It appears that three-time Grey Cup champion head coach Marc Trestman is not a fan of many of the rule changes being explored by CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie and the rest of the league’s board of governors.
On Sunday, Sportsnet reporter Arash Madani shared a screengrab of an alleged deleted tweet from the legendary CFL coach with the caption: “Even Marc Trestman had to vent at the lunacy going on.”
Even Marc Trestman had to vent at the lunacy going on pic.twitter.com/OFzZtplCoj
— Arash Madani (@ArashMadani) April 17, 2022
In the tweet, Trestman was responding to comments made by Ambrosie at his Randy’s Road Trip stop in Hamilton, in which the commissioner defended a proposed rule change to narrow the hashmarks by citing the opinion of Ticats receiver Bralon Addison as evidence that the difficulty of wide-side throws really made the CFL an 11-man game. Trestman was having none of it.
“Respectfully Mr. Ambrosie – attention on rules, hashmarks, ratio, etc, is a ‘distraction.’ Let’s focus on the ‘long hard road’ of growing the CFL fan base,” he wrote, according to the screengrab. “Can’t imagine a game w/o a Ricky Ray wide-side corner ‘dime’? Btw, a player ‘response’ for ‘reasoning’ is ‘reckless’!”
The image timestamps the tweet at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, but it no longer appears on Trestman’s Twitter feed. It is unknown how quickly the comments were removed.
Trestman has come to the defence of CFL purity before, publicly stating his opposition to the league converting to four downs when that was the subject of conversation earlier this offseason. It appears he is equally opposed to smaller alterations, such as changing the hashmarks, as well as the recent debate surrounding lowering the Canadian ratio.
Currently an adjunct professor at the University of Miami’s law school, Trestman first arrived in Canada in 2008 as head coach of the Montreal Alouettes after a long career as an NFL assistant. The Alouettes won the East Division regular season title four times and claimed back-to-back Grey Cups in 2009 and 2010. He accumulated 59 wins in 90 regular season games and went 5-3 in the playoffs.
The Minneapolis, Minnesota native was then hired as head coach of the Chicago Bears in 2013 but he was fired after the 2014 campaign with a 13-19 record. He spent one season as the Baltimore Ravens offensive coordinator in 2015, but was fired mid-way through the next season.
Trestman returned to the CFL in 2017 as head coach of the Toronto Argonauts and took the team to a Grey Cup championship in his first season. However, his 15-23 overall record and tumultuous 2018 campaign ultimately led to his departure a year later. He last served as head coach of the XFL’s Tampa Bay Vipers in 2020.
Trestman has long been one of the CFL’s greatest supporters south of the border, so it should come as no surprise that he would oppose fundamental changes to the game that helped build his legacy.
