Biggest team error so far in 2018?

I would say drafting a guy #1 overall and then low-balling him in negotiations. Honestly... why trade a top quality G to move up 1 spot, and then squander the opportunity to get the guy you picked. It makes no logical sense. Chapman has come out and said that he just wants something in the range of what other 1st round picks got, which is around 90-110K per season. This makes it obvious that the Ticat front office is offering him less than the guys drafted after him. Just plain awful football ops.

What would you say the biggest error in 2018 is so far?

Being cheap will get you know where.

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An error of omission in my eyes.

Being completely inactive (or perhaps being outplayed) during free agency. What has the team done during this free agency? They signed a kicker. That's it. Granted he is one of the better kickers available, but you need more then a kicker to win. Look at the players who we could have made a play on. Just counting players who moved teams, not extended with their current one.

Jerome Messam
Joel Figueroa
Rory Kohlert
Nic Demski
Taylor Reed

Plus at least two import O.Linemen of experience, the position we suffered the most at last season. You would have thought the team would have learned from last year, when the only player they signed was Kaneh. The CFL is a league where you live and die in Free Agency, because few drafted players stay for a longer period of time with the team that drafts them.

They also signed pretty much every one of their own free agents prior to the deadline. I guess it came down to the devil you know vs. the devil you don’t know. Any guarantee that any of these players would have been better than who we ended up with? And how long would they have taken to come up to speed on Jones’ style? (My guess is some, yes, and not long at all. I could be wrong.)

Can’t think of any bigger slip-ups than trading away a star o-liner to guarantee drafting a player they’re now having trouble signing.

Joel Figueroa? Didn’t he already play for us? Why do we want him back?
Taylor Reed? So we get rid of Larry Dean?

We resigned our own top free agents because of the continuity it brings.

We did ok this year considering the SMS. Not signing Chapman will hurt.

Always easy to criticize.

Well, we could have grabbed a SAM linebacker in free agency.

The usual response about how easy it is to recruit new U.S. talent is a little hard to make in this case after the issues we have had filling that position in the past couple of years.

The end of that story has not yet been written - I hope.

And if it ends the way things now stand, then yeah, it will rank up there with the dumber trades of recent years. I didn’t even like the trade when I assumed Chapman would suit up for us.

In addition to re-signing top players like Dean, we filled our one gaping hole arising from the injury to Castillo. It would have been nice to pick up an elite corner (cough, T.J. Heath) but you also have to deal with the cap.

With all due respect to Tank Reed... he lost us the 2014 cup. I don't want him anywhere near the Hammer!

Don’t try to hang that game on Tank Reed alone. The reason the Cats lost that game was because our defence couldn’t stop Calgary’s offense when it counted.

Amidst the most positive and upbeat camp in years a thread about what fans think is the most wrong.

So Hamilton.

Amidst a thread of reasonable, rational posts about the team, a post criticizing the fans for expressing themselves.

So Onemoredork. :wink:

I’m really hoping we can get Chapman into camp ASAP, and that our O-line doesn’t have any issues without Bomben. That trade could look really, really ugly.

The lack of experienced free agent signings also worries me, but I’ll keep my mouth shut until I see how the new guys fare. Like ExPat said, we always hear about how easy it is to recruit talent, but we seem to struggle to do it at certain positions.

Naive to think the culture of complaint so engrained in HTC fans would ease off a bit...Anyway.....

Heard Mike Daly on the radio last week describing what a great feeling there is down at MAC. When asked why he said the key was the fact the organization brought back all the key pieces meaning all the FA veterans thus the team could hit the ground running.

But what does he know ? he just plays for the team and not a endlessly griping "fan".

That’s great news!

Just like last year when Simoni Lawrence said:

"It’s super important to get off to a great start and I feel like we’re doing everything we can to do that," Lawrence said. "Our offence looks amazing, they’re carving things up. "Our defence is coming along and is getting great. We’re starting to understand where Jeff is going with the vision and it’s amazing. It’s going to be a great season."
https://www.sportsnet.ca/football/cfl/ticats-linebacker-simoni-lawrence-enjoys-training-camp/

Training camp is always full of positivity from the players/coaches/team staff. Nothing wrong with fans offering their opinions on things.

Great comparison except for the fact Daly was explicitly referring to what fans insist was a mistake and not making the usual generalizations one usually hears. Which was the point.

What else is he supposed to say though? Why would you go to a player on the team for objective analysis? You never get any negative quotes from players in Training Camp. If we'd replaced 45 guys on the roster, Daly would have said how great it is to have new, exciting faces in camp.

My point is that every year in camp, players and coaches are filled with positivity. They're probably not the best sources for objective analysis of a teams strengths/weaknesses.

I think most fans were pretty happy about re-signing all our own free agents, and I’m pretty sure you know that, OMD.

Some of us were also hoping to add one or two more key pieces, since after all, we weren’t exactly world-beaters last season. Of course, we don’t know enough about the salary cap details to have a fully informed opinion on how the funds were allocated.

Did pay raises to those existing FAs eat up all the savings generated by dumping several of our veterans? Did we save the money to pay for that new QB someone mentioned? Did we forget to allocate cap space to our #1 draft pick, or were we actually counting on his agent being uninformed? It’s largely just conjecture.

And the same fans now complaining about not bringing new players would be complaing how we gave away the heart and soul of the team and all the hauntings that come with it.

As thread shows many HTC fans complain about team decisions out of sheer reflex which is the larger point. To the point of calling them errors when they haven’t proven to be anything yet

I think people are just interested in the team, and like giving their opinions.

Also, the team has been largely horrible for a long, long time. Wouldn't everyone look stupid if they came on here every season and predicted sunshine, rainbows and Grey Cups? :stuck_out_tongue:

They totally dropped the ball on Chapman, so it is a legitimate complaint. Not complaining out of reflex.