Earlier this week, Eric Tillman did what we all expected and put an end to the Danny Barrett era in Saskatchewan. Much as we like Danny, especially if he turns up here as the Argos' O.C., we have to agree that the move was warranted after seven years of failing to get the great fans of Saskatchewan a home playoff game,.

Earlier this year, we tried to help our friends from down the highway by offering a few suggestions as to who the next coach of the Ti-Cats should be. (And we should note that all of those candidates are still available. Very available.) So in that tradition, we present some options that Tillman may want to consider for the next coach of the Riders:

Gainer the Gopher:
The most inspiring rodent since Mighty Mouse

Players need a coach who can inspire them and that they can rally around. And as he showed at this year’s West Semi Final, no rodent can inspire a team quite like Gainer. We suspect that his hiring would probably irk the Regina media corps, though, because let’s face it - if the heat starts to build, Gainer’s going underground.

Lawrence Phillips:

Hitting someone at a club? If the 'Riders are going to lead the league in felonies, they clearly need to step it up. And after trying to drive his car into a couple of teenagers who were beating him in a touch football game, Lawrence is clearly the man to do it.

John Jenkins:
We demand that this haircut be brought back into the league

If we know the Prairies like we think we do, there’s nothing that Rider fans will like more than a man who shows up to press conferences in expensive pinstriped suits and flashy red boots. Seems like a sure-fire winner.

Bonus point to Mr. Jenkins for being the candidate who most resembles a stalk of wheat.

Glen Constantinn:

Okay, this is a somewhat serious suggestion. He probably isn’t the most popular man in Saskatchewan, but could someone in the CFL please give this guy a job? At the very least, it may lead to someone other than Laval winning a Vanier Cup.

Real life seems to have gotten in the way of blogging this week, which is completely indefensible.  We apologize.

We'll get to the Danny Barrett situation this weekend, but for now, we wanted to tie up one last thread from the Grey Cup.  This National Post article by Siri Argell (found via Pop Wherry) reports that Nelly Furtado was the CFL's second choice for halftime entertainment.  The first choice?  Former boy band member and Jessica Simpson castoff Nick Lachey.  Given this strange turn of events, we thought we should break this down and see who the better choice would have been. 

In the interest of full disclosure, we should probably mention that one of your boatmen blog authors may have praised Nelly Furtado on CBC Radio Winnipeg during the game, so we may be a little biased.  On to the breakdown...

Popularity:

Nelly: If the routines of the CFL dance teams are any indication, "Promiscuous" and "Maneater" are the most popular, and therefore greatest songs of all-time

Nick: I could try and figure out where his most popular song charted and come up with some detailed analysis of why Nelly is more popular, but is it really needed?

The Edge: Nelly

The Posse:

Nelly: Nelly brought the incomparable Saukrates to the Grey Cup, and while his myspace profile only seems to reveal that he has no idea where he's from, he's easily the second best hip hop artist ever mentioned on this blog.  (No one is taking this spot from Shake Severs)

Nick: I don't know if his boy band exists any more, but regardless, yelling "Bring on Saukrates" during a bad first half of football is infinitely more entertaining than yelling "Bring on 98 Degrees".

The Edge: Nelly

Headwear:

Nelly: Umm... Maybe that hat wasn't the warmest choice, Nelly.  We can only assume that this was a terrible attempt to mimic Tom Landry.
Nelly + Saukrates = Gold 

Nick: We only brought this whole headwear (I have no idea if that is a word or not, but I'm sticking with it) thing up because we remember him wearing a U of Cincinnati Bearcats hat during a Cincinnati-Kentucky NCAA basketball game, and quite frankly, as we've established a few times on here: Anything with the word Cat in it is evil.

The Edge: Nelly

Connection to the CFL:

Nelly: Is from Canada, but mentioned in a CBC interview that she is not a football fan, and doesn't really have any sort of connection with the CFL.

Nick: As detailed in this article for argonauts.ca, Nick wanted to make a very special connection with CFL ambassadors, the Blue Thunder. This one is easy.

The Edge: Nick

So Nelly wins this battle 3-1, and the only reason this wasn't a tie... Saukrates.  I think we've figured out who the 2007 halftime act should be.

We’ll get back to our regularly scheduled football blogging momentarily, but in the meantime, we’d like to share another lesson we learned at Grey Cup week: Some Winnipegers aren’t especially fond of Brad Banks. Or chairs, for that matter.

