Arthur Ward/CFL.ca
There’s the dominance of the Stampeders. The brilliance of Mike Reilly and with that, the super glue-like hands of Duke Williams. There’s the hot-and-cold REDBLACKS, a seemingly on the cusp Hamilton team, a resilient BC Lions squad and, if you’re immune to oversaturation, the Johnny Manziel saga in Montreal.
These storylines are all worthy of your attention this season, but there’s one that’s so unlikely, so out-of-nowhere astonishing this year, that you need to take at least a moment to take it in and appreciate it.
“Nothing in my closet is green or any other colour. It’s all black,” Chris Jones said this week, taking a break from looking at film of this week’s opponent, the Montreal Alouettes.
“I only do it because it makes it easy. You know what colour you’re going to wear.”
Jones and the colour black have been synonymous since he took his first head coaching gig in Edmonton in 2014. When he made the move to the Saskatchewan Roughriders after the 2015 season, he had a black Riders shirt custom made that he could wear on the sidelines.
This season, that’s all changed.
For the last six games, Jones has been wearing a Riders’ kelly green Diversity Is Strength t-shirt on the sidelines. Jones started wearing the shirt as part of the CFL’s DIS campaign, but it coincided with the start of a much-needed four-game win streak. So when the Riders’ streak came to an end at the hands of the Ottawa REDBLACKS two weeks ago, most of us thought the green shirt would be cast away. Of course, we were all wrong.
“The guys have fun with it, making me have to wear green,” Jones said, laughing about how long he might wear it. “So I’m going to play along with it. Our football team’s the main thing.
“You know me, my focus has always been my players. As long as they feel that it’s something good then we’ll do it.”
The players feel that it’s more than something good. On a conference call a few weeks back, Willie Jefferson said it was breathtaking to see Jones in anything other than black. Odell Willis, who won a Grey Cup with Jones in Edmonton in 2015, couldn’t believe what he was seeing when Jones stuck with the shirt.
“Black was always his colour. Whether we were traveling, whether it was shirt or tie. Black is his colour,” Willis said.
“I know when I was there we used to joke with him like, ‘Coach you ain’t got another shirt?’ He said he had four, five black shirts and he’s got four, five black jeans.
“For him to wear green, I don’t know who convinced him to do that. That right there is amazing.”
Riders’ defensive end Charleston Hughes first played for Jones when he was the Stamps’ defensive coordinator from 2008 through 2011. He’s not as shocked by the one bright item in his wardrobe as other players, but he wants him to keep wearing the shirt. He thinks it’s good luck. The Riders were 3-4 without the green shirt. With it? They’re 5-1.
Behind the (generally) all-black-everything exterior, Hughes and Willis insist, is a coach that doesn’t seem like as much of a hard ass as everyone outside the team might think.
“He’s a players’ coach, for sure. He takes care of us,” Hughes said. “He knows when to work hard and when to get after it but at the same time you can’t ask for a better situation.”
“This is no disrespect to none of my coaches, but Chris Jones is one of the funnest coaches you want to play for,” Willis said.
“On the field, if you ain’t on top of your stuff every day you might not like him, it’s just plain and simple. As long as you’re on top of your stuff and you’re doing everything you’ve got to do, being around coach Jones is fun.”
Willis thrived under Jones in Edmonton and he did it with his coach asking a lot of him. Willis often dropped back in the defence, sacrificing his sack numbers, but helped that unit create the chaos that Jones’ schemes are known for. There was a lot expected out of Willis and he knew it.
“I felt like he put a lot of pressure on me, so I couldn’t really enjoy the fullness of his coaching. I learned so much from him but at the same time he put a lot of pressure on me. Now, I’m glad he did,” Willis said.
Jones will keep wearing the green shirt and keep the pressure on his players as they eye up a home playoff game and bigger things this year.
