NO SACKS? NO PROBLEM FOR ESKIMOS

Pressure has become the name of the game for the Edmonton Eskimos defence. But a funny thing happened at the stadium on Friday; for the first time all season, the team that leads the league in sacks failed to earn a single one on the way to a 16-12 win over the visiting Ottawa Redblacks.

While their 26 quarterback takedowns behind the line of scrimmage still has Edmonton sitting first overall in the sack department — one ahead of the Charleston Hughes-led Saskatchewan Roughriders — at least the Eskimos now know they can win without getting a tally from their sack attack. Of course, just because they didn’t register one on Friday doesn’t mean they weren’t still providing their share of oh-so-important pressure on Redblacks quarterback Dominique Davis. It was just a different kind for the situation.

“That’s what we talked about in the room. I said, ‘I couldn’t be prouder of you because you gave up your individual (goals) to do what I asked you to do for the team,’” said Eskimos defensive co-ordinator Phillip Lolley, whose squad came up with a red-zone stand to seal the victory late in the fourth quarter. “The team deal was we didn’t want to make a lot of pass moves up the field and get run by that quarterback, and let him come out of the pocket.

“So they did what I asked them to do, and we could have probably had a couple of sacks, but we felt winning the ball game was a lot more important than individual recognitions.”