Courtesy Regina Leader Post:

Pick a storyline — any storyline.

When the 2008 Canadian Football League season kicks off tonight on two fronts — Montreal visits Hamilton and the Calgary Stampeders play host to the B.C. Lions — there will be no shortage of them to follow.

Can Saskatchewan match its 2007 Grey Cup brilliance? Can Edmonton avoid a third straight year out of the playoffs, a dubious feat it hasn’t managed since 1965? Can Hamilton resurrect a franchise that has fallen on hard times?

And can Calgary take that long-awaited jump from the middle of the pack to elite status?

Here’s one guy’s opinion about the 10 most intriguing storylines to watch this season, leading up to the 96th Grey Cup game on Nov. 23 at Olympic Stadium in Montreal:

- GREEN WITH ENVY

That’s a fair description of the seven other CFL teams late last November when the Saskatchewan Roughriders set off a provincewide — make that nationwide — celebration with their Grey Cup triumph in Toronto.

But the off-season was anything but routine in Regina, and it’s anybody’s guess how this team will fare in a quest for back-to-back Cups, which hasn’t been done in more than a decade (Toronto won in 1996 and ‘97).

The Roughriders lost their head coach, Kent Austin, to his alma mater at Ole Miss, and their starting quarterback and reigning league Most Outstanding Player, Kerry Joseph, to a salary-dump trade.

Now they’ll be riding the unpredictable arm of Marcus Crandell, who has turned three brilliant playoff games in 2001 with the Calgary Stampeders into seven more years of employment. It’s been said that Crandell can keep you in every game but will always break your heart at the end.

The schedule isn’t that kind to Gang Green — four games in 17 days to close out the season. Ouch.

- PUTTING A STAMP ON THINGS

A year ago, the Calgary Herald rightly predicted that John Hufnagel would be coaching the Calgary Stampeders in 2008.

A third straight first-round playoff exit last November, combined with a growing concern over a perceived lack of discipline and top-down control, ultimately cost Tom Higgins his job as coach and general manager of the Stampeders, and Hufnagel was handed the reins in December.

Since then, he’s worked on fine-tuning an already dangerous offence, and overhauling a defence that grew stagnant last season under former defensive co-ordinator Denny Creehan.

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