Mike Reilly comes to the rescue
Still hobbled by foot injury, No. 1 QB helps Edmonton outlast Saskatchewan
There’s a reason No. 2 quarterbacks aren’t No. 1.
If that point wasn’t evident earlier in the day after an appalling performance from B.C. Lions’ season-long stand-in Kevin Glenn in the crossover playoff game at Montreal, it was driven home with an exclamation point Sunday afternoon at Commonwealth Stadium by Saskatchewan’s Kerry Joseph.
That Edmonton Eskimos’ Matt Nichols, or rather his team, came out on top of the matchup, 18-10, in the Canadian Football League’s West semifinal was almost incidental to the fellow under the centre. Someone had to take the snaps for the winning team, with Mike Reilly nursing what was reportedly a broken bone in his foot, and Nichols was elected.
He hardly dazzled — and the Eskimos looked as though they just might blow it until Reilly came off the bench six minutes into the third quarter and put together some late, clock-eating drives — but this was no day to critique the methodology.
“We won, so ... good enough,” Reilly said, asked to assess his own play in relief of Nichols.
“That’s how it goes for these playoff games. If you won, you played good enough. If you lost, you didn’t.”
He didn’t engineer so much as a point and, in fact, the lone Edmonton touchdown came on an 84-yard punt return by Kendial Lawrence in the second quarter.
The Riders, in fact, with Tino Sunseri replacing Joseph in the second half, had 220 passing yards to just 112 by the Eskimos.
But with the game on the line and the Roughriders hanging around, Reilly restored a sense of order and calm to an eight-point lead that was threatening to come unravelled.
And with another week of rest and treatment, he’ll almost certainly start next Sunday’s Western final in Calgary.
“I think it is very likely,” said Eskimo head coach Chris Jones.
How the Eskimos failed to put the game away much earlier, gifted with five interceptions by Joseph, four of them in the first half — the 41-year-old was clearly rattled by the pressure Jones sent on almost every play — is a tribute to a feisty Saskatchewan defence and the cold weather. But that failure was probably what convinced Jones that he had to risk Reilly’s sore foot and put his injured quarterback in.
“They brought a lot of pressure early, I didn’t see the field well, I didn’t make good throws. At the end of the day, the only way I can sum it up is, I sucked,” said Joseph.
“The dressing room was good at halftime, we knew despite the turnovers we were still in the ball game (down 17-7). But it was horrible on my part. I let these guys down, I let this organization down, I let the province of Saskatchewan down and it was horrible, plain and simple.”
Well, it wasn’t all Joseph, any more than the Eskimos’ passing shortcomings were all Nichols, who had a 35-yard, first-quarter TD pass dropped in the end zone by Adarius Bowman.
But the Riders gave up six special-teams touchdowns this season, and Lawrence’s proved fatal.
The Eskimos also won the line of scrimmage, getting 134 yards from running back John White, and the Riders couldn’t take pressure off the quarterback by establishing any kind of run game of their own. Their two running backs, Steven Miller and Anthony Allen, netted just 20 yards on eight carries, though Sunseri, who was an improvement in all respects over Joseph, ran for 27 more.
“Chris Jones sent pressure the whole time. He was going to live or die by it,” said Roughrider coach Corey Chamblin. “We couldn’t get some balls off ... (Joseph) just didn’t have it. You couldn’t have a running game. That’s the whole thing, they were blitzing the run. Jones knew that was our strength, our running game and he was able to take that away and move us to the pass game.
“We definitely had the chance. A hard fought game against a very good football team: 18-10, that’s the way a playoff is supposed to be, supposed to be a tough game.”
The Riders, who never recovered their Grey Cup winning form of a year ago and looked mostly lost after QB Darian Durant went down at mid-season, got their lone TD in the final minute of the first half after Edmonton cornerback Patrick Watkins was injured.
Joseph scrambled away from the rush long enough to let receiver Korey Williams get wide open behind Watkins’s replacement to cut the lead to 17-7 at intermission.
Hugh O’Neill contributed three field goals to the winners’ total.
Now comes the hard part. Nothing the Eskimos showed Sunday — certainly not their offence, or Reilly’s relative playit-safe reluctance to run — would give any hint that the Stampeders will have much of a problem next weekend.
They have won 11 straight regular-season games against the Eskimos, including all three this season, though Reilly didn’t play in either the Labour Day game or the rematch.
But the last time the Alberta rivals met in the playoffs, the Eskimos won the division semifinal at Commonwealth Stadium before losing to B.C. in the 2011 West final.
They do like to spoil each other’s parties.