REDBLACKS TRY TO REGROUP AFTER UGLY BUTT-KICKING
No matter how much lipstick the Ottawa Redblacks put on it, they’re not going to be able to pretty up Thursday’s 27-3 loss to the Calgary Stampeders at TD Place.
The 24-point margin actually doesn’t do it justice — it was much, much worse than that. It was a kick in the gonads to a team that believed it could hang with the undefeated Stampeders. Two weeks ago, they fought back and forth for three quarters before Calgary took over in the final 15 minutes and won 24-14.
Thursday’s game was different. It was deflating with quarterback Trevor Harris unable to generate any kind of offence. It’s not like the Redblacks have much time to ponder the whys and what-ifs. The B.C. Lions are in town July 20 with divisional opponents Hamilton and Toronto in the two weeks after that.
“They came out and whupped our ass, plain and simple,” said defensive back Rico Murray. “They came out with their tails lit on fire, right from the start.”
You can bet there will be chatter about whether this team can win with Harris as its quarterback. The Redblacks had just one first down in the first half. But the team isn’t ready to turn its back on him.
“He’s going to tell you he needs to be better,” said Redblacks coach Rick Campbell. “We all needed to be better. We needed to protect him better, we needed to run the ball better, we needed to play defence better, we needed to be better on special teams. There’s a large body of work that suggests he’s a very good quarterback and has done a lot of great things for us.”
Said Harris: “Everybody has to be better. It’s not a game where you can point the finger at one guy, but if you need to, you can point it at me. That’s what I want to do for my guys. I’ll make sure we’re better, I’ll step up to the plate and be better for everybody. That’s the responsibility of the quarterback. I’ll take that on my shoulders.”
Heaping blame on each other would be destructive over the course of a long season. Keep in mind, the team is still 2-2. It’s not like the Redblacks have fallen off a cliff in the playoff hunt.
Said Murray: “It’s the ultimate team sport. If you didn’t want to play a team sport, you could box, you could play golf, you could play tennis. This? Everybody depends on everybody else.”
Know that as bad as the Redblacks were, the Stampeders deserve a lot of credit for what they did. Coming off a bye week, it was almost like they knew what each Ottawa play call was going to be. They seemed to have an answer for just about everything. On the defensive side, they had a fumble recovery and three interceptions, holding Harris to 14 of 22 pass attempts for 93 yards. On special teams, they had a fumble recovery. On offence — playing half the game without starting quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell, who didn’t return after a hit late in the first half — they were methodical and didn’t make mistakes.
“We got flat-out beat in all ways — offence, defence and special teams,” Campbell said. “We never found a way to respond, we never found a rhythm, we never found a spark. I think we have some pretty good football players on our team, but we just didn’t get it done. I wouldn’t have predicted this outcome. I know they’re a good team, but our guys seemed ready to go and excited for the opportunity.
“It’s worrisome that we never came up with any plays to create a spark. I’ve never questioned our effort or want to. We weren’t able to come up with, for whatever reason, anything to give us a spark to counter-punch and come back. That’s what we have to figure out: how to do that. We’ll look at it, find some answers and make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.”
“It wasn’t good,” said receiver Brad Sinopoli. “It’s a long season, it’s just one game. Whether we lost by 50 or whether we lost by one, we have to be able to flush it. We didn’t win, we have to be able to move on to next week. As professionals, it’s our job to move on. We can’t sit here and sulk about it.”
Putting this in the rear-view mirror is necessary, but not easy, Harris said.
“It’s really hard (to forget about it),” he said. “These are the games that if you don’t have the right mindset, (they) can bug you for a long time and spill over into other games. That’s the challenge for us: having a championship mindset to come back next week stronger and better.”
The Redblacks actually moved the ball deep into Calgary territory on the opening drive of the second half. They got to the one-yard line before taking an illegal-procedure penalty. But in a puzzling sequence of events, they appeared to have yards taken away by the officials when Powell seemed to get to the fouryard line before being pushed back to the eight.
Said Harris: “The refs re-spotted it at the eight, which was confusing. That changed the play call. Obviously that wouldn’t have made the difference in the game. But I felt if we could have punched that touchdown in or on the next drive come up with a big score, it would have catapulted us.”
It will be interesting to see how the Redblacks respond.
“It’s a tough pill to swallow, but