Offensive line at root of Eskimos’ struggles

Team has given up 31 sacks in its past nine games — and has gone 2-7 in that time

Remember the Edmonton team that started this season 5-1? In those first six games, the Eskimos allowed the grand total of four — count ’em four — sacks.

That’s one sack every 54.5 pass attempts. Edmonton was the No. 1 ranked offensive line at that point and by plenty. That’s awesome.

They’ve gone 2-7 since. And they’ve given up a whopping 31 sacks — THIRTY FREAKING ONE! — since then.

That’s one every 11 pass attempts! That’s ranked No. 8 over that span and only better than the Montreal Alouettes over the same span with their 36 sacks allowed and on a current run of having allowed five or more in each game of the last five, an alltime CFL record.

That’s beyond awful.

You should know that with three games to go, the Eskimos’ 35 sacks is already six more than the 29 — 1.6 per game — they allowed all last season. Quarterback Mike Reilly was sacked five times in Saskatchewan.

Seldom has a quarterback gone from having had the protection, the time, the trust and confidence Reilly operated with to be forced to play in a set of handcuffs like he has lately.

While Reilly still leads the league in passing yards at 4,605 with three regular season games to go, he’s just about the last guy you’d blame for what’s happened here. And in case you missed the latest accounting, he has thrown five interceptions with no touchdown passes in the last two games. And the Eskimos, by coach Jason Maas’ own math, are a minus-12 on turnovers in the last three games. This is a guy who had built a remarkable record of producing 21 fourth quarter-winning drives and is now playing for a team that hasn’t scored a point in the fourth quarter for four straight games.

So to the question, then. How do you do a quick fix on an offensive line when you have back-to-back short weeks for the third and second last games of the season?

They say ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ But clearly, as the Eskimos lick their wounds prior to Saturday’s game against Ottawa, their once dominant offensive linemen are broken men a long way from a Halifax pier.

So how, exactly, did the Eskimos’ gathering of offensive line giants go from awesome to awful?

Offensive line coach Mike Gibson, unlike special teams coordinator Cory McDiarmid the week before, apparently remains employed. But he and everybody else with the team were unavailable Tuesday and will remain so Wednesday as they huddle up to figure out how to put these Humpty Dumptys back together again.

With that in mind, your correspondent resorted to Blake Dermott, the Eskimos offensive line great and current 630 CHED football analyst to try to explain.

Dermott said he isn’t so sure it didn’t all start when there was an injury to an import playing left tackle and Matt O’Donnell moved over from right guard to replace him and stayed there, electing to play Travis Bond as a guard.

“Matt playing out there at tackle doesn’t play as big as he is. He bends at his waist. So, he leans. Even if you get beat, make the guy run around your gigantically long arms. But he plays in close to guys like you do as a guard. For a guy who is six-foot-eleven and 340-pounds, the result is that he plays pretty soft.

“I think Justin Sorensen has ended up playing pretty soft, too,” he said of the centre that missed a game earlier in the season and missed another one Monday and has been playing dinged-up all year.

“He has the same problem as O’Donnell, being so tall, guys can out-leverage him. They can get underneath them,” he said of the six-foot-eight mountain of a man.

But Dermott doesn’t point fingers at either of them.

“It’s a whole bunch of guys. And not just the offensive line guys.”

He includes running back C.J. Gable.

“He admits he’s missed a whole bunch of blocks.”

And then there’s Mike Reilly himself.

“If you watch him right now, almost half the time he’s throwing the ball from within four yards of the line of scrimmage. He’s fearless. He drops back and he steps up and hangs on to the ball. And that might be because right now guys aren’t getting open,” he said of the sub-par receivers he’s been left to work with since Derel Walker got hurt and with Duke Williams now playing hurt.

“You look at how many times he’s been sacked when it’s been over four seconds. You have to have that ball off within three and a half seconds and I’ll bet half those balls have been getting off when it’s well over four seconds.

“If an offensive line can hold their guys for four seconds, they’ve done their job.

“I can’t point a finger at any one person or even any one area because I don’t think it is any one person or any one area. It’s a combination of a whole bunch of things.”

The scariest thing, Dermott believes, is the big picture.

“With what the Eskimos have done with this group the last three or four years, I think teams are starting to get a book on them.”

If an offensive line can hold their guys for four seconds, they’ve done their job. I can’t point a finger at any one person.