1984: "Trojans Ontario (Midget) Football Champs"

The partial article below was added to the Midget page earlier tonight. It was written by Bob Ferguson and featured in the local sports section of the Monday, November 12th, Ottawa Citizen. The game took place the Sunday before.

Mr. Ferguson points out that nine former Trojans had taken part in the Ottawa Sooners national championship victory in Kelowna on the Saturday. That's a good way to underscore the benefits of these programs.

2002: "Sooners Reclaim That Title Feeling"

The Ottawa Citizen article about the 2002 Manson Cup was just added to the "Ottawa Sooners (Junior)" page above.

The Shortest Championship Season Ever

The Ottawa Rangers played at the intermediate level in the early 1930s. I'm going to look into their origins more closely at a later time but for now I want to review the back end of their existence.

In 1934, the Quebec Rugby Football Union was struggling. There was some question as to whether it would even attempt to play a season, at least at the intermediate level. They decided to proceed after all, with the plan being that two sections (divisions, basically) of four teams would compete to determine a champion.

Things clearly deteriorated from there because Ottawa was given a bye...for the entire regular season. Only two exhibition games were scheduled and of those, only one came to pass. The article below is from October 12th of that year.

Canadian National would win their section and take a trip into town for the "play downs". So not only did Ottawa make the playoffs without playing a single regular season game, they hosted it!

Emerson Ogilvie. Remember him? He was the guy who entered "The Gallery of the Gods" with his performance for Glebe in the 1927 high school championship game.

The intent was for this to be a semi-final game, but things didn't quite work out that way.

So by virtue of winning the single contest in which they participated, Ottawa Rangers won the championship.

But that would not be enough for our plucky Rangers! They challenged St. Thomas for the Dominion championship!

That game was played on December 9th on a frozen field. Go figure. Ottawa lost 5-2, the two points being scored off the foot of football god Emerson Ogilvie.

Recently, I was impressed that the Ottawa Sooners played 16 games in order to secure a national championship in 1974. At the other end of the spectrum, no one will ever win a championship in fewer games that our 1934 Ottawa Rangers.

I have not located any results for the Rangers in 1935 so evidently, they went out (Québec) champions.

Let's Show Some Love to St. Brigid's

The Ottawa Football Club executives began the formation a four-team football league in 1918 with the goal to develop local talent. Among the teams to come to life was St. Brigid's.

The league had issues around field availability in its early days. They managed a brief season and its initial championship was eventually won by Ottawa Collegiate.

The league grew to six teams in 1919. The purple, green and white clad St. Brigid's club would win all five of its games and take the championship that season. They were coached by Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame and Canadian Football Hall of Fame inductee Sylvester "Silver" Quilty.

In 1920 the city league, now back down to four teams again including St. Brigid's, became a "section" of the Quebec Rugby Football Union.

Brigid's went undefeated (6-0), secured the city championship, then played Westmount in a 2-game series to determine the QRFU champ. They won both games in the series as well by a combined score of 31-15. Their only defeat would come to the Hamilton Tigers Seconds in the Canadian Rugby Union intermediate finals.

St Brigid's would apply to add a senior team in the Ontario Rugby Union in 1921. Over the next couple of seasons, they would struggle against teams from Toronto.

The junior version would continue for a while but the senior club would serve its purpose of improving the Ottawa Rough Riders in an entirely different way. In 1923, it merged with the Big Four entry.

At this point, Ottawa had not won a championship since 1909 and was coming off a season in which they'd posted an 0-5-1 record. Quilty's team would only improve that mark to 1-5 in 1923 but Dave McCann assisted with the coaching and during practices.

McCann became a coach in 1924 (along with Walter Gilhooley who seems to get very little credit). They again showed slight improvement, putting together a 2-4 record, but optimism was still high, as seen in the November 18th Ottawa Citizen..

Indeed, they would win championships in consecutive seasons in 1925 and 1926 under McCann's leadership. Quilty and McCann both entered the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1966.

This is an era that I find somewhat misrepresented in "official" historical reports. It is often said that the Rough Riders changed their name to Senators in 1925 as a result of the merger with St. Brigid's. Clearly that is not the case since the merger actually took place in 1923. The Senators name was in use that year as well, on occasion, but Rough Riders also was used to refer to the club.

In any event, similarly to the Ottawa Trojans merging with the Rough Riders in the mid-40s in order to (among other things) improve the latter club, St. Brigid's did the same two decades earlier.

Happy Anniversary X2!

The official account for the city of Toronto (of all people) tweeted earlier today that the CFL was celebrating its 62 birthday today.

I looked it up and that is technically correct. Intentions for the two leagues to split from the CRU were announced two days earlier, mind you, apparently out of the blue.

Presumably the agreement was considered finalized on January 19th, 1958, even though there were still wrinkles to iron out.

The above graphic is from the Ottawa Citizen from January 20th 1958. A scroll down the same page reveals that league heads handled other affairs when they got together that weekend as college draft results were also announced. A very familiar name made the list with little fanfare, at the time.

