With the 7th pick overall in Thursday’s CFL draft, the Saskatchewan Roughriders stayed close to home and drafted someone they hope can follow in the footsteps of Gene Makowsky and Ben Heenan.
The Riders took Melfort’s Matt Riley from the University of Saskatchewan Huskies with the first of what is slated to be eight selections.
“If you were telling me that yesterday I probably wouldn’t have believed you,” Riley says.
Unfortunately for him, the news didn’t reach him as fast as he would have liked.
“Our wifi was lagging a little bit,” says Riley. “We were on a Zoom call with my family. And all of them started getting excited (about him being drafted) and we still hadn’t heard it yet.”
His friends in his hometown were perhaps even more excited than Riley and his wife.
“My phone is just going off right now from all of my friends back in Melfort. They’re super excited. Melfort is a smaller, northern community. They love the Riders, they love their football so they’re pretty pumped.”
Riley, who is 6 foot 3 and weighs 300 pounds, can play guard or centre. He was a first-team all Canadian the past two seasons. That drew the eye of Riders General Manager Jeremy O’Day.
“We looked at it as an area we wanted to add some depth to our team at,” says O’Day.
“After we watched the tape for a long period of time and just felt really comfortable with what Mattland brings to the table. He’s well-coached. He comes from a good school that we’ve had a lot of successful players come out of. We think he’s taken a big stride from the first couple years until the last year. And we like the flexibility that he brings to our offensive line.”
O’Day says they didn’t draft Riley because he’s from Saskatchewan. And it didn’t hurt him either.
“I think the culture the players from Saskatchewan bring in the locker room is important. We’ve had decisions like this in the past where we’ve taken the best player on the board. We didn’t give him extra bonus points because he’s from Saskatchewan.”
Call it a coincidental feel-good story for the Riders then.
With the 30th pick, the team took receiver Kian Schaeffer-Baker from Guelph. He caught 22 balls for 364 yards and three touchdowns last season. At 6’3” and 205 lbs., Schaffer-Baker possesses prototypical size for a CFL slotback according to TSN’s Duane Forde. In last spring’s U SPORTS East-West Bowl, a competition featuring many of the top prospects in the Class of 2020, he led all receivers with five catches for 126 yards and a touchdown.
They went right back to Guelph with the 35th pick taking linebacker Junior Allen. He had 4.5 sacks and 43 tackles with the Gryphons last season.
The Riders got the top-rated player in the 2020 draft. They selected Oklahoma DT Neville Gallimore in the 8th round. It’s likely Gallimore never plays in the CFL, having been a 3rd-round pick of the Dallas Cowboys in last week’s NFL draft.
Two members of the U of R Rams were taken. With the last pick in the first round, the Toronto Argonauts selected OL Theren Churchill with the 9th overall pick while fellow OL Andrew Becker went to Montreal with the 49th overall selection.
