Business as usual for season finale
Eskimos vow to keep battling to bitter end in meaningless game against Bombers
Halloween isn’t until Wednesday, but that didn’t stop the Edmonton Eskimos from sitting through a horrific bye week that saw their 2018 playoff hopes dress up as a ghost and vanish into thin air.
They went in barely clinging to life, with their only string of post-season possibility resting in the hands of about the worst puppet master imaginable: the archrival Calgary Stampeders, whose loss to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers on Friday was a death sentence for the Eskimos.
“Horrible, you never want to be in that position,” said Eskimos general manager Brock Sunderland, whose club will not finish with a winning record and misses the playoffs for the first time since 2013. “It’s difficult when you’re crossing your fingers hoping for another team to handle business for you when you should have handled it already.”
Instead, they’re caught in purgatory over this final week of the regular season, with no way out until those very same season-spoiling Bombers come to Commonwealth Stadium for Saturday’s finale (2 p.m., TSN, ESPN+, 630 CHED).
“You don’t ever want to be put in that spot where you have to rely on other people to get you in and, obviously, there’s reasons for that,” said Eskimos head coach Jason Maas. “It was difficult to watch. Afterward, you just deal with it and move on.
“And that’s what we choose to do and that’s where our focus is.”
And with one last game left to play — despite a win or loss making no difference to either the ousted Eskimos or the Bombers, who will finish in third place and travel for the divisional semifinal — Commonwealth’s inhabitants were in no hurry to exorcise any demons on a season that saw them start out 5-2, only to sit with an 8-9 record.
“We talked about it in the meeting this morning, as tough as it is we’ve got one more week to go and we want to finish it off strong,” Maas said. “The focus has to be there. Preparation’s not going to be any different than if this game was for a playoff spot and I’m very proud of our guys to show up (for practice) like that.
“There’s two choices, you either just give in or you keep going. I think the human spirit’s definitely dampened when you get something taken away from you and you can’t go on and try to win a championship, but our job is to keep going and rally these guys and get them to play as well as they can to get a win and finish the year off on a strong note. That’s the job as a coach, and particularly a head coach.”
Not every Eskimos member witnessed the nail in the coffin Friday.
“I was back east at a wedding, so I was checking the updates on my phone, of course,” said quarterback Mike Reilly. “And being the east coast, it was a late game, so I knew sometime in the middle of the night that things hadn’t gone our way, but, no, I wasn’t able to watch the game.
“That’s the way it goes. It’s unfortunate for us but at the same time, we put ourselves in that situation. Not the result we were hoping for, but that’s why you don’t want to hope for other people’s results. You want to take care of business on your own.”
Our job is to keep going and rally these guys and get them to play as well as they can to get a win and finish the year off on a strong note.
As for the biggest order of business at hand now that the Eskimos are out of the playoffs, Reilly wasn’t interested in discussing his contract situation, which will see him become a free agent in February pending action.
“I’m focused on Winnipeg. I haven’t thought of anything outside of that game,” said Reilly, who hasn’t let that rather large, looming shadow hanging over Commonwealth take the attention away from his team’s preparation. “My focus was on getting a win to try and get us into the playoffs, but the fact that has changed and the reality that we can’t be in the post-season hasn’t changed what my thought process is.
“So if it’s not about Winnipeg, I haven’t given it a second thought. And I won’t. I’m prepared to come out here and play the very best that I can on this field and I expect the same of all the guys on our team, and that’s what we’re going to do.”