Redblacks lament sloppy play against Stamps
Moments after the Ottawa Redblacks fell 43-39 to the Calgary Stampeders on Thursday night, coach Rick Campbell was disappointed and angry.
While there were some terrific Ottawa moments — including an electric 96-yard touchdown run on a punt return by Diontae Spencer — there were too many stumbles, too many brain cramps that led to mistakes good football teams don’t make.
At times, it was a one-stepahead, two-steps-back mentality — bad penalties, poor tackling, getting kicks blocked, those kind of things. Oh, yeah, and they let Calgary’s backup quarterback, Andrew Buckley (in the game in a short-yardage situation) somehow dash around the right end 60 yards for a touchdown, avoiding a weak tackling attempt by Imoan Claiborne. An offensive line that should be better let their quarterback, Trevor Harris, get hit way too often. He was sacked four times, three of them by Micah Johnson, and it could have been worse. There were also some questionable calls and possible misses by the officials.
“There are no moral victories, we lost, that’s where I’m at,” said Harris. “Missed calls are going to happen, just like missed reads, missed throws, missed tackles, everybody’s human. There’s nobody to blame except ourselves.”
“It’s on me to figure out (what went wrong) and do whatever we need to do to fix it because it’s too hard to win football games when you’re going backwards,” said Campbell. “The frustration is we show some resiliency and fight, but it’s a matter of too much bad football, too many bad plays. This obviously hurts.
“It’s a team game — it’s offence, defence and special teams working together and we didn’t get it done. We’re going watch the film and make sure we correct things and be ready for the next game.”
“At the end of the day, I put it on the defence,” said Redblacks linebacker Nick Taylor. “In some big situations, we had to get off the field and get the ball back for the offence to give them an opportunity to win the game. We didn’t come through so we’ll take the blame.”
The Redblacks were aggressive enough. On his team’s second offensive play, Harris launched a ball downfield that Greg Ellingson took and ran into the end zone, but Brad Sinopoli was flagged for an illegal block. Even with the penalty marched off, the play still went for 59 yards. On the team’s next possession, the Redblacks pulled the flea flicker out of their bag of tricks — with Sinopoli just misfiring.
Harris completed 27 of 35 passes for 425 yards and was sharp most of the time when he had enough time to find a receiver.
“Hopefully, everybody’s happy we threw the ball down the field,” said Harris. “Our game plans are going to change week to week. We attack them where we feel like we can attack them. We’re not just going to throw it deep to throw it deep. We’re not just going to take underneath to be safe. We’re going to spread it around and try to tackle areas of the field.”
“I thought (Harris) did a lot of good things and battled the whole night for us,” said Campbell.
It was an amazing effort by Spencer, who had 351 yards on the night (including punt and kickoff returns), also scoring on a 65-yard touchdown pass.
Speaking about his punt return TD, Spencer said: “We’re running out there onto the field and all the guys were saying, ‘Spence, we need you, Spence, we need something big.’ Every time I step out there, I want to make a play for my team. Everybody did their job and I just did what I can do. But we didn’t get the W, so the individual accomplishments mean nothing.”