Saskatchewan Roughriders legend Darian Durant explains the dynamic with his former teammate Jeremy O\u2019Day and what it was like negotiating a contract with him from 2012 to 2016.<\/p>\n
“You have to be mentally strong, that’s first and foremost. When you’re teammates, you’re at his house, you have dinners, you’re interacting more so as friends and teammates and business partners, so to speak, it’s a different type of reaction. But then once you make that transition over to the front office, now you have to\u00a0put those friendships aside. You have to focus on the business part, make sure you’re building a team in the right way,” Durant told Dave Thomas on the SportsCage.<\/p>\n
“I think he’s so mentally strong that he was able to\u00a0separate himself from teammates because it’s not only me he had to deal with.\u00a0It was myself, [Weston] Dressler, [Chris] Getzlaf, it was the whole crew of guys that had played with him previously.”<\/p>\n
After O\u2019Day retired as a player in 2010, he became\u00a0the Riders’ football operations coordinator in 2011 prior ti\u00a0transitioning to the assistant general manager position from 2012 to 2014. There\u00a0was a period of time in 2015 when he was initially the assistant general manager before getting the interim position of\u00a0general manager.\u00a0His next gig was the assistant vice president of football operations and administration\u00a0from 2016 to 2018, before becoming general manager from 2019 to\u00a0present.<\/p>\n
“He takes his feelings out of it and does what’s best for the team. That’s the only way you can have success as a GM is if you\u00a0take those personal feelings out, how you feel about a player, whatever relationship you’ve built with the guys,” Durant said. “You have to let that go,\u00a0you have to do what’s best for the team, and he’s always done that.”<\/p>\n