STAMPEDERS MEAN BUSINESS
Team awaiting Grey Cup
More than any other Grey Cup opponent the Calgary Stampeders could have landed against, the Ottawa Redblacks might be the team they are most unfamiliar with.
Yes, the two teams played against each other twice this season, but they were done with one another on July 12 after squaring off twice in a two-week stretch.
The earliest the Stamps got finished playing their regular season matchups with any other team was Sept. 8, when they took on the Eskimos in Edmonton in the Labour Day rematch.
When they take the field in Sunday’s Grey Cup, it will have been more than four months since the Stamps really dug into any game tape to study the Redblacks’ tendencies — and vice versa — and the Calgary crew doesn’t think there’s all that much to be taken from their two early-summer tilts with Ottawa.
“I think that was still in June, both those games,” said Stamps linebacker Alex Singleton. “It’s going to be cold (on Sunday) and it was probably 30 when we played them, and that’s Celsius, you guys.
“We’re going to watch film, obviously not having played them since Week 3 or 4 or whichever week that was, we haven’t watched a lot of film and now it’s going to be crunch time this week to get in and see what they’ve done all year since they’ve played us. They’ve obviously changed a lot and it’s going to be a battle and it’s going to be fun.”
The Redblacks have certainly come a long way since they played the Stampeders.
In their two matchups this year, for example, Redblacks QB Trevor Harris threw for a grand total of 228 yards and no touchdowns. In last weekend’s East Division Final alone, Harris had 367 passing yards and a CFL playoff record six TDs.
A lot of that should be credited to the dominant Stampeders defence, but the numbers also show a Redblacks team that has figured out how to play its best football and is peaking at the right time.
The Stampeders know that, although they’re not completely discounting the value of studying those early-season games.
“What you’re more worried about, a little bit, is are they going to play you like they played you, or are they going to play like they’ve been playing lately?” said Stamps head coach Dave Dickenson. “I do think you do more study. It’s not like you have much time, though.”
For those of us who aren’t seasoned football coaches, it’s hard to know how much importance should be placed on the Stamps and Redblacks’ shared history.
Yes, the Stampeders won both of their head-to-head matchups this year, but they somehow managed to tie a game in both the 2016 and ’17 seasons, while two other games — including the 2016 Grey Cup — went to overtime. The Stamps and Redblacks generally play each other pretty close, in other words.
That suggests fans could be in for a thriller on Sunday.
Whichever group manages to better figure the other out in the film room could go a long way toward determining if that happens, and it’s going to be a long work week.
“It’s not a question,” said Stamps QB Bo Levi Mitchell. “The last couple weeks, knowing we were going to play a combination of (the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Saskatchewan Roughriders or B.C. Lions in the West Division Final), it was teams we played all at the end of the season, so you’re pretty familiar with personnel, things like that.
“You’ve played them a couple times and watched film on them a couple times. We put away the film on Ottawa a long time ago and they’ve done a lot of different things since then. They like to play us a certain way, so we’ll see, personnel wise, what they decide to do, coverage-wise what they decide to do and we’ll go out there and react to it.”
STYLE POINTS
Mitchell showed up for the journey to Edmonton on Tuesday rocking a Smithbilt Hat and a full-on western jacket and shirt.
It was a wild look, and while his coaches and teammates were impressed, it doesn’t sound as if anyone was going to get Dickenson wearing a similar look any time soon.
“You’d have to pay me quite a bit of money, actually,” Dickenson said with a laugh. “I don’t know if my wife would let me back in the house, that would be the problem.”
Singleton, for the record, gave Mitchell’s look his full stamp of approval.
THEY’RE READY
The Stamps only made Singleton, Dickenson and Mitchell available to media upon their arrival in Edmonton, and each of them was unsurprisingly asked about the team’s failures in the last two Grey Cups.
Anecdotally speaking, they seemed prepared for the questions.
They know the team’s going to get asked, and they know it’s going to happen a lot.
How many times do they expect?
“Four or five days, times a hundred or two hundred?” Singleton said. “A thousand (times), probably.”
The Calgary Stampeders can’t change their most recent Grey Cup history, of course.
But they can choose to ignore it. Or revise it.
“Look at our roster. There’s hardly anybody here who has been here for two years,” head coach Dave Dickenson said Sunday in Calgary after the Stamps beat the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the West final. “There has been so much turnover.
“That’s why I think it’s great what we’ve accomplished. We’ve done it with totally different teams. We’re not the same team. We’ve maybe at times had more explosive players, but we’re still a damn good team.”
They were a damn good team two years ago, too, the better team at 15-2-1 to the Redblacks’ 8-9-1 in fact, but Ottawa prevailed 39-33 in overtime in the 2016 Grey Cup game.
Contrary to his recollection, the Stamps were only slightly different personnel-wise then. There are 27 current Stampeders who were with the team two years ago in the Grey Cup, including 18 of the 24 starters in Sunday’s West final win over Winnipeg. That’s 75 per cent of the starters.
They are important players, too: quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell, defensive stalwarts Ciante Evans, Brandon Smith, Micah Johnson, Alex Singleton, Junior Turner and Ja’Gared Davis, punter Rob Maver and kicker Rene Paredes. Most of that offensive line is still with the Stamps.
There are some new offensive playmakers, among them the biggest star of Sunday’s win, receiver Eric Rogers, who caught three touchdown passes. Running back Don Jackson is new; so are receivers Chris Matthews, Richard Sindani and Markeith Ambles. But this is not a totally different Stampeders team from two years ago. There will be a media focus on many of those holdovers, Mitchell prime among them, given his ability to dictate a new outcome.
That said, will Mitchell be carrying the baggage from that disappointing 2016 loss into Sunday’s game at Commonwealth Stadium? Or can he shrug it off ?
“I can shrug it off. You guys can’t, you know?” he said Sunday, referring to media. “Y’all will bring it up and I understand that. It’s your job. But this is a completely different team. There are a lot of different guys on this team. It’s not a rematch of 2016. It’s not the same Ottawa Redblacks. Different defence, different co-ordinator, different quarterback.
“I told them on the sidelines, the only thing the same is the two logos.”
His argument is better made for the Redblacks. Only 13 current Ottawa players were on the team in 2016 and precious few were important players: Brad Sinopoli, Greg Ellingson, Jonathan Rose and Antoine Pruneau among them.
So the current Stampeders are far more likely to have the 2016 game fresh in their minds, whether they want to admit it or not.
Vegas oddsmakers made the Stamps heavy favourites in 2016. But Ottawa stunned Calgary right out of the gate by taking a 27-7 lead. The Stamps stormed all the way back to tie it 33-33 and force overtime. In extra time, Redblacks quarterback Henry Burris completed his MVP performance with a touchdown toss to Ernest Jackson. Mitchell and the Stamps came up empty in overtime and the quarterback’s last three throws were incompletions.
The Stamps returned to the 2017 Grey Cup and once again Mitchell had the ball in his hands within striking distance of a win, but threw an interception in the Toronto end zone with 20 seconds remaining and the Argos won 27-24.
In 2016, Mitchell won the most outstanding player award three days before the Grey Cup game. He should win it again Thursday over Hamilton’s Jeremiah Masoli. It would be the only part of that Grey Cup week he’d like to repeat, one suspects.
It took Mitchell some time to get the offence going in the West final, but he hooked up three times with Rogers, got the job done and should be confident Sunday.
“I thought he was fairly sharp, made some great throws. … He managed the game extremely well again,” Dickenson said. “I don’t ask him to do everything, I just want him to win football games and in my opinion there is no one better.”