CAT-ASTROPHE
Tiger-Cats torched by Harris’s record performance
Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ Frankie Williams is swarmed by Ottawa Redblacks during the CFL East Division Final in Ottawa on Sunday. It was a day to forget for the Ticats and their fans as the team dropped a 46-27 decision. With the win, Ottawa moves on to the Grey Cup game next weekend in Edmonton.
OTTAWA — Not even close. Anywhere.
On the field, on the scoreboard, on the game plans, on the headsets, on second downs and on and on and on.
There is no further argument required. The Ottawa Redblacks are the best team in the CFL East, by a wide margin, after a Hamilton Tiger-Cats season of uneven promise crash landed with a thunderous 46-27 implosion in the nation’s capital Sunday afternoon.
It was the Redblacks’ fourth straight victory over the TigerCats this season, and with each outing they were increasingly dominant.
Sunday, the Ticats fell behind by 19 points late in the second quarter — much of that forged by pivotal interceptions of two Jeremiah Masoli passes — and there was going to be no coming back from that.
Not with Trevor Harris directing an Ottawa offence that could do no wrong, especially on second down. With his third consecutive A-plus performance against the Cats, he completely erased that blackboard with “inconsistent” chalked on it.
He established an alltime CFL postseason record with six touchdown passes, didn’t throw an interception and surgically dissected the Hamilton secondary, often a split-second before the Hamilton pass rush arrived.
The Ticats had him in second and long several times and he responded with serial ease, finding wide-open receivers.
“He’s a pro, and he knows what they’re doing,” June Jones said. “I thought if three times in the plus area we score touchdowns, we make it a game. Unfortunately, we didn’t put it in and they just kept moving the ball.”
As Hamilton’s head coach, Jones is allowed to be charitable to his team. But from early in the second quarter — when Masoli was picked off by Anthony Cioffi to set up the game’s first touchdown after a field-goal-ish first quarter — this one seemed beyond the Ticats’ grasp.
Over a phenomenal six quarters against Hamilton at TD Place this season, starting with the final two of the regular season game here and ending with this masterpiece, Harris completed 43 of 47 passes.
Jerry Glanville’s defence simply had no answer against him on second, and often looked as if it wasn’t sure what the question was.
And they were returned to the field far too frequently by a stuttering Jones offence, whose only first-half TD (their first against Ottawa in more than two hours of play) was almost thwarted by time clock mismanagement.
In one of the most dominant quarterback performances in CFL November history, Harris completed 29 of 32 passes — “the ball didn’t hit the ground very much” — to 10 different receivers for 367 yards and just the six touchdowns.
Former Ticat turned Ticat killer Greg Ellingson snared all eight passes thrown his way, good for 144 yards and a TD.
Masoli was 28-for-41 for one touchdown (Mike Jones on a great, on-his-back, reception in the final second of the first half ) but had three picks.
Bralon Addison, the discovery of the late season, caught a dozen Masoli passes for 129 yards.
Ottawa’s two murderous picks in the second-quarter — one at the start, one at the end — were off the kind of ill-advised throws Masoli had all but eliminated on his way to being named the East’s Most Outstanding Player.
It took the Ottawa offence a just 20 seconds to convert them into 14 points with first-down Harris strikes to Diontae Spencer and Jean-Christophe Beaulieu.
“I just had to a better job of decision-making,” a despondent Masoli said afterward. “That’s on me to take care of the football. I’m just upset for my teammates right now. I can’t believe we lost.”
The Tiger-Cats appeared to have rediscovered their game and their swagger with an overwhelming 48-8 win over the BC Lions in the East semifinal, but a week later they looked nearly as outmatched as the Lions had.
Postgame, their locker-room was like a morgue, with most players too stunned, or emotional, to grasp, let alone analyze, what had just happened.
“There’s not really words for it,” said middle linebacker Larry Dean, the East’s top defensive player.
“You come with a set goal in mind entering training camp and we fell short. They were the better team. Hats off to them.”
The loss necessitates another reaudit of what this team did this season.
They did make the playoffs for the fifth time in six years, and their fourth appearance in the East final. They also saw Masoli set a franchise record for most 300-yard passing games, Brandon Banks set a record for most 100-yard receiving games, and two players (Banks, Luke Tasker) reached double digits in TD receptions for the first time.
But they finished two games under .500 and lost four of the last five games they played, including three to Ottawa.
Yes, the season-ending injury to Banks — when the pivotal second regular-season game against Ottawa was still in doubt — was a kind of a back-breaking straw. Especially given the previous loss of four other impact receivers. But a huge part of successful football is overcoming setbacks, even multiple ones.
Another potential setback looms on the near horizon. Assistant head coach Orlondo Steinauer, who returned here as the heir-apparent to Jones, is clearly among those squarely in the Argos’ head-coaching sights. They can talk to him 48 hours after the Grey Cup is over and, although Jones still has a couple of years left on his contract, team brass may be looking closely at what it would mean to lose Steinauer to their biggest rivals.
Rivals, maybe, but the Redblacks are now their biggest nemesis.