Will Lions get recognized?
Top team hopes voters take that into consideration
Andrew Harris had done his job for the last time in the regular season. A 13th win by the B.C. Lions left him contented, and when talk rolled around to his bid to become the division nominee for top Canadian, there wasn’t much more he could say or do.
The next phase of balloting in six categories for the CFL Awards concluded Sunday, and to hear their collective line of logic, the team with the most wins was trying to suggest their players should take home most of the awards.
But Harris, like most outstanding player nominee Travis Lulay or defensive player candidate Adam Bighill, also realizes that votes can be cast for reasons that aren’t contained on a stat sheet.
And there was hope on the part of several players that coaches and voting members of the Football Reporters of Canada looked at their accomplishments and didn’t weigh them against league records broken this year by other players.
Calgary’s Jon Cornish, who is up against Harris for top Canadian, broke a long-standing non-import rushing standard set by Normie Kwong. Bighill had far fewer tackles than Edmonton’s J.C. Sherritt, who broke a league mark. However, Bighill was dominant in several other major categories.
But what almost seemed to matter to Harris after posting more yards from scrimmage (1,830) than any non-import in league history was that he carried himself better than Cornish. On some levels, it seemed to matter more.
“Sometimes how he acts, I don’t get it, but all the best to him,” Harris said of Cornish after the Lions’ 17-6 win over Saskatchewan.
“He comes off arrogant sometimes. For me, I don’t really appreciate that kind of stuff, but that’s how he rolls. He beats to his own drum.”
Comportment shouldn’t count in balloting, just as personality shouldn’t count in a general election. But it does.
In the same light, some of Bighill’s teammates tried to suggest that Sherritt’s 130 tackles with the 7-11 Edmonton Eskimos shouldn’t make him a defensive finalist and hoped voters looked at the overall game of the Lions’ linebacker, whose work has been exemplary beyond tackling.
“What gets lost in stats is the overall team, the fact our team and defence is number one,” said linebacker Solomon Elimimian, who had 98 tackles las year but lost the defensive club nomination to Keron Williams.
“You can’t judge it on just one number. J.C. is a great player, but how good are the Edmonton Eskimos?”
Indeed, Sherritt and his teammates briefly celebrated the record-breaking tackle Friday having just surrendered a first down on the same drive on which they went on to lose against Calgary.
If you get the feeling this might be an edgy two weeks for the Lions before the West Division final Nov. 18, you might be right, though some have a balanced view of the top-Canadian race.
“Harris did more in different facets of the game, but Cornish had more touchdowns,” said Shawn Gore, who caught Harris on the final game of the season for the club receiving lead, leaving Willie Fleming as the last Lions player to lead in rushing and pass-catching in the same season.
Mind you, the rhetoric that may yet spice up the playoff run was touched off by Wally Buono, who suggested on the weekend that the Cornish’s eclipsing of Kwong, a personal friend of the Lions general manager, should carry an asterisk as it took three games longer to accomplish.
That prompted a reaction from both Cornish and his coach, John Hufnagel of the Stamps.
“(Buono) had the opportunity to draft me and he didn’t. Really, I don’t care what he has to say,” Cornish told the Calgary Herald.
Said Hufnagel: “Well, put an asterisk in all of the records, then. We play an 18-game schedule now.”
And on that schedule, one team had more wins, and didn’t lose a single season series against an opponent this season.
The Lions seemed to be bracing themselves for the possibility that that point in voting may have been missed.