It was the best of seasons, it was the worst of seasons
Roller-coaster ride of 2017 marked by record 346 man games lost to injury
It was the best of seasons, it was the worst of seasons for the Edmonton Eskimos.
And it almost felt like it could have been either one at any given time during their Dickensian journey of a 2017 Canadian Football League season.
While the moral of the story is two minutes isn’t enough to make seven out of three, there was plenty more to the streakiest 18 games ever assembled than a wonky finish to a wild West Division final.
Even while starting out on an incredible 7-0 run, the Eskimos felt like they had to pinch themselves to make sure it was real.
While they were finding ways to win, they certainly hadn’t been blowing teams out of the water by any means. But they definitely did start drowning in injuries early on, beginning with a season-ending Achilles injury to middle linebacker and defensive captain J.C. Sherritt on opening day.
In the end, it would amount to a league record in injury wages to cover 346 man games lost, as the Eskimos dressed 88 players over the course of the year, including 54 different starters.
And it all finally caught up to them in the form of a six-game losing streak that would begin and end with a Winnipeg Blue Bombers squad that remained the only team the Eskimos failed to beat in the regular season.
But the Eskimos won the one that counted most after hitting the post-season on a five-game win streak to cap a most remarkable way to earn a 12-6 record, before defeating the Bombers 39-32 and earn their fourth straight trip to the divisional-final round.
Of course, after having won it all in 2015, coming oh-so close to another chance to play in Sunday’s Grey Cup final makes last week’s 32-28 playoff loss to the rival Calgary Stampeders that much harder to take.
“This ranks as one of the more disappointing ones, more than all of the rest of the years,” said perennial CFL all-star defensive tackle Almondo Sewell. “But it was pretty good still.
“The only sad part about it is we knew we could have been there. It’s just a couple of mistakes here and there, and it would have been a completely different story.”
And not just by the players, either.
While Jason Maas has left himself open to an off-season of criticism with a field-goal strategy that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, the second-year head coach was almost prophetic in his outlook early on in the schedule.
Right around the time the Eskimos were putting a 5-0 record on the line against a Hamilton TigerCats club that went on to lose its first eight, Maas was asked if winning streaks make the actual dayto-day job of coaching a team any easier.
“When you coach football and you play football, it’s different from every other sport,” Maas said at the time.
“In every other sport, you play more than you practice, so I think the biggest factor in (the early streak) is we hadn’t lost in all of July, we feel pretty good, we’ve been able to practice so many days, play so many games and for all of July, we had a good state of mind because of winning. And I think that’s what happens.
“When you lose a lot and you haven’t won, you are constantly at practice, it’s gone days, now weeks, now a month before you’ve tasted victory. And, trust me, we try to preach here if you only get satisfaction out of winning, you’re doing the wrong things, because you should enjoy practising and grinding and working hard.
“But at the same time, that gets very difficult when you’re not winning as well, because then you start questioning things and wondering about how you’re doing things and you want to start changing. That’s human nature.”
Little did he know he would go on to find himself on the other end of that equation, only to flip the script once more down the playoff stretch.
It didn’t end the way they wanted, but the 2017 edition of the Eskimos was a team that could rally behind each other and pull good from the bad.
For every injury, there was a backup earning valuable experience that will improve the depth on the roster they head in with next year, when Edmonton hosts the 106th Grey Cup.
And they learned a little bit about each other along the way.
“I couldn’t be more proud of this team, this is the funnest team I’ve played with because of the fact that we’ve had so many guys come through, and yet that family brotherhood atmosphere in our locker-room never changed,” said quarterback Mike Reilly, who earlier this week became the first Eskimos player in 28 years to receive the CFL’s most outstanding player award after leading the league with a club-record-setting 5,830 passing yards.
“We’ve had like, who knows? One-hundred guys come through the locker-room, or whatever it is.
“It’s easy for them to get lost and not feel as connected to their teammates, but that never wavered.”