Marauders roasted, Western-style
LONDON — There haven’t been many times over the past decade or so that you knew McMaster was going to lose a football game even before kickoff. Actually, it’s hard to think of one. So Saturday’s contest at Western was decidedly unusual for the Marauders.
Western isn’t just the defending Vanier Cup champions but it returned almost all its starters from last season’s league-best offence and league-best defence, while Mac is exceedingly young and has had massive turnover.
Thus, the purple roster is more-experienced, bigger, stronger and has the benefit of familiarity.
If all that wasn’t enough, the Mustangs, who were playing at home where they basically never lose in the regular season, were hungry after getting a scare in their first game and were coming off a bye week.
If you were trying to create a recipe for a maroon migraine, you couldn’t do much better.
So really, this game was about gauging just how far the Marauders are from the elite of Canadian university football and finding out what kind of guts this team has.
The answer after an unflattering 44-6 thrashing?
“I felt like we needed to play with more grit on defence and realize that in order to be successful, we needed to play inspired football,” says head coach Greg Knox. “I don’t think we did.”
In front of a terrific crowd on what surely felt like the first day of fall, all of Mac’s weaknesses were garishly exposed. Starting with the offence.
The inexperienced O line was clearly overmatched.
Running back Jordan Lyons, who was so good last week, had few holes to exploit this time.
Quarterback Jackson White was under pressure from the first play of the game. Same for Andreas Dueck who replaced him at the half for the second straight week.
Yes, the team has some injuries among starting skill players. That hurts.
Yet, as pointed out by a London writer, Mac’s failure to find the end zone again means the team has more offensive co-ordinators (two) than touchdowns scored this year (one).
Sure, the three schools it’s faced have been pretty good but still, that’s not good.
On the other hand, the defence acquitted itself better than the scoreboard would suggest. And a little better than Knox was suggesting.
The maroon D struggled against screen passes and play action thanks in large part to bringing so much pressure that some receivers were inevitably left open. But until the last few minutes of the first half when it was worn down from being on the field so much, the defenders had been stiffening enough at key moments to keep Western out of the end zone and forcing the Mustangs into kicking field goals.
Against a team that’s scored 60 or more points five times at home in the past four years — and more than 70 another five times — this was a victory of sorts. A pyrrhic one, perhaps, but in a game like this you’re looking for any positives if you’re the visitors.
“It’s a positive but it has to come together as a whole,” defensive lineman Josh Lolli says. “We’re a young team. We’re trying to work out all the kind and trying to find what works. It’s going to take some time.”
The one tangible positive? Despite the lopsided score, the Marauders looked engaged right to the end. Not quitting is worth something.
“I saw some fight down the stretch,” Knox agrees. “Maybe we needed a little more early on.”
Again though, this was always going to be a loss. He can argue otherwise, the players can argue otherwise, the fans can argue otherwise, but it was. Which really made this game less about two points in the standings than a test of the group’s mettle and of how far McMaster is from contender status. The answer? To the mettle part, pretty good. To becoming a dominant squad? A long, long way.
If the youngsters in maroon use this beat down as a launching point and a learning moment to understand where they have to get to over the next couple or three years to be like the Mustangs and to become a championship-calibre team again, this spanking will have been worthwhile.
Otherwise, it’ll have simply been a painful Saturday in London.