Argos not looking at wholesale changes

Don’t expect general manager Jim Popp to make wholescale changes following the Toronto Argonauts’ 0-2 start to their season.

The Calgary Stampeders thumped Toronto 41-7 on Saturday night in a rematch of last year’s Grey Cup, which the Argonauts won 27-24. The lopsided loss came after Toronto’s seasonopening 27-19 road defeat to the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

“If we made any change it would be very minimal, if any,” Popp said Monday. “We’ve got 20 of 24 starters back, we’re way ahead of where we were a year ago in regards to guys knowing what they’re doing, understanding the system and knowing the culture.

“We won a Grey Cup with most of these guys, we’ve had another draft, we added some key free agents . . . We just haven’t performed as well as we wanted to.”

The Argos hired Popp and head coach Mark Trestman on Feb. 27, 2017, just over three months before the start of the regular season. Toronto headed into the second half of the ’17 campaign with a 4-6 record but won five of its last eight regular-season games to clinch first in the East, then downed Saskatchewan 25-21 in the conference final before capping its campaign with a stunning Grey Cup victory.

“It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” Popp said. “Now, every single game is important because you learn something and find things out and maybe some of these losses early on tell us something that maybe we didn’t quite think about.

“We shocked a lot of people doing what we did last year . . . but it didn’t mean we played that great early on so we’ll see if we can’t get us playing back at a much higher level of football.”

But Toronto lost more than a game as veteran quarterback Ricky Ray left the field on a stretcher with his head immobilized after being sandwiched between Calgary defensive linemen Ja’Gared Davis and Cordarro Law. Play was halted for over 20 minutes.