So on its literal day of birth (officially), the CFL also took in the greatest Canadian player it would see for the next decade and well beyond. How fitting.

1951 Grey Cup: Ottawa 21, Saskatchewan 14

A number of newspaper clippings specific to this game were added to the Grey Cup page above. Have a look!

2010: Junior Riders Win Title to Complete Perfect Season

The following article was added to the Jr. Riders page earlier today.

I think I was at that one. I recall leaving the house, looking at the snow fall and thinking "Meh, it can't go on much longer."

Then I was waiting for a bus at Bayview thinking "Meh, it can't go on much longer."

Then I arrived at the stadium and thought "Meh, it can't go on much longer."

It went on much longer.

Pictures above copied from the QJFL Facebook group.

Eastview Golden Eagles Celebrate a Championship

New Plan.

This is a result of the "updates on updates" post a little earlier. Trying to remember all the recent updates and/or determining whether they were worth mentioning was a bit challenging and time-consuming so going forward I'll be posting updates pretty much as they happen. Some days you might end up with a half dozen posts, or we might go several days without one. A lot of the content might seem oddly random but at times, I find things when I wasn't looking for them.

Such is the case here. While filling out Ottawa U's 1966 season results, I'd happened across a victory celebration of that year's Eastview team.

The Golden Eagles are said to have won the Junior Interprovincial Football League title, referred to in the article as the JIHL for some reason (typo?), in defeating the Ottawa Sooners in a two-game series. The league did change names a few times and reporters didn't always seem particularly bothered to get it absolutely right.

For this site's purpose, the content is added to the IJFL page. I've seen the league called Interprovincial Junior Football League most often so that's what I go with.

Very little photography was displayed for that league in either paper at the time (Citizen and Journal) so I try to make use of whatever I come across.

The Largest Gee-Gees Hall of Fame Class Ever!

With a twist...The program issued the following press release last Friday.

The largest class of inductees in Gee-Gees Football Hall of Fame history will be enshrined this year; three teams and two individuals have been selected for the honour. There are five decades of Gee-Gees history being celebrated; the 1960, 1970, and 1980 championship-winning teams will all go in to the Hall of Fame this year along with defensive standouts Steve Glenn and Sébastien Tétreault.

Naming entire teams to the Hall isn't a first for the Gee-Gees. In 2015 they inducted the 1975 team, then in 2018 the 1965 edition entered the hallowed halls. Evidently, it helps to play at Ottawa U. during a year that's a multiple of five.

So let's see what the university has to tell us about the 1960 team in particular. 

The 1960 team was the first of Matt Anthony's undefeated teams, playing to a 7-0 regular season record in the Ontario Intercollegiate Football Conference. The team then defeated Loyola for the Ontario-St. Lawrence Intercollegiate Athletic Association Championship, winning by a score of 49-13 in the title game. Over the course of the season, the Gee-Gees outscored opponents 259-78 before travelling to Halifax for the Atlantic Bowl.

The recap of that 49-13 victory is, unfortunately, not very good. The Rough Riders won the Eastern Conference that same weekend so much of sports coverage was dedicated to them. Here is the Journal's version.

The team lost the game out east to St. Francis Xavier by a score of 21-06. That St. F-X team was coached by Don Loney, a teammate of Gee-Gees head coach Matt Anthony on the 1951 Rough Riders Grey Cup winning team.

Here's a look at the squad as well as as good a roster as I could find. Too bad about the gash on that page of The Citizen. Tough break, 63.

I'll probably have a closer look at the 1970 and 1980 teams as well before too long but wanted to get the ball rolling with these guys.

As for the individuals named, Steve Glenn was a linebacker who led the Ontario Quebec conference  in tackles in 1992. He was the team's MVP that year, a team captain from 1992 to 1994 and named to the conference's all-star team on three occasions. In the pros, he was mostly known as a reliable long-snapper. He played professionally from 1996 to 2005 including three season with the Ottawa Renegades.

Tétreault played from 2006-2010 and was a three-time All-Canadian on the defensive line. He is currently the head coach of the Cegep de l'Outaouais Griffons.

Update On Updates

I've made quite a few updates to a number of pages on this blog but unless you were looking specifically for them, you couldn't possibly know about them.

Some are rather dry, "bookkeeping" types, like recording RedBlacks draft results. If you were looking to find out who the team drafted in 2017, there are several places you could look, but I prefer to keep that data here as well for my own reference.

Others are much harder to come by (like the 1952 Rough Rider draft results in the previous post). It is those ones that I wish to share with you today.

Rather than write out a few lines from some Panda Game recaps, when possible I've carved out the newspaper article(s) about the game and posted that under the score. I've done this for a few of the ones in the 80s and 90s, including the 1989 game below which included a rather good celebration pic.

Clicking on either image should make it easier to read, either off this post or on the Panda Game page itself.

