FOOTBALL FANS IN 50-50 DRAW FRENZY
Calgary wins eighth game in a row at Commonwealth Stadium
Kolton Batdorf, left, sells 50-50 tickets for the record $348,000 draw at the Eskimos home game at Commonwealth Stadium on Thursday evening. Overwhelming demand forced the Esks to delay announcing the winning ticket until after the game ended. The team said it would be posted on their website (see A3). The Calgary Stampeders broke Edmonton’s winning streak with a 26-22 final score
There’s a song by a famous country music singer/ fried chicken slinger that warns about the perils of gambling.
For Chris Jones and the Edmonton Eskimos, gambles had worked well this year in the Canadian Football League, providing a nice sprinkling on their perfect 4-0 record.
On Thursday against the Calgary Stampeders, the Eskimos went to the well once too often.
A botched fake punt deep in their own end zone cost the Eskimos, as they came up short of the first-down marker and allowed the Stampeders an easy one-play touchdown on a turnover on downs.
That keyed a 26-22 win over the Eskimos, improving Calgary to 4-0, while dropping Edmonton to 4-1, in front of 40,066 fans at Commonwealth Stadium. It was the Stampeders’ eighth win in a row in the Eskimos’ house.
Eskimos head coach Chris Jones stuck to his guns on the call.
“We’re trying to score on every play. Every play we’ve got, we’re not a concede-type team,” he said. “We’re trying to find ways to score on every single play.”
It was the first time this season that a trick play blew up for the Eskimos.
With 26 seconds left in the first half, Edmonton was lined up to punt from its own six-yard line. The ball was snapped to punter Grant Shaw, who flipped the ball to Aaron Grymes. The defensive halfback made it within a yard of the first down, but didn’t get there.
Calgary quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell (14 of 29 passing, 124 yards, one touchdown) hit receiver Jeff Fuller for the touchdown pass. It sent Calgary into the locker room up 20-13, despite the Eskimos defence stonewalling them through the first 29 minutes of play.
That dominant half went for naught, as turnovers contributed to all 20 of the Stamps’ first-half points.
Shaw also had a punt blocked and returned for a touchdown by Keenan MacDougall while a Jamal Miles punt-return fumble set up the game’s opening score, a 36-yard field goal by Rene Paredes after only two minutes and 17 seconds.
The Eskimos out-scored Calgary 7-3 in the third quarter, but couldn’t produce enough offence to get over the hump. Mike Reilly (19 of 34 passing, 212 yards, one touchdown, one interception) hit Canadian wide receiver Shamawd Chambers for a 32-yard touchdown at 6:11 of the quarter, but Paredes’ hot foot (four for four on field goals) kept the Eskimos out of striking distance.
“This is a good football team that we played against,” Reilly said. “They’ve got the best record in the league now, but we also, I think, learned that we have to do a few things better to win that football game.”
Despite the lack of offence, this game almost had it all. Two undefeated teams colliding in front of a seasonhigh — for the Eskimos and the CFL this season — crowd at Commonwealth Stadium. A wet and stormy game that more than made up for its low scoring with high drama, including that botched Eskimos’ trick play at the end of the first half that turned the game in Calgary’s favour.
Of course, there was the subplot in the Commonwealth Stadium concourse. The Eskimos had a carryover of more than $71,000 in the 50/50 draw from their last home game. Fans lined up hundreds deep all night to push the total to an incredible $348,534.
The winner wasn’t announced during the game, as the team said it wasn’t able to process the amount of tickets purchased at the time. The winning ticket was to be announced on Thursday night on the Esks website.
After Paredes’ 30-yard field goal made it a six-point game at 6:05 of the fourth quarter, the Eskimos still had a few chances.
On first-and-10 on the Calgary 30 inside the final five minutes, Mitchell threw a ball right into Eskimos defensive end Odell Willis’s hands, but he couldn’t hang on to the ball. Mitchell was lucky, as Willis ran a pick-six back against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers last week.
Grymes almost had an interception, as well, with 2:08 to play. He couldn’t hang on to the Mitchell pass near Calgary’s 30-yard line.
Calgary conceded a safety with 44 seconds left to close out the scoring.
Inside the seemingly small “c” conservative exterior that Edmonton Eskimos head coach Chris Jones presents to the world beats the heart of a riverboat gambler.
