One of the strangest media situations in Canadian Football League history took another twist Sunday. There, the Toronto Argonauts media relations account announced that quarterback Chad Kelly is not participating in their training camp:
Chad Kelly is currently not participating in team activities. The team’s focus is on training camp activities with the players available. Future updates will be provided as warranted.
— Toronto Argonauts Media Relations (@ArgonautsMR) May 12, 2024
On its own, Kelly’s non-participation here wouldn’t be notable. In fact, that’s what most figured would happen after the CFL announced a nine-game suspension for him Tuesday for violating the league’s Gender-Based Violence policy, with that coming after a three-month independent investigation into sexual harassment and wrongful termination claims made against him and the team by a former Argos’ coach in a lawsuit. (TSN’s Dave Naylor obtained the investigation’s executive summary and reported that it corroborated three of six claims in the lawsuit, including the claim that Kelly sexually harassed the coach.)
But that’s not what happened. At the start of rookie camp Thursday (a three-day camp preceding full CFL training camps, which began Sunday), Kelly was out there in shorts and a t-shirt working with the rookie quarterbacks. He didn’t speak to media afterwards, but team general manager Michael “Pinball” Clemons did. And there, Clemons said a number of things that drew blowback, including “He’s allowed to be out here, the league has given him that permission” and comments about supporting Kelly, but not the organization’s female staffers.
Kelly’s appearance at camp, and Clemons’ remarks in defense of it, intensified the media crisis dimension of the story. And that was already an issue for the CFL, especially with the delay of almost a week in announcing the investigation into Kelly in the first place (although the investigation itself reportedly began earlier, they didn’t communicate that to the media or the public for six days, only saying they were “reviewing” the matter).
But Kelly showing up at camp escalated this further. And so did Clemons defending that (and not in entirely-accurate terms; as Naylor noted, the league office doesn’t actually have the power to keep suspended players out of practice barring putting them on a commissioner’s banned list, which would nullify their contract entirely). That combination took a lot of fire across the media, and even from executives at the league office and with other teams. Some of the most notable comments there came from Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ senior director of branding Rheanne Marcoux:
.@pinball you said yesterday “we will give Chad Kelly all the support he needs”. What are you doing to support your female staff that now have to face coming to work every day with a predator in the building? Have you even spoken to them about your decision to allow this?
— Rhéanne Marcoux (@RheanneMarcoux) May 10, 2024
Yet at the first opportunity to do so, you did the complete opposite. You have only managed to downplay a serious situation and make women across the league feel unvalued, disrespected and unsupported. Do better.
— Rhéanne Marcoux (@RheanneMarcoux) May 10, 2024
And now, it sure looks like the Argonauts have done an about-face on Kelly’s presence around the team following all that criticism. It is of course possible that the plan all along was for Kelly only to appear at rookie camp rather than the full training camp (but if that was the case, you’d expect the team to have included that in their statement as well). But this certainly looks like a change.
The thing is, none of this week’s particular furor needed to happen. The Argonauts seemingly could have made the very obvious move of telling Kelly he’d be better off to stay home (which, again, is their call, not the league’s). It’s quite difficult to argue the team really benefited from Kelly doing limited work with rookies for a few days when you consider the damage of the media crisis caused by his presence (especially with him not even speaking to media himself, forcing Clemons to answer questions on his behalf). And if he hadn’t been there, there would have been a few stories about camp starting without him, but no discussion on this scale.
Bringing Kelly out this way sure seems like the team defending him and his actions publicly. And that’s a bad look for the Argos. And it’s something that all could have been avoided in this case. They eventually got to the point where camp will proceed without him and without the media circus caused by his presence, but it would have been much better if they’d gotten there in the first place.