Riders’ defence has waved bye to stellar ways since the break
Chris Jones is not the least bit defensive when asked to assess the state of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
That was clear on Tuesday when Jones, the Roughriders’ head coach and general manager, candidly fielded a question about the CFL team’s struggles on offence.
“Everybody wants to blame the offence for lack of production, but defensively we gave up nearly 500 yards of offence the other night,” Jones said. “It’s not just one side of the football. It’s all three sides.”
The special teams held up its end of the bargain — and then some — on Saturday. Saskatchewan scored on a punt return and a kickoff return during a 30-25 loss to the visiting Ottawa Redblacks.
However, Ottawa rang up 481 yards of net offence and scored four touchdowns against a Saskatchewan defence that has received many accolades this season.
“We haven’t played good defence since before the break,” Jones said. “We have not played the defence that we played early in the season, so we’re going to keep working and get back to what we’ve always done.”
That assessment applies even though the defence carried the Roughriders to a 32-27 victory over the host Winnipeg Blue Bombers on Sept. 8.
During that game, Saskatchewan
Everybody wants to blame the offence for lack of production, but defensively we gave up nearly 500 yards.
scored on two long-distance interception returns and held Bombers tailback Andrew Harris to 21 yards on 10 carries.
“But when they have 380 yards of offence, nobody mentioned that because we happened to score two times,” Jones said. “Nobody mentions the fact that 380 yards would put us in the bottom third of defences.
“Our expectation levels across the board for players, coaches and everybody is higher than that. It gets hidden sometimes.”
A four-game winning streak, such as the one that was snapped on Saturday, can camouflage deficiencies in some cases.
“When we won four games, we weren’t coming in and telling our players how good we are,” Jones said. “And right now, after losing a football game, we’re not coming in and telling our players how bad we are. We need to play good, consistent football and trust the process.”