ARGONAUTS.CA STAFF
TORONTO – While the hype surrounding the hiring of new head coach Scott Milanovich and Jim Barker’s move to General Manager has taken the majority of the Argos’ off-season headlines pertaining to the front office, there has been one man diligently working away behind the scenes aiming to make CFL draft day a story all its own.
Ted Goveia, the Argos’ Director of Canadian Scouting and a seasoned veteran when it comes to spotting non-import talent, has been hard at work in the office, at the stadium and on the road trying to find the next great homegrown talent from a pool of CIS and NCAA prospects.
He spends a lot of his time on the road, making his way across Canada scouting and spending even more time in the film room dissecting every last play in which a potential future CFL player may participate. As tiring a task as it may be, Goveia wouldn’t have it any other way.
Hitting The Road
The annual CFL Evaluation Camp is the premier showcase for CIS talent but for Goveia, and many other scouts in the Canadian Football League, it is merely the culmination of many months of scouting. For the prospects, it’s one of their last real chances to show teams the skills they possess.
“The process for evaluating players actually starts the year before the draft, and sometimes even before that,” Goveia explained to argonauts.ca. “It often starts at the CIS all-star game (The East-West Bowl) where we watch them, talk with them and eat with them all weekend so we get a really good opportunity to evaluate a lot of players at that time.
Once our season kicks off, the University year begins and I head to a number of CIS training camps, go to meetings and listen to the coaches communicate with the players to see how they follow instructions and how they practice. A lot of it is observing; seeing how they interact with their teammates, get to know them a bit better on the personal side and see if they are a good fit,” he revealed.
The former CIS head coach will often plan his cross-country scouting missions around the Argonauts’ road schedule when possible. He’ll fly into cities three days before an Argos away game and meet with CIS teams within that region.
No stranger to the CIS landscape, Goveia previously held positions at the University of British Columbia, McMaster University and Mount Allison University before initially joining the Argos as a running backs coach in 2010.
“Last year, I saw every team play in the Maritimes,” he said of one of his trips with a chuckle. “I drove across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It’s a lot of fun for me because I coached high school football out there and you get to see people that you know.”
In The Film Room
When he is not scouring the nation, those who know him can often find Goveia in front of a television or laptop screen. He is likely not watching his favourite movie or TV show though, often attentively examining CIS game film of the many dozens of players he will look at throughout the season.
About 14 hours per player is what Goveia estimates he watches in an average year.
“I saw about 18 games live last year so I saw almost every team during the season,” he explained. “I then go with a hard drive to every school that I get to and they copy down all of their games for me so I then watch them in the hotel room when I am on the road.”
A Challenging Off-Season
His calculated film study received a rather unexpected obstacle when a December fire tore through the Argos’ football operations facility. It torched pretty much everything in its path, something that Goveia is still trying to play ‘catch-up’ from.
“I lost everything,” he said earnestly. “I lost my hard drives with all of the film on it. I lost all my notes on every player, roster information, interview notes with the coaches, spreadsheets with all of the player results. So I started from zero. We also lost our video editing system so we had to wait for that as well.”
“It’s been very challenging but on the flipside of that is, now I have done it twice and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. You go back and you already have an opinion on the player, and you start looking at the film with a different lens on and you have a fresh perspective. Sometimes guys move up [on your radar] when you look at it a second time.”
Hurry Up and Wait
If the fire that sacrificed a lot of his work didn’t make this off-season unusual enough for Goveia and the rest of the Argos front office, not having a first round pick also offers up a bit of a different scenario for the Boatmen.
Goveia understands that in order to get a premier talent such as Ricky Ray a team must give up a first round draft pick as part of the price. He is not, however, panicking at the notion of having to wait until the second round for the Argos to make their first pick.
“I am lucky because Jim [Barker] has been through this so many times before and he has a pretty good process where we go through box situations and kind of role play through the draft. It is kind of like a big game and it’s a blast. We have to try and assess the other CFL team’s needs and try and get in the heads of their GM’s to get a feel for where they will pick.
“A lot of it is personal opinion but a most of it is doing your homework and trying to understand who is drafting before and after you, too.”
Goveia and the Argos will enter the CFL Canadian Draft on May 3 and fans can follow all of the selections and see exclusive content on argonauts.ca as well as the club’s official Facebook and Twitter pages.