During the Harlequin II concert, we found ourselves talking with a particularly rabid and only slightly aggressive Bombers fan. He was joking around about how the Bombers were going to steal Arland Bruce III back, or about the elaborate plan to relocate Pinball to the Prairies. A good chuckle was had by all… until he mentioned that the Bombers could use Damon Allen.

“Damon? You guys don’t need Damon, you’ve already got Brad Banks.”
Bomber Fans are Apparently Harsher than Hawkeye Fans Now, when I said this, I meant it as a compliment. Brad Banks was pretty decent in Ottawa, and while he wasn’t great in the Peg this year, he has shown some potential in the past. But uur new friend apparently didn’t agree with me. Instead, he stared blankly for seven or eight seconds as he tried to process this information; all the while his face was getting redder... and redder... and redder.

“F*** Brad Banks!" he finally bellowed. "F*** him!” At this point, he stood up to leave and we shook his hand to wish him well. However, his Banks rage wasn’t over with and something had to pay the price.

He strode confidently over to one of the folding chairs we were sitting on, picked it up, and hurled it behind him…. right at the feet at one of Winnipeg’s finest.

To the officer’s credit, he realized that the fan wasn’t trying to cause any harm and didn't eject him from the concert. But it took us a while to figure out why our new friend opted to throw a chair at someone’s feet (even if it was unintentional) - and finally, we got it. In order to show some respect for another quarterback rumoured to be the Bombers QB next year, he was simply doing his best impression of an Anthony Calvillo pass to Dave Stala.

We salute you, sir.

Anyone who's been to Grey Cup knows it's a veritable cornucopia of fine music - even for those of us who shamefully missed Tom Cochrane's performance with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and had to settle for gazing in wonderment at his autograph.

For some of us (who may or may not have already been mocked for it), there was the unparalled rock 'n' roll experience that is Free Ride. What made this the Official Rolling Stones Cover Band of Boatmenblog.com is not just that we were exceedingly drunk while watching it, nor its ability to get three off-duty Saskatchewan cheerleaders to join it on-stage at Riderville. It wasn't even the entirely reasonable decision to forego Ron Wood in favour of two Keith Richards. It's that, while the rest of the band clearly realized that it was, you know, in a Rolling Stones cover band, its lead singer was arguably more committed to being Mick Jagger than Mick Jagger is. When you're a middle-aged Saskatchewanian (or possibly Manitoban) willing to do that fey arm-waving thing during every song, and you even manage to stay in character for the between-song banter, you deserve respect. (Did we mention we were drunk, and there were cheerleaders?)

For others, there was Harlequin II. Now, for most of us, Harlequin rings a vague bell as an '80s hair band. But if you're from Winnipeg, apparently, it rings a very loud bell as the greatest band of all time. Honestly, you haven't lived until you've seen a legion of locals at a post-Grey Cup party pumping their fists and singing along to Innocence (it's all you've ever needed, apparently). And you really haven't lived until you've been handed the press release for Harlequin II, which involves the original lead singer accompanied by the likes of "Spider" and "Phil X," who apparently "require no introduction" as "some of Canada's most prominent Canadian musicians." (It also tells us Harlequin's "rather classic repertoire" is enjoyed by "a significant fan base wherever music is played," but that pretty much goes without saying.)

But here's the thing. For all of these thoroughly enjoyable musical experiences, there's one that was considerably less so.

We raise this with some trepidation, because some of us may have gotten in trouble for saying this in print previously. But we shall not be silenced. So here it is: The Saskatchewan pep band sucks.

It's hard to explain why it sucks, exactly. After all, it's certainly peppy (albeit in a slightly geriatric way). But we know we're not alone in this; we're pretty sure we heard other people heckling it as it mercifully exited the Ticats' party on Saturday night. And we've yet to see anyone look particularly happy when it turns up.

Part of the problem is that it's everywhere - if you go to five parties in a night, you're guaranteed to hear this thing at least five times. A bigger problem is that it does the same routine everywhere it goes, and that routine is pretty awful the first time. Do we really need to hear a fight song for every single team in the league? And if that really is necessary, couldn't its members learn the actual fight songs, instead of tacking generic "We are the Argos..." lyrics onto U.S. college songs?

But the biggest problem, we think, is that it's completely devoid of a sense of humour. Unlike our beloved Argonotes, these people take themselves enormously seriously. Upon their arrival, you're expected to clear the floor, stand back at a respectful distance, and watch them in reverential silence. To ensure this happens, they go so far as to ask revelers minding their own business to act as "security" to keep everyone else away from them. And no matter what the mood of the room, they're not leaving until they've played their entire repertoire.