Don’t be fooled by the Tennessee drawl, the 1950s haircut, the name-rank-and-serial-number approach to what we’ll laughingly call discourse.
Jones, the defensive specialist, is secretly from Mississippi. He never met a gadget play he doesn’t like, he never saw a situation too fraught with danger to take a chance. He wants to roll the dice.
He rolled them, all right, and he and the Eskimos lost 26-22 to the Calgary Stampeders on Thursday night. Whether they lost because Jones gambled depends on your sensibility.
For all his attention to detail, his endless film study, his obsession with Xs and Os, Jones has a fair amount of Bill Cosby in him, drawing up plays in the sand using a Coke bottle top, a piece of glass and a pebble.
How else to explain some of the creativity he threw at the Stampeders at Commonwealth Stadium when the entire 40,066 fans in attendance were gambling the grocery money to try to win the $348,534 50/50 payout. Some fans were shelling out hundreds of dollars for tickets.
Despite the casino-like feel that prevailed at Commonwealth Stadium, Jones’s third-down gamble with 26 seconds left in the first half stood out for butt-naked risktaking.
On that play, Eskimos punter Grant Shaw, standing nine yards deep in his own end zone, pitched to Aaron Grymes, who scooting past him on an end around. The defensive back ran 10 yards to his own 16-yard line, inches shy of the first down. Turnover on downs. The very next play, Stampeders quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell hit Jeff Fuller in the corner of the end zone for a go-ahead touchdown as Calgary, outplayed the entire first half, fashioned a 20-13 lead. Ouch.
“We’ve got to clean up our mistakes.” Mike Reilly, Esk squarter back
Wrong time, wrong place to inject some razzle-dazzle, sniffed some purists. It wasn’t that long ago then-Eskimos head coach Tom Higgins tried an ill-advised third down gamble involving a Sean Fleming pass to fullback Mike Bradley in the Western Division semifinal that may have contributed to Higgins losing his job.
Lighten up said, among others TSN analyst Milt Stegall, noted for his razzledazzle as a Hall of Fame receiver for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. For the record, I’m with Stegall. This is the CFL; what’s wrong with some calculated fun?
It’s just football? Can Stegall be serious, the stiffnecked purists harrumphed. Well, sure.
Know this, Eskimos quarterback Mike Reilly had zero problem with what Jones tried there.
“None,” Reilly said, asked if he had qualms about that play call. “That’s our coach’s decision and we’ve rolled the dice plenty of times and came out on top. So, I’ve got no problem with that.”
Stegall and others know, of course, that Jones is a Don Matthews disciple. He learned to be unpredictable and take calculated chances from the master.
In Year 1 of his career as a head coach, Jones has put that into action.
In Week 1 against the B.C. Lions, Jones called a thirddown gamble to keep a key drive alive. The Eskimos scored a touchdown on that drive.
Then Jones called a short kickoff, which was successful, although the Eskimos then went two-and-out.
In the Eskimos’ win over Winnipeg last week, backup quarterback Pat White took a direct snap on third down and ran for a first down.
On Thursday, the Eskimos ran a play where Reilly gestured for a receiver to reposition himself even as the ball was snapped directly to tailback Kendall Lawrence, who scampered off with the ball. He gained only four yards, but in gambling, perhaps it’s the thought that counts.
It’s certainly the case that if you plant a thought in the mind of the defence that anything might happen, you might take the edge off their aggressiveness.
Look, the Eskimos didn’t lose Thursday night owing to a third-down gamble. They lost because of a cluster of mistakes: a fumbled punt that led to a field goal; a blocked punt that led to a touchdown; an interception that led to another field goal.
That’s 13 points on turnovers that sabotaged another splendid performance by the Eskimos defence.
Fred Stamps dropped at least two key balls that would have helped drives. Grymes and Odell Will is both dropped clear interceptions deep in Calgary territory late in the second half.
The Eskimos, 4-1, stubbed their collective toe, but don’t blame Jones.
“Certainly,” Reilly said. “I’m not going to take anything away from Calgary; they played a great game, they’re a great football team.
“But we’ve got to clean up our mistakes, we’ve got to execute better. We had plenty of chances to have a different result for this game.”