Espionage on the CFL football field is no joke and the Calgary Stampeders counterintelligence is all hands on deck when the Saskatchewan Roughriders are coming to town.
Both football teams have decided to close one or more of their practices to unfamiliar faces or fans this week in their respective cities, before their match at McMahon Stadium Saturday at 7 p.m.
“It’s the CFL and there’s probably a good chance everybody does it [spies]. I’m sure there’s spies everywhere,” Stamps quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell said.
Spying on football plays is similar to the Art of War, “if you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt.”
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So, if an opponent even knows just a signal from a team’s playbook — it can cost them the game.
Stampeders head coach Dave Dickenson, whose brother is the Roughriders special teams co-ordinator, said when he was in the NFL, no outsiders watched practice.
“There can be an advantage gained. Especially as innocent as somebody putting something on a page saying “oh they ran this play and it was good to see so and so out there,'” Dickenson said. “You’ve got to watch what you say and you’ve got to make sure you give yourself the best chance to win.”
Meanwhile, in Riderville, Saskatchewan head coach Chris Jones said he plans to lock up practice on a weekly basis moving forward after becoming suspicious in his team’s last game against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
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“There was a couple guys in Hamilton that used to be here and we had a particular block going and they identified it in two seconds. It’s almost impossible to identify that quickly unless they’ve been working on it,” Jones said.
Cases of spying have been around the CFL for years, but so far no big punishments have been handed down. If a person is caught, the CFL said in a statement to Global News that “team and player fines are assessed individually and on a per case basis.”
But the CFL is a competitive league and team’s out west like the Stampeders and Roughriders don’t want to take any chances.
“Just look across the standings, any little edge that you can take advantage of on game day you have to do. It just so happens that we’re playing the Saskatchewan Roughriders and we’re closing practice because we want to keep everything private,” Rob Maver, punter for the Stampeders, said.
Maver is also mindful of the fact that it’s a risky two-way street.
“You got to be careful about some of the tips you’re given because it could be given to mislead or you’ve got to question the source or reliability of ‘said’ tidbits,” Maver said.
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At the end of the day, it will all come down to who executes better at McMahon Stadium come Saturday night.
“For the most part, the way football is, if you just line up and beat the man across from you, you should be alright,” Stamps running back Jerome Messam said.
Spying is also no secret in the NFL. One of the biggest scandals involved the New England Patriots in 2008, when they were fined a collective amount of $750,000 and a draft pick in what was called “Spygate” for illegally videotaping Jets coaches’ defensive signals.
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