FIRST LOOK AT 2013 EDMONTON ESKIMOS
Eskimos lose QB Nichols, kick returner Moore as Riders rally
Edmonton Eskimos’ Matt Nichols looks downfield during CFL pre-season action against the Saskatchewan Roughriders at Commonwealth Stadium Friday. The Esks lost to the Riders 31-24. For more pictures, go to edmontonjournal.com/photo.
The Edmonton Eskimos may need to call a fumigator.
In their first Canadian Football League pre-season game of 2013 on Friday, the team saw that the injury bug(s) that latched onto them a year ago and tried to suck the life out of them are still alive and well, milling about the turf at Commonwealth Stadium.
In the Eskimos’ 31-24 loss to the Saskatchewan Roughriders — which was won on a Graig Newman interception that was returned for a touchdown in the final minute of play — injuries weren’t the deciding factor. But if the injury to Matt Nichols is severe, it could be the derailing factor of the team’s training camp and quarterback battle.
Nichols lasted all of 14 minutes on Friday night, before the 26-year-old injured his right knee and had to eventually be carted back to the lockerroom. He was handed a pair of crutches when he got there.
Shortly after Nichols gave way to Mike Reilly at quarterback, the Eskimos lost running back/kick returner Tavoy Moore, who suffered a lowerbody injury and, like Nichols, was done for the night.
“All we know is that it’s a lower-body injury and we’re going to see how it settles tonight (Friday) and we’ll reassess him (Saturday),” Eskimos head coach Kavis Reed said of Nichols.
It wasn’t just Nichols. Moore had a pair of crutches next to his locker after he left the game in the first half as well. Moore said he hurt his leg on the first play of the game — a kickoff return that he fumbled, recovered and ran nine yards.
“Similar situation,” Reed said. “It’s a leg injury. Doctors don’t know for sure what it is. Once we get everything looked after and it settles down we’ll have more information.”
The Eskimos need good information.
Nichols wasn’t around in the Eskimos locker-room postgame. His stats are an unfinished five-of-seven passing for 88 yard and two interceptions. He hurt his knee trying to keep Carlos Thomas out of the end zone, after his pass bounced off of Ed Gant’s hands and into Thomas’ hands for what ended up as a 30-yard touchdown. That put Reilly, the other face of the team’s quarterback battle, into the game a little earlier than he anticipated.
“We feel bad when something like this happens, but it’s the game of football and it’s a tough game,” Reilly said after completing four-of-nine passes for 102 yards, a touchdown and an interception.
“You’ve just got to battle through those type of things and be ready to go.”
Reilly didn’t see what had happened to Nichols from the team’s crowded sideline. Reilly heard receiver Shamawd Chambers say that Nichols had gone down.
The result is a familiar frustration for Nichols, who saw his 2012 season end with a dislocated ankle and broken fibula in the playoffs last year against the Argonauts in Toronto. He’d rehabbed and trained for the past six months to get back to Friday, back to his shot at being the Eskimos starting quarterback. And for the second time in as many of his games, he was carted off of the field.
“First and foremost you think about the players and how hard they worked and hopefully it’s nothing too serious that they can’t come back from,” said Reed, who spent a portion of his time Thursday discussing the lengths his team has gone to in training camp to try to keep the injury bug away.
“It is a disappointment, but injuries are a part of our game, unfortunately. I think our team is constructed very well that if it is something long term, we’ll be fine.”
Reed used his second half to play his CFL rookie quarterbacks. Both Jacory Harris (four-of-six passing, 32 yards) and Jonathan Crompton (fivefor-11, 60 yards, one interception) showed well, helping the Eskimos build a 21-14 lead through the fourth quarter, before the Riders began to chip away at the lead.
Former Eskimos kicker/ punter Brody McKnight led the Riders with three field goals and Newman caught a loose ball that popped off of Eskimo Youssy Pierre in the final minute of play and ran it back 57-yards uncontested to seal the game.
Reed figured the Eskimos would make seven cuts on Saturday to get his roster down to 64 players. The team will be in Vancouver on Friday night to wrap up their pre-season against the B.C. Lions.
FORT MCMURRAY — In need of a temporary home for the 2015 Canadian Football League pre-season, the Edmonton Eskimos are on the move and making a little history at the same time.
With the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup forcing the Eskimos to find some temporary ground, the team has finalized a plan that will see it hold its “home” pre-season game in Fort McMurray.
The Eskimos will host the Saskatchewan Roughriders on June 13, 2015, at Fort McMurray’s MacDonald Island Park. It will be the furthest north a CFL game has been played in the league’s history. The game will broadcast nationally on TSN.
Eskimos president and CEO Len Rhodes and his staff worked hard with the league on setting a date. The CFL schedule is usually a year at a time process, but to finalize arrangements with Fort McMurray officials, the Eskimos needed three things from the league.
“We needed a date, we needed an opponent and we needed a commitment from the broadcaster,” Rhodes said.
The wheels were forced into motion for the relocation three months ago, when Edmonton was named a host city for the 2015 Women’s World Cup. The City of Edmonton’s facilities, specifically Commonwealth Stadium, will be booked up through June, which left the Eskimos in need of a place to play football.
“We found not only a solution, we found a great solution,” Rhodes said.
The game will be played at MacDonald Island Park’s SMS Stadium, which is currently under construction. The 5,000-seat venue — a $127 million expansion project to what is already the largest recreation centre in Canada — is expected to be completed between late 2014 and early 2015.
The Eskimos will set aside 2,000 seats for their season ticket holders (available from June 17 at 10 a.m. to June 27 at 5:30 p.m. MDT) and will then open ticket sales to the public on June 28 at 10 a.m.
As Rhodes, Wood Buffalo mayor Melissa Blake and MacDonald Island Park’s chief operating officer Tim Reid addressed a small crowd of Wood Buffalo employees in the Park’s atrium, the enthusiasm for what the Eskimos have termed Northern Kickoff was overwhelmingly present.
“There’s nothing that matched this one, quite frankly,” Rhodes said of the options for a pre-season game location.
“I think the obvious ones that came to people’s minds is, ‘Do you want to go play at the U of A (University of Alberta) and there were capacity issues with that. Others had asked whether we’d entertained playing in Calgary and that is one that we were not going to entertain, or northern Saskatchewan. We wanted to keep it at home and that meant somewhere between Edmonton and Northern Alberta and this is a perfect location.
“The stars have aligned, given with everything coming in the future.”
The Eskimos still have an announcement to make in regards to where they’ll hold their training camp in 2015. Rhodes said that news was “days away” and that it will not involve Fort McMurray.
“We’re going to go into another community outside of Edmonton proper (for training camp),” Rhodes said.
Rhodes took a moment during his address to fans and the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo employees in attendance at MacDonald Island Park on Friday to announce the Eskimos would be making a $10,000 donation to emergency services in Fort McMurray. The money would go toward aiding the community as it deals with a week that has seen substantial flooding in its downtown area after continuous heavy rainfall.
“Given what the citizens of this community have been through in the last week, we were not going to just come in and talk about football,” Rhodes said.
“While we’re excited about bringing a ray of sunshine through football, we have a commitment right away. We’re a community owned team and that entails giving back to the community. What we did today, the $10,000 donation to emergency services is on behalf of our club, but also on behalf of all of our fans.”
Blake shared her colleagues’ enthusiasm over the news.
“It’s the brightest ray of sunshine that we could have. This is just something to give us hope and move us forward,” the mayor said.
“It’s a dream come true for this community.”
Additional information on the event is available at northernkickoff.com and Esks.com