Boatmen vow to stay the course

Don’t expect general manager Jim Popp to make wholesale changes following the Toronto Argonauts’ 0-2 start.

The Calgary Stampeders thumped Toronto 41-7 on Saturday night in a rematch of last year’s Grey Cup, which the Argonauts won 27-24. The blowout came after Toronto’s season-opening 27-19 road defeat to the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

“If we made any change it would be very minimal, if any,” Popp said Monday. “We’ve got 20 of 24 starters back, we’re way ahead of where we were a year ago in regards to guys knowing what they’re doing, understanding the system and knowing the culture. “We won a Grey Cup with most of these guys, we’ve had another draft, we added some key free agents … We just haven’t performed as well as we wanted to.”

The Argos hired Popp and head coach Marc Trestman a little more than three months before the start of the 2017 regular season. Toronto headed into the second half of the ’17 campaign with a 4-6 record but won five of its last eight regular-season games to clinch first in the East, then downed Saskatchewan 25-21 in the East Division final before stunning Calgary in the Grey Cup.

“It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” Popp said. “Now, every single game is important because you learn something and find things out and maybe some of these losses early on tell us something that maybe we didn’t quite think about.

“We shocked a lot of people doing what we did last year … but it didn’t mean we played that great early on so we’ll see if we can’t get us playing back at a much higher level of football these next couple of weeks than how we finished the game (Saturday night).”

Toronto has a bye this week and hosts Edmonton at BMO Field on July 7.