Redblacks pointing the ‘arrow up’
Players focused on getting ‘ better every week’
Coming off their summer vacation, a one-week interruption of their Canadian Football League schedule, the Ottawa Redblacks are looking to push forward with the key being two words spoken by head coach Rick Campbell before practice on Monday. “Arrow up.”
The Redblacks have their words of the day and Campbell repeated them to the players, who head into the second half of the season with a 6-3 record, They face the Montreal Alouettes, who they have already beaten twice this season, in a home game on Friday night.
“It’s about making sure, when you walk out the door, you’re better than when you walked in,” Campbell said. “That’s a common theme of ours. We’re going to focus on just this one game — that’s Montreal — we have another bye week coming up after four games. So this is a natural fourgame set we have going. We want to have a winning record in these four games starting Friday night against Montreal.”
Last week’s bye ended a run of nine games in nine weeks for the Redblacks.
“We had nine games in a row,” Campbell said. “There were several teams that have had two bye weeks since we had one (to open the schedule). After nine games — half a season — it was good to get a break.”
“It’s a progression, as it always is,” Redblacks quarterback Trevor Harris said. “In general, a lot of people push the panic button early in the season when teams aren’t playing well and they’re quick to crown people the Grey Cup champs. It’s a long season. The great teams are the ones that have their arrow pointing up the whole season, like Coach Campbell talks about.”
Harris, who struggled mightily in two games against the Calgary Stampeders earlier this season, has been superb for the past three weeks. He passed for 381 yards against the Toronto Argonauts, 487 against the Alouettes and 361 against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Skeptics will point to the lack of red-zone conversions but that shouldn’t diminish what he’s done on the field. He’s been on top of his game.
“I’ve been feeling more and more healthy as the year’s gone along, which I think is rare,” Harris said. “It’s come down to try and get the knee and ankle fully healed until I can start getting my Mike Vick on (scramble and run with the football).
“We started playing some good football toward the end of the first half (of the season). It’s our job to get better, push the ceiling higher and get better each week. It’s not about being stagnant. In pro football, if you’re stagnant, you’re replaced, and as a team, if we’re stagnant, we’ll be replaced at the top, so we know we have to keep pushing.”
Asked if the 44-21 win over the Bombers was the most complete game the team had played, Harris said, “That’s the progression of the season: finding your identity as an offence, as a defence, as a special-teams unit. There are some things we want to clean up every week, but in terms of an entire team performance, I would say that was one of our better ones.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It counts for the same amount of points as the Montreal win, it counts for the same amount of points as the first win of the season against Saskatchewan. We have to make sure we put things in perspective and make sure we keep climbing.”