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Fajardo, who signed a one-year contract with the CFL team in February, now has a new deal that carries through the 2021 season. TSN’s Farhan Lalji is reporting that the deal is worth approximately $450,000 per season.
“It feels great,” a smiling Fajardo said during a Monday afternoon media conference at Mosaic Stadium. The last couple of years have been tough, because I’ve been living on a one-year contract. Going into the off-season, you never know where you’re going to end up. It has been hard on my family. Going into the off-season, it has been, ‘Well, this could be my last year playing football, or a team could take a chance on me.’ I’m fortunate enough that the Roughriders took a chance on me. I knew that if I got an opportunity, I didn’t want to regret it going into it. Now, being locked in for two years, it feels good to know that there’s still more football in my life. A lot of things can change. A lot of things can happen from here to the next two years, but just knowing that they have trust in me and who I am as a player means a lot for me and my family.” ...
“We’ve been fighting hard for an opportunity,” Fajardo said. “I didn’t think it would be the third play of the first game, to be quite honest with you, but that was a big reason I wanted to sign here (in February). I knew that there would be an opportunity to be a (Number) 2 (quarterback). I don’t know how many people have gone from being a third-stringer to a franchise guy in little over a year, so I’m very blessed for that.”
In his fourth full CFL season, Fajardo has completed 313 of 438 passes for 3,873 yards and 16 touchdowns. His completion percentage (71.5) puts him in line to set a franchise single-season record. Fajardo has also rushed for 610 yards — the seventh-best total in the league — and 10 touchdowns. ...
“We’re super-happy for Cody and his family,” Roughriders general manager and vice-president of football operations Jeremy O’Day said. “We’re super-happy for our team as well. I think it’s a big day for our organization to get Cody to commit to our team for a few more years. We’re excited about that. We started this process probably a couple of months ago, when we started discussions with Cody and his representation. Very early in the process, we had a kind of a touch-base discussion with Cody and his representation and, as time went on, we increased those talks with them and really came to the determination that both parties wanted to try to get a deal done, which was exciting for us. We obviously wanted Cody, and Cody wanted to be here. They were great through the whole process. They were respectful of the process. They really wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to be a distraction for the team. Cody’s a guy who really puts the team first and has a lot of respect in the locker room and has a lot of positive attributes that made the process go pretty smoothly.”