Redblacks make quick rise to elite status
TORONTO Jon Gott is the only player to start all 57 regular- and post-season games the Ottawa Redblacks have played.
This makes Gott an ideal individual to describe just how far the Redblacks have come since they started CFL competition in 2014.
The short answer — “a long way” — is obvious. Transforming from a constantly changing band of desperadoes who won just two of 18 contests in that first season to a Grey Cup finalist a year later was an accomplishment in itself, but the Redblacks have in 2016 earned a second consecutive shot at the CFL’s big bauble Sunday against the Calgary Stampeders at BMO Field.
“That first season, we lost a lot of games and not many people had faith in us,” Gott, a 31-yearold centre acquired in a trade on draft night in 2014, said following the final full practice of this year. “Ottawa fans stuck around with us and then the second year we turned it around and went to the Grey Cup, but we didn’t win it.
“In three years, for what this team has done, it’s pretty impressive. You look at other teams around the league and some haven’t been to the Grey Cup in a while. To go back to back is pretty impressive.”
Gott and linebacker Damaso Munoz, another 2014 season survivor and the only other every game starter this year, both said the Redblacks were better off for having experienced Grey Cup week and their stinging 26-20 championship defeat against the Edmonton Eskimos last year in Winnipeg.
The collective focus is better and there’s no shortage of motivation for the biggest game of the year, they added.
“We have guys in this lockerroom, high character guys, guys that work hard, guys that want to win a championship,” said Munoz, 30, “and I think that ultimately has got us to where we are right now.”
Head coach Rick Campbell said the Redblacks always had hope for success, even if many didn’t believe him immediately following that two-win season. In his words, players and coaches who stuck around through the subsequent 12-6-0 and 8-9-1 campaigns, both leading to first place in the CFL East Division, never pointed fingers or ran for cover.
“We always talked about trying to build a winning culture and expectations of winning, which is easy to say and easy to talk about, but it’s more about the action of coming to work each day and working hard,” Campbell said Friday.
“It started to translate (into success) for us and I think our guys, the whole organization — our coaches, our players — have a good appreciation for how hard it is to win and all the work that it takes and it has paid off for us.”
The Stampeders, of course, have their own vision of the CFL world and what is required to get ahead in it.
And coach Dave Dickenson wasn’t about to allow reality to spoil a good yarn about the plucky underdog Redblacks, whose 2016 record was clearly inferior to his squad’s league-best 16-2-1 for the regular season and playoffs.
What about those five CFL awards presented Thursday to the Stampeders, four of them in categories including Redblacks as finalists?
Dickenson, who received 72 votes to Campbell’s one as CFL coach of the year, described those honours as a by-product of producing the league’s best win-loss record and of utterly no significance to the Grey Cup game.
“I think both teams, whether they think they’re underdogs or not … if you truly ask them, they’ll say it, but they don’t believe it,” Dickenson said. “It’s a tight game, it’s going to be anyone’s game (to win) and I’m looking forward to being part of it.”
Tailback Jerome Messam, who received 63 votes as the most outstanding Canadian player to 10 for Hamilton Tiger-Cats slotback Andy Fantuz, described Dickenson as “a fortune teller” for accurately predicting the torrents of awards and predictions listing the Stampeders as prohibitive favourites against the Redblacks.
“We’ve been prepared, we’re locked in, we know they’re a good team, we know that they’re listening to all this, too,” Messam said. “We are not looking past them at all. We’re going to work hard and our focus hasn’t changed since the beginning of training camp.”
For the record, the Redblacks should have beaten the Stampeders in July, but a fourth-quarter fumble and a dropped interception in overtime led to an eventual 26-26 tie. The rematch in Calgary in September was close into the fourth quarter, but the Stamps eventually pulled away to win 48-23.
Historically speaking, Ottawa and Calgary CFL teams have met in two previous Grey Cup games. The Stampeders won in 1948, the old Rough Riders in 1968.
“We swept all the awards last year, but we lost the big game,” Gott, who was beaten out by the Stamps’ Derek Dennis for outstanding offensive lineman, said in reference to the Redblacks’ three player honours and Campbell’s recognition as top coach in 2015. “I’m not worried about an individual award on our team, I’m worried about the Grey Cup.”
It’s a tight game, it’s going to be anyone’s game (to win) and I’m looking forward to being part of it.