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And it stands to reason many of them – along with the Eskimos fan base – are still questioning Rhodes’ reasons behind his decision, which included an impasse on Hervey’s contract extension as well as philosophical differences in fan and media access to the team.

“I’m in the midst of doing that, trying to call every single player,” Maas said. “I wrote an email to every one of them to kind of give them a state of the union as to how I feel about the direction of the club, how I felt about it personally and what we need to focus on.

“From there, I tried to reach out to every single one of them. I’m just about done, there’s quite a few players to talk to. Some of those conversations go long and some you leave voicemails for, but it was important that I speak to every single player that’s on our roster and part of our organization.”

The message: Their job doesn’t change, and still needs to be done to get ready for the upcoming season.

“As of right now, Ed’s the one change in our organization on the football-ops side,” Maas said. “And for all of us who knew Ed, we’re all here because of Ed on this side. So the message was we can’t change what’s been done, we need to focus on our present jobs that we have, that we were signed up to do and then the future’s going to be coming.

“So we’ve got to be aware of that but not focused on that. None of us knows what the future holds, we just know what we can control today and that’s to make the Edmonton Eskimos a winning organization from top to bottom and to look forward. We were built to win and that’s what we all have to believe.”