We know we're going to get hate mail for this, and possibly be blacklisted from the entire province of Saskatchewan. But somebody had to speak up. What the world clearly needs is more Free Ride and less Saskatchewan pep band.     

...and moderately less hung over than we were yesterday. 

One of the more frustrating things about the life of a CFL fan is that the league has a tendency to fall off the face of the earth during the off-season, since every sports journalist in the country is contractually obligated to spend the winter overanalyzing the mid-season exploits of the local hockey team. But while we might make a better case for ourselves as sports journalists than, say, Jack Todd, we're not actually sports journalists.

What's the point of all this, other than to work in another gratuitous shot at Jack Todd? The point is, we're going to keep right on doing what we've been doing right through to kickoff next June. For the rest of the week, we'll be sharing some more of our special, special moments from Grey Cup '06 as they slowly creep back into memory. And from there...well, we'll see. But it's a safe bet that Shake Severs, Frank D'Angelo and the rest of our wacky cast of characters will be involved one way or another.

As you might've guessed from our eerie silence, we're somewhere just this side of dead. Or at least, after four straight days of drinking, we're more or less pickled. But considering we did manage to stumble our way into the stadium, we should probably say something about the game itself.

That's a little tricky, since games notable for their plethora of field goals generally don't make for especially good conversation. But courtesy of some great seats, we did gain a bit of insight into the sorry excuse for Grey Cup finalists that the Als turned out to be.

(For those great seats, by the way, we owe the good folks at Canad Inns Stadium some thanks. The night didn't start out too well, since the overhang above our seats had sprung a leak – giving Rusty his own private shower of...well, we're not sure what it was, exactly, since it was a perfectly clear night. But to their credit, it only took a few minutes after our complaint for them to move us to different seats, which happened to be a lot closer to the field. Not so good for Rusty, who was soaked for the rest of the game, but rather enjoyable for the rest of us.)

Anyway, the thing about the Als is – how to put this delicately? – they're pansies.

Yes, it was cold outside. But you know, the rest of us managed. The Hamilton cheerleaders, who probably have an average weight of 102 pounds, even managed to rip off their jackets during their routine to perform the rest of it in sleeveless shirts. So you'd think that the Als - big men playing a championship game in front of millions of people – would have so much adrenaline pumping through their veins that the temperature would be the last thing on their minds.

Instead, these guys were one step away from huddling together for warmth. True, they did manage to find the energy to yap incessantly at the Lions - including, inexplicably, as the B.C. players ran out of the tunnel at the start of the game. But every time they came back to their bench, which we were conveniently seated behind, all the testosterone apparently left their bodies.

We knew it was a bad sign when several players – Ben Cahoon and Dave Stalla among them – insisted on putting on sweatpants every time they left the field. But what really blew our minds was the ass-warming.

It's one thing to go by those sideline heaters now and then to warm up your hands a bit. But we've never seen so many guys make a beeline for the thing every time they come off. And we've certainly never seen them constantly use it to heat their posteriors.

Understand that these guys were actively jockeying for position – stepping in between one another to get this sacred spot. And while some of them were at least subtle about it, several others were literally wiggling their butts in front of it to get the best possible position. You really haven't lived until you've seen Mark Estelle do this for minutes on end.

Personally, we'd have left just moves to Nelly Furtado, and worried more about what was happening on the field.
But then, we don't have the experience choking in the Grey Cup that the Als do.

A couple of random notes before we get in to the predictions...  No one - and I mean no one - is cheering for Montreal.  We've run in to as many Ottawa fans as Montreal fans so far, and none of the fans from the other teams are pulling for the Als. There might be quite a bit of bruit when Montreal has the ball tonight (and for a change it won't be confused Montreal fans yelling). 

Also, it should be noted that while we're cheering for the Lions, their cheerleaders have put in a bit of a poor effort so far. We've seen the Felions 3 times this weekend, and they always leave the stage after 90 seconds of dancing.  Hopefully they're saving their energy for the game. On to the picks...

Rusty's Pick:

Montreal at BC

The lack of Montreal fans at tonight's game?  Don Matthews' fault.  Montreal being 7 point underdogs... Don Matthews fault.  The lack of beer on the Westjet flight over here... Don Matthews' fault.  The fact that I'm somewhat hungover and want to crawl back in to bed... Don Matthews' fault.

