Photo courtesy: Paul Yates/BC Lions
Since the Edmonton Elks last faced the BC Lions in Vancouver — a 59-15 season-opening loss just 56 days ago — head coach and general manager Chris Jones has made 83 separate changes to his team’s roster.
The revolving door depth chart has long been a trademark of a guy who would cut his mother off if it meant securing a win, and honestly, it’s hard to blame him. Despite all the promises of victory from president Victor Cui, the Elks are a 2-5 team looking up at the rest of the Western Division, and Jones has yet to create a winning formula from the wreckage left by the organization’s previous regime.
Each of these roster moves will play a small role in determining the outcome when these two teams meet again on Saturday night, and in many ways, things are looking good for the Elks.
Undeniably improved and solid for the first time, this is a game that could be much closer than the double-digit spread suggests. However, Edmonton will enter BC Place at a slight disadvantage thanks, in part, to one of Chris Jones’ roster moves well before the start of the current campaign.
That’s because despite all his swings and trades during the season, the Elks will be playing a man down at BC Place.
On paper, the above statement is provably false, but in practice there is no other way to describe a depth chart that includes three kickers.
In addition to Sergio Castillo and rookie John Ryan, the Elks will be forced to put on Australian Ryan Meskell on Saturday. A career 26-of-39 on field goals at the University of Hawaii, his best bet is to contribute as a kickoff specialist, something he was good at in college but brings little value to a pro roster.
Love him or hate him – I won’t attempt to convince you either way in this article – the CFL’s Global Initiative makes it clear that one international player must be on each team’s field day roster. With Danish forward Steven Nielsen battling illness, the team had no choice but to choose between Meskel and Brazilian kicker Rafael Gallanone for the final spot in the lineup.
With Tomas Jack-Kurdila suiting up to replace Nielsen as the sixth offensive lineman, Edmonton will have one less body available to cover kicks for what has been a questionable special teams unit. It didn’t have to be that way though.
Back on February 28, in one of his first moves as the team’s general manager, Jones cut three players from the Elks’ roster. All three were global and all three had previous experience in the game.
The message was clear: Jones would tolerate Nielsen as a depth piece — his college pedigree and previous interest in the NFL ensured that — but he had no desire to entertain other position players. He reinforced that sentiment in the 2022 Global Draft, when he and assistant GM Jeroy Simon, newly BC’s director of global scouting, selected kickers with the three picks and spent their first round on 30-year-old punter Ben Griffiths, who never appeared in the camp.
It’s easy to dismiss those decisions by Jones, and there are undoubtedly plenty of Elks fans who share his ambivalence toward global players. Regardless, three years of data has shown us that this is the worst type of strategy to implement with the mandatory roster quota, and the failure to stock capable special teams is now coming back to bite Edmonton.
All of this would hardly be worthy of a footnote in the game’s preview if it weren’t for one fortuitous twist. On that fateful day in February, the Elks released Mexican receiver Diego Viamontes and French linebacker Maxime Royer, both of whom might have been nice to have right now. However, the third player cut will actively get the chance to hurt them on Saturday.
Belgian defenseman Tibo Debaillie, an unheralded third-round overall pick out of Towson University, played three games in 2021, recording a single try in extremely limited reps. Few fans would know his name, a player so minor that he found out he was released by reading a tweet from Dave Campbell. Elks leadership said they tried to contact him in various ways, but Debaillie never got their message.
“I never spoke to Chris Jones about it. I never met him, never spoke to him. “One night I came back from the gym and I was on the couch, just chilling with my dad and mom, and all of a sudden I saw on Twitter that I had been released,” the resident of tiny Gistel, Belgium, told me last week.
“I never heard anything from Edmonton. No text, no email, no phone call.
It seemed clear that Debaillie’s CFL adventure was over and he signed with the Potsdam Royals of Germany. That was until the BC Lions emailed him, desperate to replace departed special teamer Global Niklas Gustav.
With all due respect to Thiadric Hansen’s ability to get bad shots and cover kicks, what Debaillie has managed since then is the best performance yet from a global position player. He has played roughly half of the Lions’ snaps at nose tackle in six games, recording nine tackles and one sack. He often sees the field in key moments and goal line situations, receiving a level of complete trust that no other international player has.
Edmonton, meanwhile, is struggling to find a competent American defense to fill a void. Isn’t irony delicious?
As heartwarming as his story was, Debaillie’s presence won’t win BC the game, and playing short won’t cost Edmonton. However, either through misjudgment or a lack of effort on the part of the Elks, the Lions took a hitter from the scrap heap that the green and gold could desperately use.
In an industry where the margins of victory are as thin as they are in pro football, sometimes that’s what separates the good teams from the bad.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect a statement by the Edmonton Elks that they attempted to contact Debaillie to inform him of his release.
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