Despite loss, some positive signs for Eskimos
As far as vanilla playbooks and on-the-bubble players go on setting the barometer for a team, Friday night wasn’t too bad for the Edmonton Eskimos.
The Eskimos lost 14-11 to the visiting B.C. Lions, thanks to a 38-yard field goal from kicker Steven Shott that split the uprights with eight seconds to play.
As in any sport, the score in a preseason game stops mattering as soon as the final horn sounds.
What’s left is game tape for both Eskimos head coach Chris Jones and Lions sideline patroller Mike Benevides, as they try to make their first round of cuts ahead of Sunday night’s 11:59 ET Canadian Football League mandated deadline.
The Eskimos and Lions battled on the field, but were like two armies that happened to graze one another in the battlefield.
They’re competing in their own way, with agendas zigzagging.
The Lions rested 25 veteran players for this game (including quarterback Travis Lulay), while Jones, in his first year as a head coach, ran through his entire roster.
“It was a pretty good game,” Jones said.
“There’s a lot of good things on that film.
“We wanted to win the football game, but unfortunately we came out on the short end. We did play a whole bunch of people in order to try to get the evaluation, because cut day is coming.”
What was gleaned in the Eskimos’ first preseason game is that quarterback Mike Reilly, when given protection, can be very effective.
Playing in the first quarter, he made 11 of 12 passes for 117 yards and the Eskimos’ only touchdown – a 33-yard pass to slotback Fred Stamps on a corner route.
The Eskimos defence, while still a little sloppy against the run at times (84 yards allowed total), has big playmaking ability.
The 25,963 fans at Commonwealth Stadium left with a familiar home loss swirling in their mouths, but it can be rinsed out in knowing that there’s another preseason game — next Friday in Regina against the Roughriders — to grow and be ready for the season opener on June 28.
Reilly only played the one quarter, which partly owed to his clean look and the bounce to his step, but the protection he got certainly helped him, too.
“I thought they did a great job,” Reilly said of his O-line.
“Just like everybody else they’re going to see that they have things that they need to get better at but for me personally standing in the pocket, I had plenty of time and they gave me more than enough time to do what I needed to do to get the ball to the guys.
“We got one or two pressure looks and they still delivered the pocket to me and they let me set up and deliver the ball. That’s all you can ask for.”
In total, the Eskimos gave up four sacks to the Lions’ three.
Reilly’s touchdown pass to Stamps is the meat in the sandwich that fans want to eat this year. That, along with Grant Shaw’s convert, an 11-yard field goal and rookie kicker Zack Medeiros’ wide field goal, accounted for all of the team’s offence on Friday.
While Nichols (9-12 passing, 107 yards) didn’t put points on the board, he was the next busiest quarterback on the Eskimos roster, despite not checking in until the start of the third quarter.
The Eskimos looked at Jonathan Crompton (3-8, 19 yards) in the second quarter and used Pat White (3-9, 28 yards, one interception) for QB sneaks and gave him reps mostly in the fourth quarter.
Jacory Harris was 0-2 with zero yards on limited reps early in the fourth.
Nichols was playing for the first time in almost a full year. He tore his anterior cruciate ligament in the first quarter of the first preseason game last year.
“I made it through one,” Nichols joked when congratulated on making it through.
“It would have been nice to finish off one of those drives as a touchdown,” Nichols said.
“But we overcame some penalties and gave our field goal team an opportunity to put up some points. Overall it just felt good for me to get back into a game situation. (Game play) felt kind of slow for me.”
The Lions chipped their way back into the game in the second half. After White’s interception, quarterback Travis Partridge found Brian Burnham for a 23-yard touch down pass. Shott’s convert tied the game with 2:43 to play.
Jones stuck with White at quarterback to close out the game, but the offence couldn’t get what it needed. Shott lined up from 38 yards out and coolly won the game for his team, a collection of new faces still getting to know one another.
The Eskimos will take Saturday off, to rest players’ bodies and for Jones and his staff, along with Eskimos general manager Ed Hervey to decide how to get the roster down from 84 players to 65 by Sunday night, excluding non-counters.