the unveiling of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame’s 2017 induction class – including Mike O’Shea of the Bombers – a fan-experience event and the combine itself which is being held Friday and Saturday before the watchful eyes of scouts, GMs and head coaches from all the teams.
All of this is part of the league’s evolution and part of what makes CFL Week, a tool to generate hype about the league in the offseason, so important. And just a couple of days into the event it was already being hailed as a brilliant brainstorm by anyone and everyone who has attended.
“We need more of these,” said Wally Buono, the B.C. Lions boss and dean of CFL coaches, during a confab with the media this week. “The CFL cannot exist just in the months from June to November.”
“We’ve got to keep the focus on the CFL all year round and things like this will go a long, long way to help that. Hopefully this will help us engage the younger generation which we definitely need again.”
“I was just thrilled to hear how pleased the players were with the event. That’s what is making this really positive. Obviously, you want the fans involved and the media here, but the fact that the players see this as a tribute to who they are and what they do was very, very, very positive.”
Finally, an update for those of you who may have been wondering from Day 1 of the combine: the players weren’t fed cheeseburgers off the back of a wagon and, thankfully, there were no wardrobe malfunctions.
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