They may turn on you, Chris Jones, but they are not going to turn away from you.

The Eskimos he coached to the Grey Cup last year are favored by almost two touchdowns — 13½ points — over the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Yet with 32,432 tickets sold as of 4 p.m. Thursday and 37,000-plus being projected for the ideal evening forecast for the 8 p.m. game, it will draw the largest crowd of this CFL season.

Jones, nattily dressed in a new black suit, didn’t look like a head coach returning to Edmonton with his tail between his legs Thursday. But seldom has a fan base turned on a new head coach (OK, a new VP football operations, general manager, head coach and defensive co-ordinator), like they appear to have turned on Jones in Regina. But they’ll be behind him tonight.

“They are very loyal fans. They care about our football team,” said Jones. “It’s like down south where I’m from. Win or lose, people are in the stands. That’s what football is all about.”

Jones has never been through anything like this before, unless you count a 1-4 start as a baseball manager in his first high school job.

“I’ve never had a start like this. In anything. I was 1-4 as a JV baseball coach in 1991. It was in Newport News, Va. Lynchburg High School. I talk about it all the time. It was real interesting. I thought I was going to be Tommy Lasorda. We were striking out looking. I had them start swinging the bat and stealing on the first pitch. We started winning.”

Despite that experience, he’s requiring advice on how to deal with the situation.

“I’ve been leaning on a lot of people to ask their experience, people that have been coaching a lot longer than I have. They all said the same thing. Just keep doing what you’re doing and be positive. I’m just me. Sometimes they like me, sometimes they don’t. It’s one of those deals. We know it’s worked everywhere else we’ve been, and we’ll continue to do the same things.”

In this one, the Eskimos are coming off a 46-23 win over the Argos in Toronto while the 1-7 Roughriders are reeling from a 53-7 defeat in Hamilton.

In his first year as general manager Chris Jones was so intent on change he decided to drive a self-propelled swather through the existing roster when he took over the team, without thought to the combination that could happen if he got hit by injuries. The result is that Ottawa had way more to work with three years ago as an expansion team.

The Riders, who played 10 new players last week, became the youngest team in the CFL, with 32% of their team being rookies, eight weeks into the season. With two new players for this game — DL Tony Criswell and DB Fred Bennett — Saskatchewan will already have played 79 guys at least one game this season.

Through eight games that was just seven players short of the all-time club record set last year when the 3-15 Riders had 84 different players seeing action. The CFL record is 88 having dressed for at least one game, set by Hamilton in 2013. With the NFL cuts coming, Saskatchewan could hit 100 this year.

“I don’t think you ever start a season thinking you are going to have 20 to 22 guys on the six-game injured list with knees and ankles and whatever. But we just keep going to work,” he said.

Jones, people forget, was not prepared to be a head coach in many aspects when he took the job two years ago in Edmonton. There’s more to being a head coach than coaching.

Remember the fines for the three times Jones didn’t have his team out for the national anthem, not being classy enough to shake hands with other coaches, availability issues with rights holder TSN and no-content media scrums that seldom lasted three minutes?

But he learned from most of that last year and couldn’t be faulted on much as a head coach in his second season.

Jones has made major mistakes in his first year as general manager that got him into this mess.

He’s incurred $80,000 in roster cheating fines and another $26,000 to the salary cap. Yes, everybody cheats with a player here and there on the practice roster or injured list or hidden in town. Norm Kimball once had guys playing in the flag football league. With the roster limits in this league you almost have to. But Jones went and did it by the busload. No doubt he’ll learn from these mistakes, as well.

The shock is that Jones has the worst defence in the league, one that is on pace to set a CFL record for points allowed. The Riders also go into this game not having produced a touchdown in more than 90 minutes.

“We did the things we felt were necessary to put a winning football team on the field. Unfortunately we were dealt some other hands and we just continue to work.

“We’re 1-7. We certainly didn’t expect to be in that situation. We’re just trying to go 1-0 this week.”

terry.jones@sunmedia.ca

@sunterryjones