The Edmonton Eskimos won’t be kicking off their season on time.
Not that they were really planning to at this point in the whole COVID-19 proceedings.
But it became official Tuesday with the Canadian Football League announcing nothing will take place before at least July 1.
The Eskimos were set to kick off the CFL regular season with a visit from the B.C. Lions on June 11, their first of three games that month.
“Once I heard Calgary and Toronto said no public events until June 30, it’s pretty much a done deal that there wasn’t going to be any CFL football until then,” Eskimos quarterback Trevor Harris said on a phone call from his family home in Waldo, Ohio, where he and his wife, Kalie, welcomed their second child, Trace Thomas, exactly five weeks ago. “I mean, unless they planned on doing no home games for Calgary and Toronto, and that becomes another separate entity. But then, what if Winnipeg jumps on board and then Edmonton jumps on board? So, you just don’t know.
“Once you hear that, you realize you’re probably not going to see CFL football until July 1.”
While it means more off-season training for Eskimos players, who are doing everything they can to continue with workouts in isolation while the facilities at Commonwealth Stadium, not to mention gyms across the city, remain closed, Tuesday’s announcement did nothing to knock the Eskimos front office from its off-season track.
“We’re not allowed in the building and the league mandated all of our facilities are on lockdown,” Eskimos general manager Brock Sunderland said from his Edmonton residence, where he lives year-round. “The biggest thing right now is the focus is on the draft, so the biggest difference is we’re not going to be able to have draft meetings where our head coach can be here and all the scouts can be here together.”
The CFL National Draft, set for April 30, is pushing ahead as planned, though teams and the potential players they’re looking at won’t have the benefit of having gone through the regional and national combines. They were all cancelled, while training camps scheduled to open in mid-May had previously been postponed.
Impacting the start of the season was just the next logical step.
“Not a huge surprise with what’s going on in the world right now,” Sunderland said. “And what we think about it is we’re very much in the state of health and safety, first and foremost above anything else. So we all love football and we want it to come back, we believe it will come back at some point. When that time is, none of us really know.
“The biggest thing right now is making sure that everybody’s healthy: Our players, the support staff, the fans, everyone who works here at the stadium and at stadiums across the country.”
There is no counter-argument to be made, after all, to pushing back the start of the season.
“I think, for right now, it’s the right move to make sure that everybody’s protected and safety is first and foremost,” Sunderland said. “The rest of it is we’re basically controlling what we can control. A lot of this stuff is out of our control, like it is for everybody else. So we’re doing our due diligence and making sure that we are doing the things that we can do, which is watching film and cross-checking players and communicating on the phone daily to make sure what I’m seeing is what Scott (Milanovich, head coach) is seeing.
“Or if we disagree, which certainly happens, we watch a little bit more games and figure things out that way. So we’re going to control what we can control right now and that’s all we can do.”
Instead of focusing on the time lost this season, Harris encourages football fans in the city to try and stay positive by thinking about better times to come.
“I’m a little more on the optimistic side, I feel like something’s going to break through for us and well have a season,” he said. “We’ll have a long season. That’s just what I’m going to continue to believe in and I really do feel that way. I’m really looking forward to that because I think we have a special, special group and special things brewing in Edmonton.
“And I think it could be something that we’re putting together for years to come. It could be a great thing.”
E-mail: [email protected]
On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge
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