Sporting Madness

Doug Farrar has an excellent piece over at Yahoo! Sports on the jump from the CFL to the NFL. He talks to former B.C. Lions Cam Wake and Ricky Foley about their experiences in transition, but perhaps the most interesting part is his discussion with agent Paul Sheehy about the loss of the "NFL window" in the CFL's new CBA. That certainly will limit the CFL's personnel losses, which have been quite high in recent years, but Sheehy thinks it might also lower the quality of the CFL; talented players who miss out on NFL contracts or get cut may wind up heading to the UFL instead, which is easier to get out of. The whole piece is a good read, and I'd recommend it even if I didn't contribute some minor information on guys who could perhaps make that jump in the future. Check it out .

In the next instalment in my extended interview series for this piece on innovation in the NFL for The Good Point , I present Steve Sheiner of the Miami Dolphins site Blog With A Porpoise . Steve is also a senior editor at Fanball.com , the network I run Canuck Puck for. He had a lot of interesting comments on the Dolphins, the Wildcat offence, former B.C. Lion Cameron Wake and innovation in the NFL in general. Read on for the full interview! Andrew Bucholtz: The Dolphins obviously made a huge turnaround last year, going from the league's worst record to AFC East champions. How much of that success do you attribute to their implementation of the Wildcat offence? Steve Sheiner: I certainly think that played a role in their success as they caught a lot of teams off-guard that were ill-prepared to defend against such an unfamiliar attack. But more realistically, the Dolphins had one of the cushiest schedules in 2008 and the loss of Tom Brady in the division certainly didn’t hur...

The CFL's always a good option for CIS football diehards looking for offseason entertainment, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders are one of the teams to watch. As Neate pointed out with his list of CIS players in the CFL the other day, Saskatchewan is well ahead of the rest of the league in terms of CIS content. The Roughriders, who start their season tonight against the B.C. Lions, have a league-high 21 CIS-trained players on their roster. I'll be live-blogging the game here tonight; kickoff is at 9 p.m. Eastern. Saskatchewan's Canadian-trained talent is perhaps most evident in the receiving corps, where the Riders have two players who are already stars (slotback Jason Clermont from the University of Regina and wide receiver Andy Fantuz from Western) and three more with serious star potential (wide receiver Rob Bagg from Queen's, who I profiled here , slotback Chris Getzlaf from the University of Regina and wide receiver Adam Nicolson from the University of Ottawa...

Well, I didn't get the chance to post the recap of last week's B.C. Lions - Winnipeg Blue Bombers game earlier in the week, so I figured I'd save it for now to properly set up tonight's rematch. Here's the GBU breakdown from last week's game in Winnipeg: Final score : 42-24, B.C. How I saw it : On TSN. The Good: Stefan Logan: The pint-sized (5'7'', 185 pounds) running back not only filled in for the injured Joe Smith, he did an exceptional job of it, picking up 143 yards on only 18 carries in the CFL's second-best debut performance ever by a running back (the best was Larry Key, way back in 1978). He forced the Bombers to respect the ground attack, opening up passing lanes for the Lions' air attack. Jarious Jackson: The Lions' quarterback had a fantastic game, going 19 for 24 to pick up 340 yards and 5 aerial touchdowns while only conceding one interception. He also ran twice for 18 yards. As a result, he picked up the CFL's offensi...

Photo: Saskatchewan knocked off B.C. 26-16 Friday night. (Photo from Luongo ) First, a quick disclaimer. There was plenty that happened in the sports I'm interested in over the weekend, but unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of time to write about it. Thus, I started several posts but didn't get them finished: they should go up later tonight or early tomorrow. Here's the first one. I'm going to try to start doing some analysis of the various games I go to or watch on here. There's usually plenty of other outlets handling the game stories, so I'll focus more on the analytical side, with perhaps a bit of humour here and there. My preferred method for these is from the Clint Eastwood classic " The Good, The Bad and The Ugly ," breaking down the best performances, the worst performances and the just plain awful stuff that happened (a previous example is here ). I'll file these under "The GBU". As always, post thoughts on the series or ide...