ONE CRAZY NIGHT
Forget the talk about the Argos winning because of trust and love — this wild Grey Cup was won on three plays
OTTAWA — When it was over, when the crowds had left TD Place to seek warmth and the field was covered with double-blue confetti mixed in with piles of snow, Marc Trestman said he was at a bit of a loss to explain that Grey Cup win.
Dave Dickenson said the same, except much quieter.
“They are just words,” the Calgary coach said.
“I don’t even know what to say,” the Toronto coach offered.
That makes three of us, fellas.
What kind of insight can be gleaned from a game that was so plainly ridiculous? The powerhouse Calgary Stampeders dominated the first 55 minutes of the 105th Grey Cup in all of the ways a football game is normally assessed.
Their stellar quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell threw for more than 370 yards and looked remarkably comfortable in the snow for a guy from Texas.
Jerome Messam, the Stamps’ road-grader of a running back, had scored twice and was more effective than his Toronto counterpart, James Wilder Jr., whose best runs came before the game, when he warmed up, glistening and shirtless, amid the snowfall at the Ottawa stadium.
Calgary was so much better that they could have won easily even while losing the turnover battle. The Stampeders just couldn’t overcome those particular turnovers: The 109-yard return of a Kamar Jorden fumble, and Mitchell’s pass into the end zone in the dying moments that was intercepted by Toronto’s Matt Black.
They were, combined, the utter cruelty of sports at a championship level. What if Jorden keeps two hands on the ball? What if Mitchell spots Black before he unloads into the end zone? The Stampeders would almost certainly be champions on Monday morning, and we would be considering their place among some of the greatest teams in CFL history. I know this to be true, because those paragraphs exist in the version of the story that I wrote on Sunday night before suddenly giving my delete finger a workout.
Instead, the Stamps are left to wonder what happened, to awkwardly point fingers at each other and to consider how a team that was so good for two seasons could have nothing but heartbreak (and a pair of West Division trophies) to show for it. Messam, who has now had the chance to score gamesealing touchdowns in two straight Grey Cups and instead watched teammates screw it up, did not speak to reporters after the game on Sunday night. From a teambuilding perspective, he was probably wise to keep his thoughts to himself.
From Toronto’s perspective, though, the unlikely win was a validation of something Argonauts players and coaches had said all week: That this was a different group of players, a collection of castoffs and misfits who trusted each other from the start of training camp and bought into themes of sacrifice and working for the collective good.
As the Argos were celebrating on the field on Sunday night, taking pictures with their families and hugging one another, they were saying things about believing in each other and never giving up. That crazy win was a win for trust and love.
We pause here to note that this is basically nonsense. A team’s culture is not meaningless, but if Jorden’s knee hits the ground a halfsecond before he loses his grip on the football, than all the mutual love in the world would not have saved the Argos from a two-score deficit with less than five minutes to play.
But the Argos did win, and so they can claim whatever story they what. They kept telling us that this team was different for culture reasons, for reasons that sounded at times like weird mystical voodoo, and then they went out and won a game they had little business winning.
After a few players had said things early in the week about the new attitude that made it sound as if training camp was held at an ashram, I asked Jim Popp, the Argos’ architect, how he found players who would respond to the new message.
“It’s all about acceptance, it’s about trust, it’s about loving one another,” Popp said. “That’s really what we’re about.”
Popp said there was no template for a character guy, and that a good team finds a variety of personalities and then gets them eventually pulling in the same direction.
“There’s many a different person, as there is in society, as there is in your own family, that you just learn to trust, love and go to work with every day,” Popp said. “That’s really all that we try to do.”
The record book will show that a Toronto Argonauts team that was 5-13 last year and 9-9 this year became Grey Cup champions because a crazy game turned on three plays. It wasn’t fate, it was sports.
But Popp said on Sunday night, after he hoisted the trophy, that he just believed his group would pull it off. He had faith. And you can’t prove he was wrong.
To the victor goes the narrative.