The Edmonton Elks have turned their attention to 2024 after wrapping up their regular season this past weekend with a 45-25 loss to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
Though the club finished with a disappointing 4-14 record for the second consecutive year, the emergence of Canadian quarterback Tre Ford has given fans hope for the future. Despite his success, however, it doesn’t appear as though head coach and general manager Chris Jones is willing to give him a long leash as the new face of the franchise.
“Tre’s a good player, he’s going to have to come back and compete for a job just like everybody else. He’ll come in as our number one but Tyler Cornelius is a good player also and I feel like we not only have two good quarterbacks, I think we have a third. I think (Jarret) Doege’s a good little quarterback. Everything’s a competition in pro football and it’ll be square one when we come back day one,” Jones told the media in Edmonton.
“(Ford) won four ball games for us and he showed the dynamic ability that he can do some things that no other guy in the league can do. Now if he can just go make those — I call them the ‘Dave Dickenson plays’ — find your checkdown … and don’t always try to force balls in and don’t always look to run … I think he’s gonna be a very good quarterback.”
Ford completed 67.4 percent of his passes for 2,069 yards, 12 touchdowns, and six interceptions this past season, going 4-6 as the team’s starter. He also carried the ball 66 times for 622 yards and three touchdowns to finish eleventh league-wide in rushing yards.
It took two months for Jones to make a quarterback change this season after he repeatedly admonished Ford’s performance during training camp and in practice. In a way, it was a similar story to the one that played out in 2022.
Nick Arbuckle was Edmonton’s week-one starter last year and he played three games — all losses — before the reins were handed to Ford. The Waterloo product suffered a serious shoulder injury in his second start, which is when Cornelius, who’d started the year as a healthy scratch, was given the top job and eventually anointed the club’s franchise quarterback with a two-year contract extension, which included $100,000 of guaranteed money in 2024.
In 2023, it was Doege, not Ford, who was the next man up when Edmonton first decided to move away from Cornelius following an 0-3 start. Doege started and struggled in the team’s 26-7 loss to the Ottawa Redblacks in Week 4, though he finished the year with a respectable 587 passing yards, four touchdowns, and four interceptions.
Cornelius started another four games after Doege’s one-off performance and lost them all, going 0-7 as a starter on the year. He threw for 1,305 yards, five touchdowns, and nine interceptions and ran the ball 71 times for 502 yards and seven touchdowns, six of which came after he’d been relegated to short-yardage duty.
It seems fair to question whether or not Cornelius would even be back with the team next year if it weren’t for the guaranteed portion of his salary. As for the rest of the roster, it appears Jones is looking to largely stand pat heading into 2024. The team has only 16 pending free agents, which is significantly fewer than most clubs around the CFL.
“We’re gonna look at everything and see who all’s available. We’re not going to be nearly as aggressive in free agency as what we’ve been in the past two years. We’re looking at more continuity on our roster and I think that’ll bode well in the fact that guys know who’s where on the roster,” said Jones.
“There won’t be very much change, we were a lot closer than what we were a year ago. We had a lot of the older guys get injured the first year and it kind of makes you look back in hindsight and want to go young the first year and maybe we’d be farther along than what we are right now, but we’ve got a good young roster.”
Eugene Lewis, Steven Dunbar Jr., and Kyran Moore were the team’s three marquee free agent additions this past off-season, though none of the veteran receivers cracked the 1,000-yard mark in 2023. Inconsistent quarterback play was undoubtedly a factor, as was the scheme of offensive coordinator Stephen McAdoo, who was demoted partway through the season.
Regardless, Edmonton will need more from its star players and its coaching staff next year if the club wants to make the playoffs for the first time since 2019. The team’s attendance rose slightly from 2022 to 2023 but fans are clearly still not buying fully into an organization that’s won only eleven games since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve gotta keep our nose to the grindstone. We’ve never quit on anything, so we’ve gotta keep working and do the things that we know that have been successful in all the other places that we’ve been,” said Jones.
“It’s very frustrating but at the same time, I’ve told them and given them my word that all we’re going to do is look forward. We can’t sit there and wallow in the fact that we’ve had two four-(win) years back-to-back. We’re looking at where we’re going. … I wish we could get started today but we’ve got a lot of work to do in the off-season.”