Pick: BC

A-Rad's pick

Montreal at BC

Like everyone else, I'm pretty excited about tonight's Nelly Furtado appearance; every cheerleading team is apparently required to include Maneater in their routines, and there's always something amusing about normally scantily clad starlets doing Grey Cup halftime shows in parkas. But there's just one problem: Assuming Timbaland didn't make the trip to central Canad, and that seems a fair assumption, who's going to duet with her on Promiscuous?

When you think about it, there's a pretty obvious answer. He's one of Canada's top music talents, has a strong CFL connection, and probably doesn't have any other plans. If memory serves, he even flirted with the idea of coming to Winnipeg earlier in the year. Yep, someone needs to get Shake Severs out here, pronto.

Pick: BC

Bonus pick:

To cap off the season, having persevered through a series of entirely plausible scenarios, Pinball is invited to play every team in the league (except the Argos, obviously) at the same time. To make matters even tougher, Wally Buono has injected Pinball with a flu virus, Don Matthews has shrunk him to three feet tall, Kent Austin has been installed as his offensive coordinator, Frank D'Angelo's cover of Here for a Good Time is piped into his helmet throughout the game, all the wind from Portage and Main is being blown directly at him, Jason Maas turns up to "help" him as his quarterback, he's forced to eat an entire turkey before the game, Montreal cops won't stop chasing him, and he's forced to play the game wearing the Gainer the Gopher costume. How does Pinball do?*

Rusty's Pick: Pinball 298, CFL 0. (Honestly, it would have been more of a blow out if D'Angelo wasn't involved.  That man ruins everything.)

A-Rad's pick: Pinball 246, CFL 17. (Good thing we've spent much of this weekend encouraging random people to visit this site. Because this post clearly won't confuse them a bit.)

* = Everything we need to know about football analysis, we learned from early '90s SNL sketches.. 

Okay, we know Winnipeg has a proud Ukrainian history. But we're still feeling a little weirded out right now.

As Shoomy mentioned below, we spent this morning at the Spirit of Edmonton breakfast. It was, on the whole, a lovely experience - as are all opportunities to drink vodka at 7:30 a.m. But we're having a bit of a hard time wrapping our heads around the tastes of our fellow morning drinkers (of whom, by the way, there were about a thousand - this is a hard-core breakfast).

See, the event largely revolves around each team's cheerleading squad turning up in the middle of the room to strut its stuff. This, to us, is generally a good thing - especially when it involves the Calgary cheerleaders, who more or less refused to leave the stage, or the Winnipeg ones, who are clearly the creme de la creme of CFL cheerleaders. (We now understand why their potentially topless shenanigans in Regina caused such a ruckus.) But most of the routines earned little more than polite applause - at least compared to the euphoric response that greeted not one but two sets of traditional Ukrainain dancers.

Now, understand that we have nothing against traditional Ukrainain dancers. And these, the second set in particular, were rather good ones. Had it been some sort of cultural event, they would have fit in a whole lot better than a bunch of petite 20-year-olds in boots and halter tops. But since this was a Grey Cup breakfast, 80% male and 97% drunk, the whole thing was a little confusing.

Maybe it'll make more sense once we sober up.

We've spent quite a bit of time here hanging with our man Jaime Stein, who calls Argos games for AM 640. And so we should point out that, along with visiting Louisianian Jack B. Beddell, Steiner has his own Grey Cup blog over at CFL.ca.

We should also note that Steiner is ending every post with "see you on the field", so if you want to celebrate with the winning team after the game, just tell 'em that Steiner sent you.

They say you never forget your first time, and neither does your liver. So rather than just share our own drunken observations with you, we bring you the virginal Grey Cup experience of our man Shoomy. (You may remember him from such jerseys as Jerome Davis's.) In his first missive, he shares his moments soliciting kisses from cheerleaders, shaking hands with Noel Prefontaine and chatting with a giant lobster.)

***

It’s 9:30am on Saturday of Grey Cup weekend. A-Rad and Rusty were up this morning at 6:45 to make it to the Spirit of Edmonton for breakfast. Call me crazy - or still drunk - but the idea of paying $60 for the honour of waking up at 6:45 after an all day and night boozing and bamboozling session just didn’t appeal to me all that much. I’ll just settle for my usual breakfast of coffee and rye in the hotel room.

We checked out the East Coast party yesterday. Decent lobster rolls and a fine Celtic band made it an enjoyable event - although I could use a ruling on the exact definition of the word “fresh.” Were these allegedly “fresh” lobster rolls pulled out of a body of water in Winnipeg I don’t know about? And when we went back to the party at around 12:30 a.m., how did they still have “fresh” lobster rolls on offer. Was there a continuous flight to and from Halifax restocking the supply? (Yes, I did have a Lobster roll at 12:45am. And yes, I was better for it.)

