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Most sports franchises exert a ton of time and effort into researching players ahead of the draft, but that wasn’t the case with a couple of CFL teams who made a baffling mistake by selecting guys who had already died two years in a row.
Drafts provide sports teams with a golden opportunity to scoop up promising talent, and while there are usually standouts in every class, scouts, coaches, and members of the front office tend to do a deep dive into prospects in the hopes of finding a diamond in the rough.
Every franchise would obviously love to do what the Patriots did when they scooped up Tom Brady with the 199th overall pick in the NFL Draft in 2000. That’s easier said than done, but that’s just one of many notable examples that highlight the importance of doing your due diligence while compiling intel to identify potential sleepers.
The stakes might be slightly lower in the CFL, but the Canadian teams that comprise that league still have plenty of incentive to research the players who are hoping to keep pursuing their football dreams alive in the Great White North. Of course, it’s a bit hard to do that when you’re dead—a lesson two teams learned the hard way in the 1990s.
The CFL teams who drafted dead players two years in a row
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In 1994, the Ottawa Rough Riders (not to be confused with the Saskatchewan Roughriders) finished the season with a 4-14 record and found themselves hoping to acquire some new talent prior to the start of the next campaign.
By that point, the CFL was home to four teams based in the United States, but following the conclusion of the season, that number dropped to three after the Las Vegas Posse were suspended thanks to issues with its ownership group.
The league subsequently held a dispersal draft on April 12, 1995 that allowed other teams to claim players on their roster, and Ottawa decided to pick Derrell Robertson, a defensive end who’d played college football at Mississippi State. However, there was one slight problem: Robertson had been killed in a car crash in Dallas on December 5, 1994.
You’d think teams would’ve been a bit more careful to avoid falling victim to the same mistake when the 1996 CFL Draft kicked off on May 12th. However, that somehow didn’t end up being the case.
In the fifth round, the Montreal Alouettes selected James Eggink, a defensive end from Quebec who’d played at Northern Illinois. According to The Washington Post, Montreal eventually got a phone call from a coach at Concordia University who’d been familiar with Eggnik before he’d passed away from cancer the previous December, which led to Alouettes owner Jim Speros phoning up his family to apologize for the oversight.
It appears that second snafu was enough to force CFL teams to at least confirm players are alive before drafting them, as no franchise has made a similar misstep in the close to 30 years that have transpired since then.