If the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ winless skid continues beyond their current bye week, general manager Jeremy O’Day will take a big step toward some historic milestones.
And not the good kind, either.
The 50-year-old, who has been with the organization in some form or fashion since 1999 and is in his fifth season as GM, is trending dangerously close to missing the playoffs for a third straight year.
The significance of this, on top of the angry callers to the postgame shows on Regina talk radio and the empty seats at beautiful Mosaic Stadium, is that this hasn’t happened in a very long time. Almost ever, in fact.
The last GM to preside over three-straight playoff misses in Saskatchewan was the late Jim Spavital from 1980 to 1982. Much of the team’s current fanbase wasn’t even alive when that happened.
In fairness to Spavital and his descendants, it should be noted that the Riders posted a winning record of 9-7 in 1981, good for the fifth-best record in a nine-team league. Had the crossover rule existed then as it does now, Saskatchewan would have visited the Ottawa Rough Riders (5-11) for the East Semi-Final.
That team, legendary for its unselfish ‘J.J.-Barnagel’ quarterbacking duo of Joe Barnes and John Hufnagel, swept Ottawa that year in the regular season. That 1981 squad was good — although not good enough — and they had spunk and personality.
The Riders of the last two years? Not so much.
If Saskatchewan misses the playoffs this year — a distinct possibility given where they sit in the middle of a topsy-turvy West Division — it will likely happen with a third-straight losing record.
Saskatchewan’s last GM to have that happen was Al Ford in the late 1990s, around the time he signed a fresh-faced free-agent offensive lineman away from the Toronto Argonauts named Jeremy O’Day.
But Al never missed the playoffs three years in a row.
Despite an 8-10 record in 1997, the Green and White upset Jeff Garcia and the Calgary Stampeders in the West Semi-Final before knocking off Edmonton in the West Final. Their Grey Cup dreams were dashed the following week when they hit a brick wall named Doug Flutie, Pinball Clemons, Robert Drummond, Jeremy O’Day, and the Toronto Argonauts.
But back-to-back-to-back years of missing the playoffs and a losing record to boot with the same GM? That’s only happened in Saskatchewan once in the modern era of the Canadian Football League, dating back to 1958.
And that’s where this comparison has a silver lining for J.O.
There have been 12 general managers for this franchise since 1958 and the only one to so far carry this dubious distinction — remember, O’Day hasn’t got there yet — was also the team’s most successful.
The great Ken Preston managed the Riders for 21 years, including an 8-37-3 stretch from 1959-61 that included three consecutive playoff misses. Even Saskatchewan’s 17-31-1 record since 2022 doesn’t rival that disaster of the early days of the club.
Preston eventually found franchise legends Ron Lancaster and George Reed and a Grey Cup championship and 11-straight West Final appearances soon followed.
But if the ending to this Riders campaign is as stinko as the last two have been, no one in Regina will be comparing Jeremy O’Day to Ken Preston.
This team, which hasn’t won a game after the first week of September since the pandemic-shortened season of 2021, had better get it together quickly or their general manager just might follow in the footsteps of Cody Fajardo and Craig Dickenson, neither of whom were offered new contracts after each of the last two failures in Riderville.
For his part, team president and CEO Craig Reynolds, who gave O’Day a three-year extension at the end of last year, has offered no indication that O’Day is in any jeopardy of being punted at the end of the season, no matter how disastrous it may turn out. The CFL’s operations cap would also make it inconvenient to get rid of a highly-paid personnel guy with two years left on his deal.
However, it’s hard to imagine being able to sell Jeremy O’Day to a jaded fanbase again if yet another late-season meltdown materializes, as well-liked in the community as he is.
O’Day has been with the organization for 26 years and he’s a nice guy to boot. The problem is there are a lot of nice guys and gals around Regina who don’t all get to be general manager of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
Much of the critique surrounding this year’s mid-season sag has been around the unfortunate and untimely injuries to prized free agent pickups Trevor Harris, A.J. Ouellette, and Jermarcus Hardrick. When these players are all healthy, there isn’t much wrong with this team as evidenced by its 5-1 start, which now feels like a distant memory.
One could also argue, however, that this general manager has too heavily relied on retreads when constructing this team over the years. The Roughriders aren’t growing their roster organically at key positions and it’s putting undue stress on their aging, expensive free-agent acquisitions to carry the load.
A draft and development organization is the foundation of success in any professional sports league. Young, enthusiastic athletes grow up in the system together and play for the crest on the jersey and their teammates. They can also be had for something less than a king’s ransom and their bodies just might hold up to the rigors of an 18-game season.
There are positions at which this team has done an excellent job of drafting and developing young talent — the receiving corps certainly comes to mind — but they’ve not done that consistently enough in other areas. Free agents are expensive, usually motivated by personal gain, and are often older players who get injured more frequently and that’s certainly been the case in Saskatchewan.
Many fans in Regina felt very little connection to Chris Jones when he was with the Roughriders as everything with him felt like a business transaction. And a good number of those fans were fine with seeing him leave before the 2019 season when he was replaced by O’Day to be the general manager.
However, the win totals improved in each of Chris Jones’ three seasons in Riderville. The opposite has happened under Jeremy O’Day.
This year’s Riders have been frozen at five wins for what will be two full months by the time they get their next chance to get victory number six. They will enter that game off a bye against a mediocre Calgary Stampeders team, which currently sits dead last in the West Division.
Now no time to panic, especially with the Roughriders still in playoff position as of now. But a loss in Calgary would put this team and its general manager behind the eight-ball like it never imagined when the season started.
A current relaxing week off in Riderville really does feel like a calm before the storm.
