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Originally Posted by SPTO |
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Well...I guess there goes his job now!
Jeez, When Kelly was hired I thought he'd be a good guy for the Blue Bombers what with him coming from the Eskimos organization but he's been nothing but a loose cannon and generally a big bad bully. He's been arrested on assault charges which doesn't surprise me too much given his anger issues.
I feel bad for Bombers fans like bluengold here at OS.
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Yeah, so did I. Lyle Bauer was selling him as a good media guy, a player's coach and all these things but that was the farthest thing from the truth.
His relationship with the media was basically broken from the start when he limited their amount of time in practices so at first I gave him a pass on some things because I thought it was just the media out for his head but as the season went on, it was pretty clear it was Mike himself that was doing all of the damage.
Nevermind the media, his relationships with players was just as broken. For a guy that was labeled as and prided himself on being a "player's coach", he sure seemed to get on the bad side of a lot of our players.
First there was the Derrick Armstrong incident, in Week 1 no less, where Kelly decided it was a good idea to tell Derrick he'll be coming off the bench and rotating in just minutes before the game against Edmonton kicks off (and it wasn't even Kelly who told him, it was an assistant coach). Derrick was against that and sat out the game. A lot of people thought it was Armstrong quitting on the team but for a guy who was taking cortisone shots for his knee to play every game for the last year or 2, I'd hardly consider him a guy that would quit on his team.
Then of course, the Barrin Simpson fiasco. Instead of asking Barrin whether or not he wants to play through his injured toe, Kelly decides to bench him and then try and force him onto the 9 game injured list.
And to further confirm his lack of being a "player's coach", check out this video on TSN.ca. Doug Brown, absolutely the most classiest guy you could find in the CFL, and Obby Khan sounded off on Mike Kelly:
http://watch.tsn.ca/cfl-news-and-hig...141#clip248141
I mean really, a list of the things this guy did wrong is probably bigger than a little kid's Christmas wish list. Hell, the guy had more incidents this year than we had wins (7). I've never seen so much dysfunction around a team, or at least a CFL team. The funny thing is, I complain a bit about our team never getting much attention paid to it, but this year we got that. Just not the kind of attention I wanted. We basically became the joke of the league ala Toronto and Hamilton a few years ago. It was so bad that some Rider fans felt bad for us and they were barely considering us a rival (who's laughing now after the 13th man though?
)
I will say, the one positive side of Kelly was his management of the team. We have about 4 free agents, 2 of them being key pieces of our team (Jovon Johnson and Alexis Serna), compared to year's past where Brendan Taman had handfuls of player's to try and re-sign at years end. Plus the fact that he completely fixed our secondary, which has been one of, if not the worst, units in the league, fixed our special teams which was an issue for Doug Berry's entire tenure here and supplied us with a wealth of young players and depth (just look at our secondary and defensive line). So the guy does have a pretty good eye for talent, it's just he couldn't get us a legitimate QB and he was too damn hard-headed to want to change his clearly out of date offense. It was even mentioned today that Stefan LeFors asked Kelly if he would be willing to make some changes to the offensive system because it just wasn't working and Kelly told him no because he thought "It has to work. It worked before, I'll make it work again." The fact he was against using the Shotgun formation because "shotgun is for flag football" is proof enough that the guy just wasn't going to run a proper offense or a proper CFL offense.
Also, one last positive about Kelly. He did seem like a decent guy when I seen him in person. There's a disabled guy in a wheelchair that goes to practice every day and Mike was always very friendly to him. I only went to one practice this year but when I was waiting outside to get some autographs from players (funny thing about this is I got an autograph from Mike. That one is a keeper, lol), he was joking around with that guy and I've heard he would always toss a football around with him and things like that. And I didn't have the longest talk with Mike when I met him, but he did seem like a genuinely nice guy, it just seems that he has this aggressive personality where he wants to do things his way and that his way is always the right way.
But yeah, that's my thoughts on this for now. They're all over the place because there is just so much this guy did and he caused this team and its fanbase a lot of frustration.
Yes. A lot of people up here prefer the CFL to the NFL. But like Spear said, it's a little more towards the Western Canadian side in terms of die hard fans because of the lack of success in Toronto, no team in Ottawa and up until this season, lack of success in Hamilton. I did read an article awhile back though that says interest in football overall is growing in Quebec because of the success of the Alouettes among other things.
EDIT: Thought I'd share this. Ah, the life of a sports fan in Winnipeg...
