For CFL, Week 1 had familiar feel
The West shows it is still the best with three wins in three games against Eastern teams
As much as things change, they stay the same.
As interesting as the earliest-ever opening weekend in the CFL history seemed to be, was it really any different than any other recent season?
Eastern teams may have won the last two Grey Cups but is it too soon to talk about yet another crossover year for the fourth place Western team in the East playoffs?
I mean, Ottawa came out of opening weekend alone in first place in the East. The Redblacks are the only remaining undefeated team east of Regina. And they haven’t played a game. They had the bye week.
It really was a most interesting opening weekend in the CFL with all sorts of topics for fans to talk about. But the Edmonton Eskimos return to practice Monday with the No. 1 question involving the team that set records for man games lost (346), different players to dress for at least one game (88), number of players to start at least one game (54) and a butcher’s bill ($1.1 million in injured list player salaries) being: how many players were lost in Game 1?
How many players would join Johnny Adams, Giovanni Aprilie, Arjen Colquhoun, Juron Criner, Mercy Maston, Jean-Simon Roy and James Tuck on the six-game injury list and will Aaron Grymes return from leave to handle a personal matter?
Did they lose four more? Five? Six?
The defensive secondary has already been decimated.
If it wasn’t for their leader, Mike Reilly, grabbing them by the back of their uniform pants and hauling them from behind to grab victory from the jaws of defeat against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers for the seventh time in the last 19 games, they’d have started the season dead last.
Some of the winners felt like losers and some of the losers felt like winners, but the standings look the same.
The Bombers felt like winners despite watching Reilly bring the Eskimos back with a touchdown, two-point convert and game-winning field goal in the last minute and 36 seconds in their 33-30 victory.
With the loss of starting quarterback Matt Nichols, the Bombers weren’t expected to be able to do what they almost did with a rookie starting quarterback straight out of college. The story remains the same in Winnipeg where the Bombers maintain the longest Grey Cup drought in the league, all the way back to 1990.
It was like that with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats who last season lost 60-1 in Calgary and took a 13-game McMahon Stadium losing streak into their Saturday game against the regular season dominating Stampeders of the last decade.
The Tiger-Cats damn near made it to the final gun before quarterback Jeremiah Masoli was picked off in what proved to be a 28-14 victory for the home side.
Masoli completed 25 of 36 passes for 344 yards and was making like Riley, leading the June Jones-coached team to a last minute comeback when he threw a pathetic interception to pop the balloon.
Yes, Stamps quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell completed only 47.2 per cent of his passes and had mostly a miserable opener in the rain in Calgary. There was no evidence of Grey Cup fever among the 23,717 who huddled in the drizzle to watch the team that coughed up the last two Grey Cup games like a couple of hair balls.
One thing that’s different this week is that for the first time, Johnny Manziel did not make news.
Masoli may not have come through in the clutch but he was the second-best starting quarterback in the league on opening weekend and off that performance deserves to start and play in Friday’s game in Commonwealth Stadium against the Eskimos.
Meanwhile the Saskatchewan Roughriders, coming off an abysmal pre-season, looked good with Zach Collaros finally finding winning form for the first time in two years to lead Gang Green to a 27-19 win over Ricky Ray and the defending Grey Cup champion Toronto Argonauts. So there’s that. It was the Roughriders first season-opening victory since 2014.
Not much should probably be made about the B.C. Lions 22-10 win over the Montreal Alouettes in the Lions home opener other than it was before a respectable gathering of 20,182. For Montreal, the losing streak is now 12.
As for the great experiment by new commissioner Randy Ambrosie to move the season ahead and see if people would get into CFL football this early in the season, the combined crowds for the four games totalled 99,145. I’d score that as inconclusive.
Ambrosie would end up with the Quote of the Week before kickoff that beautiful evening in Winnipeg.
“Tonight, it looks like we’re going to be in for a beautiful evening. And you think, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be great if we could play more and more of our games in conditions like this.’” Ambrosie pronounced.
It turned into the Longest Game, complete with two lengthy lightning delays that didn’t end until 1:15 a.m. local time, and featured a first half that took four hours and 19 minutes to complete.
Ah, well, Randy, if nothing else, the lid-lifter in Winnipeg more than made everyone aware that the CFL season was underway.