Stamps used Whyte’s trash talk as motivator
The Toronto Argonauts would be wise to keep their talking to a minimum during Sunday afternoon’s pre-game warmup.
As Bo Levi Mitchell tells it, there was an exchange with Edmonton Eskimos kicker Sean Whyte prior to last Sunday’s West Final that helped spur a Stampeders team that had lost three games in a row and needed something to rally around.
“He missed a field goal in pregame — he hit it off the crossbar and (Stamps kicker) Rene (Paredes) said something to him as a joke,” said the Stampeders quarterback on his weekly talk show on Sportsnet 960 The Fan.
“Sean Whyte’s reply was, ‘That’s OK because we still have two games left so I’ll figure it out.’ ” It set Mitchell and the lads off. “Coming from a kicker for one … it almost reminds me of the Peyton Manning thing, ‘Our idiot kicker,’ kind of thing. But when he said that I was, ‘All right — I’m glad that’s how your team feels so much that your kicker is saying something like that.’
“It’s kind of good to understand that’s how that sideline felt. I think that’s how we kind of felt in last year’s Grey Cup game. We felt like it was just going to happen — it was like, ‘All right, let’s go take this.’”
As every Stampeders player has repeated so far this week, they vow not to make the same mistake again this year.
“Last week we felt disrespected, obviously, but the disrespect wasn’t unwarranted,” Mitchell said.
“It wasn’t like we were winning games badly or ugly and media was just falling out of love with us. We were playing bad.”
While rebounding from an early 14-0 deficit against the Eskimos Sunday, they used Whyte’s comments as fuel, lifting the Stamps to a 32-28 win that has them seven-point favourites over the Toronto Argonauts in Sunday’s Grey Cup.