I also dug up all the results from the Ottawa Sooners' 1974 National Championship season. That took more effort than I'd anticipated. Due to playing two two-game series in the playoffs, they actually played 16 games in total that season. Stats from the championship game are included now as well.

I'll segue from that to updates to the IJFL page. Several scores have been added to the long-defunct junior league but anyone interested in the early days of the Sooners should give that page a look. Many (all?) of the accomplishments from their first decade of existence are recorded there. I'll probably copy a lot of it onto their own page but as long as I have it in at least one place, that's good enough for now.

I've built a page for the Grey Cup. Again, this is mostly information you can get in many, many places, however I thought it would be interesting to copy directly from the newspapers of the time, mostly the Ottawa Citizen and Ottawa Journal. I'll probably add to that later today. I particularly liked finding the two-page spread of the 1926 champs.

Finally, on the Ottawa Trojans page, I've added an added an article about that team changing its name from Combines between 1943 and 1944 and picture which displays their uniform quite nicely. That's been hard to land.

This is all in addition to adding whatever details I come across about high school, midget and junior championships.

The Long, Long, 1952 College Draft

If you're an NFL fan who thinks that league's draft taking four days is far too long, you might find yourself thankful that they don't run it like the first Big Four college draft.

The rules for it were ironed out on April 5th during a meeting of league (Big Four) officials. 

The driving force was market size; Ottawa and Hamilton did not have access to as great a number of local amateur players as Toronto and Montreal did. The Rough Riders were defending champions, mind you, but evidently this was still perceived as a disadvantage.

Coming up with the rules was not an issue because the initial selections were made that day and reported in the newspaper on April 7th.

Most sources, including cfl.ca as I write this, consider this to be the entire draft class and name only these players.

It was not. Teams could continue to make selections right up to training camp, apparently. Ottawa made their next selection on April 14th.

Then Ottawa's next selection was announced on May 3rd.

And then the final pick was revealed in the first week of July.

So all told, the draft took approximately three months to complete.

Now something changed along the way. The league as a whole announced the selections named its selections about a week later. Ponton above is not among them but we have a new name in Dannis Masulka from McMaster.

And yet...Ponton was on the rookie picture! Here is your 1952 draft class. I suspect that Ponton's omission above is simply an error.

Vince Colliza is not included in the picture. He was acquired by Hamilton in late July or early August about 10 days after the shot was taken.

A July 31st article made it seem as though Colliza was signed as a free agent by the Ti-Cats, but one from a few days later (in a Windsor paper) provides details for a trade of his rights to Hamilton. Again, this is a guess, but Hamilton might have signed him before realizing they weren't allowed to, so some sort of compensation had to be worked out.

All of the clipping above are from the Ottawa Citizen. The Ottawa Journal did not give the draft as much attention but it was more detailed in its reports when it did. It did explain that the initial pool of players numbered 17 but more were added later to come to a total of 28, or seven per club. I count eight for Ottawa but that's a mystery for another day.

"REDBLACKS acquire rights to Nick Arbuckle in deal with Stampeders"

This is an interesting move. You rarely see a team acquire a player a few weeks before he hits free agency.

The Ottawa REDBLACKS have acquired quarterback Nick Arbuckle from the Calgary Stampeders in exchange for Ottawa’s third-round pick in this year’s CFL Draft.  

The Stampeders will also receive a conditional draft selection if Arbuckle, a pending free agent, signs with Ottawa.  

The 26-year old Arbuckle impressed in his second year in the CFL in 2019 after taking over for an injured Bo Levi Mitchell. The Georgia State product finished the season having completed 191 passes for 2,247 yards and 12 touchdowns.

So now it's just a matter of signing him. It's kind of an important step but it shouldn't surprise anyone if there was some sort of framework in place on a deal already. Calgary was well aware that Arbuckle intended to seek a starting role somewhere so they'd have no objection to Ottawa talking to him (and his agent) in order to get something for a player they were near-certain to lose anyway.

I do question the necessity of the move a little bit. To achieve his goal of being a regular starter in 2020, Arbuckle did not have many options besides Ottawa. Only Toronto and perhaps Winnipeg might be looking for such a player. Every other team pretty much has its starter firmly in place.

So Ottawa essentially gives up a 3rd round pick to get a head start on Toronto in negotiations with Arbuckle. Arbuckle's former QB coach in Calgary is now the head coach in Toronto so maybe that isn't a bad idea.

What kind of production has that pick produced in the past? Let's check that out.

FB Gabe Polan
OL Andrew Pickett
DE Eli Ankou
DT Mehdi Abdesmad
DE Nigel Romick

Wow. Romick is the only one to provide any sort of production on that list. Pickett and Polan still could, mind you.

Ankou and Abdesmad were gambles based on interest they received from the NFL. So burning this third round pick on a free-agent-to-be is just a different kind of gamble, at worst.

Early reaction to the move seems good. After a year that was difficult from beginning to end, that alone is value for the pick.