REGINA \u2014 When the Saskatchewan Roughriders won the 112th Grey Cup championship, it would be easy to pick any number of post-game on-field moments as a highlight.<\/p>\n
The celebration with family and friends, the pomp and circumstance of the on-stage\u00a0presentation, and finally, the chance to hoist the Grey Cup itself. For\u00a0Riders’ offensive coordinator Marc Mueller, the best of times came not from anything that happened on the field, but in the moments afterwards as the team celebrated in the locker room. Just the players, the team and their direct supporters, enjoying the fruits of their labour and the culmination of victory after a season of success.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s\u00a0the guys who go to practice every single day and have fun with each other,\u201d Mueller said during a conversation with Barney Shynkaruk on\u00a0The SportsCage.<\/p>\n
\u201cA bunch of adult children who play sports and who aren\u2019t overly adults most of the time and even less of adults at that time. It’s\u00a0pure joy, everyone hugging everyone else and having fun, doing stuff that would be very, very frowned upon if it was done at any other time other than after a championship. So that\u2019s my favourite memory and I hope it sticks with me for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, the celebrations immediately after the game were only a sampling of the party that was to come. The Riders still had to return to Regina from Winnipeg, and once they arrived in the Queen City, an even bigger bash was in the cards. That came in the form of the victory parade, and while Mueller \u2014 who hails from Regina \u2014 was too young to remember 1989 and didn\u2019t recall the 2007 and 2013 parades, he knew it was going to be special. And to be a part of it all was something else altogether.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was incredible,\u201d Mueller said. \u201cYou picture what it\u2019s going to be like seeing pictures from the front page of the paper and things like that, but to be in it and seeing how many people there were wearing green, all ages, kids, older people, middle-aged people. It was really, really cool and I\u2019m glad everyone got to take part in it. It\u2019s a Saskatchewan team, it\u2019s a community team and it\u2019s great for all of us to celebrate together.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the Grey Cup celebrations were a major highlight of the whole run, there was another moment Mueller pointed to as his \u201cfavourite as a coach or player to this point in my life\u201d \u2014 and it didn\u2019t come at Princess Auto Stadium. No, that would be The Drive, the final minute surge down the field during the West Final that led to Tommy Nield catching the game-winning pass against the B.C. Lions to send Saskatchewan to the Grey Cup. A major component of the drive was how efficient it looked from start to finish, and that was for a reason \u2014 the team regularly practices those exact situations, and as a result, everyone was on the same page when it came to putting things together on the field.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes you can call plays and not everyone knows why you’re doing it, but it felt like on that drive everyone\u00a0understood what we were trying to do and what we were trying to accomplish,\u201d Mueller said, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I saw Tommy (catch the winning pass) that I went crazy in the box. It\u2019s something I\u2019ll remember forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
As is always the case, after all the celebrations and success, the time comes to move on. The Riders are into their off-season work, though calling it \u2018work\u2019 might be a bit of a misnomer when it comes to Mueller, an admitted football junkie.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always get made fun of by my in-laws and stuff like that\u00a0because whenever there\u2019s football on, I\u2019ll try and watch it,\u201d he said. \u201cLike a Tuesday afternoon bowl game on December 28, I\u2019ll try and watch that. I feel like the only way to get better is by doing, so I\u2019m going to watch football.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou try and watch other CFL teams and whether it\u2019s college football or the NFL, there\u2019s always stuff out there. I\u2019ve heard it\u00a0said a million times and it\u2019s true in football, usually the guys who have the most success are the best thieves. The game has been played 113 years here in Canada, you can run the ball, you can pass the ball and you can kick the ball and there are only so many options after that.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can check out the complete SportsCage interview by clicking below:<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"REGINA \u2014 When the Saskatchewan Roughriders won the 112th Grey Cup championship, it would be easy to pick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353502,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[3878,49,48,521,522,520,3290,4398,27684,27683,1893,4401,27682,4400,4399,82],"class_list":["post-357593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cfl","tag-agriculture","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canadian-football-league","tag-canadianfootballleague","tag-cfl","tag-contests","tag-country-music","tag-gx94","tag-manitoba-news","tag-radio","tag-rider-radio","tag-saskatchewan-news","tag-saskatchewan-roughriders","tag-saskatchewan-sports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}