Riders’ GM Jeremy O’Day evaluating roster, looking ahead to 2020

After getting within one game of playing for the 2019 Grey Cup, Saskatchewan Roughriders general manager Jeremy O’Day now will begin to determine what the 2020 team will look like.

“It’s not something that goes away real quick. The sting is still fresh when you lose and you’re so close to (a Grey Cup berth),” O’Day said Wednesday during a media conference at Mosaic Stadium.

“We were in line to make a good run at it but once the regular season is over, it’s only how you play in the playoffs (that matters) and unfortunately we couldn’t get past that first game.”

O’Day was named Saskatchewan’s general manager in January after head coach-GM Chris Jones left to join the NFL’s Cleveland Browns.

O’Day hired Craig Dickenson to be the Roughriders’ new bench boss and put together a roster that finished 13-5 and in first place in the CFL’s West Division during the regular season. The team was bested by the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 20-13 in the West final.

While O’Day wasn’t the general manager last season, he was still with Jones during the off-season. He said this coming off-season is going to be similar to the previous one.

“It won’t be much different than that. I know we got out and did a little bit of scouting in December, tried to catch a little bit extra scouting during that month,” O’Day said. “We’ll be doing the same things that we did last year at this time, which is evaluating our roster and our coaches and working on free agents.”

O’Day said when it comes to the coaching staff, he’s leaving it in Dickenson’s hands.

“He’s certainly evaluating the coaches,” O’Day said. “I’ll certainly be involved in the conversations and he certainly asks my opinion in regards to the coaching staff, but how I handle it is I give Craig the ability to hire the coaches that he wants in those areas.

“That’s why I hired Craig, because I really trust him and his ability to hire those coaches.”

On the player side, O’Day made his first move of the off-season with the re-signing of Loucheiz Purifoy, who will be with the team through the 2021 season.

While Purifoy will remain with the team, O’Day admits there will be some members of the 2019 team who won’t be back in 2020.

“There will be guys in the free-agent class that won’t be back and not by them not wanting to come back but more from our side that we’re just going to go in a different direction,” O’Day said. “There will be a group, like there is every year, that we won’t invite back unfortunately.”

O’Day said age will be something the staff takes into account as it tries to build for sustained success.

“That’s the challenge from my role is to figure out exactly when a player and their play will start to diminish a little bit,” O’Day said. “It’s an unfortunate part of the business. I was one of those guys, at a certain point in my career, where my age and salary started to play against me a little bit.”

O’Day played 14 seasons in the CFL, which included a long stint with the Roughriders from 1999 through 2010.

He said the staff will look at which players had sustained success all season and didn’t see their production decline late in the year.

“Not everyone was playing at a peak level at (the end of the season). Some kind of showed ups and downs and other guys were kind of steady through the whole time,” O’Day said. “Obviously the guys that we sign back are the guys that we think have more in the tank.”

While the Roughriders will host the 2020 Grey Cup game, O’Day doesn’t expect that to have an effect on how he builds the team.

“If you are planning any differently because you’re hosting a Grey Cup, I would say that that’s not the right approach in my opinion,” O’Day said. “I think you approach every year like you want to win a Grey Cup that year.”