We left the Atlantic party and headed over to the Argo Double Blue Fest, where I had my first full-blown religious experience since my Bar Mitzvah. I encountered G-D - and his name is Michael Clemons. Soon, his name will officially have to be changed to Mayor of Toronto Michael Clemons. I’m not saying I have anything against the newly re-elected David Miller, but I saw Argo fans asking Pinball to sire their first child – this guy is going to win whenever and whatever public office he chooses to run for.

Not to be outdone, Noel Prefontaine was also in attendance and continued to establish himself as a wonderful ambassador for the Argos and the CFL. At some point after the Grey Cup, I’ll detail my numerous Prefontaine encounters. But this one was particularly enjoyable. As Pre began to shake my hand, he was interrupted by a fan who wanted to say hello. Our hands were still locked and still moving in an up-and-down motion while this other fan proceeded to chew his ear off. This went on for at least two minutes, which was enough time for me to think of ways to deal with the situation:

A) Ride it out and continue shaking

B) Break grip but stay close to at least complete the “hello” when he finished speaking to the other fan.

C) Break grip, give Noel a gentlemanly nod as I walk away and allow him to devote his full attention to this new fan.

I went with the first option: Longest… handshake … (still shaking)… ever…

While I wasn’t impressed with the cover charge for Argo fest, it was hard to argue with the number of giveaways – tickets to this year’s Grey Cup as well as next year’s game in Toronto, with a touchdown celebration dance contest to decide who would win the tickets.

Now, I’ve been known to do a mean touchdown dance, and A-Rad has designed one of the most elaborate and well thought-out dances I’ve ever heard of. (It’s the Blue Steel of touchdown dances. Perhaps if you ask him nicely he might post a video demonstration around here – I assure you it would be worth it.) But neither of us entered the competition. Here’s why – as a man in my 20s, I know I have close to zero chance of ever winning one of these contests.

To prove my point, they got three gentlemen such as myself on stage and then an older (middle-aged) woman. The guys all did their routines of varying style and degree of difficulty; then the woman got up, turned to the crowd, gave a little booty shake and blew the house down. When the contestants were chosen, was there any doubt she was going to win? Maybe if she’d flipped Pinball the bird, or if she’d been up against a small child or Dancing Gabe. Certainly, no twenty-something man was taking her down.

It was at this point that we realized that despite feeling like it was 2:00a.m., it was actually only 6:30pm. We also came to the conclusion that despite the ample supply of Frank’s Red Hot sauce and the cute girls serving it (more on this in my wrap up post), we needed something to eat. Thank you, shockingly empty Pizza Hut.

The rest of the night basically centred around my quest to receive a kiss on the cheek from a member of every cheerleading team. Rusty played a strong wingman in this Vision Quest. At one point, he told me I was being too picky when I refused a picture from a member of Toronto’s own Blue Thunder simply because she was not my beloved Michelle G.

We went back and forth between Ticat Town and Riderville, with the brief aforementioned stop to the Atlantic party. No cheerleaders, sadly, but I did encounter the mascot for the Atlantic-team-to-be-named-later.
The Lobster with Some Bad Ass Rider FansThe Atlantic Lobster was only too happy to chat, and when I asked him to give-me-five, he replied “more like two.” But when we interrupted him taking a cigarette break outside the York Hotel and asked for a picture, he asked for “just one second to finish this butt” - totally bush-league, if you ask me, but certainly no reason to reject CFL expansion out east. (Can anyone honestly say they wouldn’t book their tickets tomorrow if there was the opportunity for a Grey Cup in Halifax?)

Our night concluded with me receiving three more kisses, and A-Rad once again swooning over “Free Ride” – the Rolling Stones Cover Band at Riderville. The quote of the night would have to go to Rusty as a scraggly looking tech person was setting up the mikes before the band’s second set. “There is the Free Ride roadie. And that is exactly what I would expect the Free Ride roadie to look like.” Meanwhile, A-Rad spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure who was Ron Wood and Keith Richards between the guitar player and the bassist. Let me reiterate I was checking for cheerleaders while A-Rad was scoping the band; to each their own.

Back to the present - Rusty has just re-entered the room from breakfast and told me that every cheerleading troupe was represented at the Spirit of Edmonton breakfast. His exact words were - “that might have been your big chance, but if we work really hard we can still get the job done today”.

On that note, bring on Day 3!