Riders stay home to select Melfort’s Mattland Riley seventh overall in CFL draft

The Saskatchewan Roughriders didn’t look too far to find a player in the first round of the CFL draft on Thursday, selecting Mattland Riley from Melfort with the seventh overall selection.

The 6-foot-3, 300-pound offensive lineman from the University of Saskatchewan Huskies had trouble believing his name was called by the team he idolized growing up.

“If you were telling me that yesterday, I probably wouldn’t have believed you,” Riley said minutes after being introduced as the newest member of the Roughriders via virtual video chat.

Finding out he was selected by the Riders proved to be an eventful experience for Riley as he watched a livestream of the draft with his wife.

“Our WiFi was lagging a little bit — we were on a Zoom call with my family — and all of them started getting excited and we still hadn’t heard it yet,” Riley said.

The 23-year-old finished his fourth season with the Huskies last fall, when he was named an All-Canadian for his efforts to help running back Adam Machart lead the nation with 1,330 rushing yards in the regular season.

Pushing guys around and making running lanes is all in a day’s work for Riley.

“I’m going to be an interior guy, that’s for sure,” Riley said. “Centre or guard, it kind of just depends how I fit in during training camp.”

Roughriders general manager Jeremy O’Day said picking Riley in the first round made sense because the position group was one where they felt they needed depth at. Guards Dariusz Bladek and Philip Blake both signed with the Toronto Argonauts during the off-season.

“Even when we had injuries (in 2019), our play didn’t fall off that much. We had a lot of depth (on the offensive line) but whenever you have a lot of good players, with that comes larger salaries. You’d like to have all your guys back but unfortunately with the salary cap, you can’t keep them all back,” O’Day said following the draft.

“We spent a lot of time watching the top four or five O-linemen and trying to make the best decision there about who we were going to take.

“(Riley’s) well-coached. He comes from a good school that we’ve had a lot of successful players come out of. We think that he has taken a big stride from his first couple years until his last year.”

Riley’s route to professional football happened without him having to ever leave the province. The new mechanical engineering graduate played nine-man football at Melfort Comprehensive Collegiate before being recruited to play for the Huskies in Saskatoon.

“I think we might have had more fun playing nine-man just because we were small-town kids, and we were just staying out of trouble, really,” he said of his football upbringing.

Making his way south to play for the province’s most popular team was already creating plenty of buzz Thursday evening in the small city with a population of roughly 6,000 people.

“My phone is just going off right now from all of my friends back in Melfort,” Riley said.

While O’Day said players who grew up in Saskatchewan can bring something to the locker room culture-wise, Riley didn’t get any bonus points just for being born in Saskatchewan.

“On our draft board, the way we had it, he was the next best offensive lineman and that’s why we took him,” O’Day said.

Riley is beginning his CFL career with plenty of questions marks surrounding the league. This time of year on the Canadian football calendar is reserved for final preparations ahead of CFL training camps in May. With COVID-19 bringing global sports to a halt, there’s still no indication when or if the league will begin its new season.

The CFL has delayed the start of the season until the beginning of July for now. Last week, Calgary extended a ban on public events in the city until Aug. 31.

Those developments aren’t lost on the new Rider hoping to break into the professional ranks.

“With the possibility of training camp being bumped so far back, I’m pretty sure everybody who plays football is kind of thinking in the back of their head whether or not there could be a season,” Riley said. “I’m preparing like training camp is happening in a week. I’m just going to be excited whenever it goes.”

Despite the uncertainty around the start of the season, O’Day was happy to see the league go ahead with the draft.

“It takes a lot of time and it gives the kids an opportunity to know what team they are going to and when they were drafted. It gives them time to prepare and the ability to get (to know) the coaching staff and start to learn things over the computer and start getting awareness about our team and organization,” O’Day said.

Riley is the fourth offensive lineman the Riders have selected in the past nine years and the first Saskatchewan native selected by the Riders in the first round since Regina’s Ben Heenan was taken first overall in 2012.

Joining draft company that includes his former head coach at the U of S, Scott Flory, is an honour to Riley.

“Those (are the) guys that you look up to when you’re a kid. It’s kind of funny, I remember watching a Grey Cup and watching Scott (Flory) play in it, which was weird. I was in high school,” Riley joked at seeing his coach win a Grey Cup.

“Obviously, it’s a huge honour to be in those guys’ footsteps.”

Flory was drafted by the Montreal Alouettes in the third round of the 1998 CFL draft before going on to win three Grey Cups over the course of a 15-year CFL career.

The Regina native was named head coach of the Huskies in 2017 after spending three years as an assistant coach, and he was forced to miss a game in 2018 so he could be inducted to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.

Those accolades, and the accompanying leadership and guidance from Flory, have helped propel Riley to becoming the Riders’ first-round pick.

“When Scott came, he brought that professional attitude. There was a group of us that were all my age, and (he) really brought all of us along and really increased our play across the board,” Riley said.

With many restrictions in place to help promote social distancing due to COVID-19, O’Day was the only one at the stadium during the draft and inside the draft war room. He said team discussions were held over a video conference with people, including head coach Craig Dickenson, and people were scattered throughout the province, Florida, Montana and Alabama.

“It isn’t really that bad. It’s like you’re sitting right next to them and everyone can talk to you,” O’Day said. “We actually didn’t have any technology hiccups at all from our end and even from a league (perspective), I thought it went really smooth for what we had to do and how we adapted to it.”

Saskatchewan’s next selection came in the fourth round where the Riders selected Kian Schaffer-Baker, a wide receiver with the University of Guelph Gryphons, with the 30th overall selection.

O’Day said Schaffer-Baker was a player the Roughriders had ranked higher on their draft board than where they would eventually take him.

“He can play both slot and outside receiver,” O’Day said. “He’s ultra athletic — he came to the regional combine and jumped 40 inches in the vertical.”

O’Day expects Schaffer-Baker to compete with 2019 picks Justin McInnis and Brayden Lenius for playing time in a crowded Roughriders receivers group.

Saskatchewan stayed with the Gryphons to select Junior Allen, a 6-foot-1, 200-pound linebacker, at 35th overall.

The remaining Roughriders’ draft picks on Thursday included:

Vincent Dethier (44th overall), a defensive back from McGill University; Jonathan Femi-Cole (53rd overall), a running back from Western University; Jesse Lawson (62nd overall), an offensive lineman from Carleton University; and Neville Gallimore (71st overall), a defensive lineman from the University of Oklahoma.

Gallimore was recently selected by the Dallas Cowboys in the third round of the NFL draft.

Saskatchewan Selections

Theren Churchill, an offensive lineman from the University of Regina Rams, was the second player from a Saskatchewan program selected in the draft; he was taken ninth overall by the Toronto Argonauts.

The 6-foot-6, 280 pound offensive lineman from Stettler, Alta., finished his fifth and final season of Canada West football last season, when he started all eight games at right tackle for the third straight year.

Defensive lineman Nicholas Dheilly was the next U of S product selected. The Regina-born Dheilly went to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers with the 46th pick.

Huskies receiver Sam Baker, who hails from Esterhazy, landed with the Argos with the 48th pick.

Kelowna-born Rams offensive lineman Andrew Becker was the very next selection by the Alouettes at 49th overall.

Huskies O-lineman Nick Summach, a product of Saskatoon, was taken by the Edmonton Eskimos in the seventh round (57th overall).

Saskatoon product and Huskies slotback Colton Klassen went in the eighth round (69th overall) to the Als. Klassen began his post-secondary football career with the PFC’s Regina Thunder.