Ultra Sports Bet

This isn’t directly related to sports betting, but it is just so ridiculous that I had to share it. I live in Canada, and my hometown of Calgary has a Canadian Football League team, the Stampeders. We are the former home of NFL greats like Doug Flutie and Jeff Garcia. There are those up here that would argue that it is a better brand of football than the NFL or college football. Simply put, it is not. It is entertaining – a great way to spend a sunny afternoon – but it is full of Division II players and NFL rejects. Never before, though, has our relative position to the American leagues been made as clear as it was today.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders won the Grey Cup, the CFL championship, this year. Saskatchewan is home to the most rabid fans in the league, and it had been a long time between championships, so coach Kent Austin, who was in his first year as a head coach, was positioned to ride that glory for years to come. He was a former CFL player,and he had played in Saskatchewan, so the game was in his blood. He was offered a new long term contract and a salary that would put him at the top of the CFL pay scale. Instead of taking that and settling into what would essentially be a job for life, though, Austin headed off to greener pastures. He is going to Ole Miss, where he will be offensive coordinator. Yes, being a coordinator at a second rate SEC school that didn’t win a single game in conference last year and is notably short of anything approximating offensive talent is seen as a step up from being the head coach of the defending Grey Cup champions. That is a blow to the ego of my homeland, but it sure bolsters what I have been saying about the relative position of our league on the football pecking order for a long time now.

To be fair, Austin did play for Ole Miss, so this is a homecoming, but that doesn’t lessen my point.

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