A wild Eskimos season ended with a game that summed up their entire roller-coaster season during one windy afternoon at McMahon Stadium in Calgary.
The Esks, who won their first seven games of the season, were probably pinching themselves to make sure they weren’t dreaming after jumping out to a 14-0 lead less than nine minutes into Sunday’s West Division final against the Calgary Stampeders.
“You’ve got to be able to continue to put points on the board throughout the game,” said Eskimos quarterback Mike Reilly, who knew a 14-point lead in the first quarter wasn’t going to hold up against this talented Calgary offence.
Edmonton, which suffered through a six-game losing streak in the middle of the season as a long list of injuries continued to force multiple lineup changes every week, was outscored 30-1 from the start of the second quarter until late in the third quarter.
“It felt like we hit a lull as a team – offence, defence, special teams, just as an entire group – in the second and third quarter,” Reilly said. “Offensively speaking, it was hard to get some traction going. We left some plays out there.”
After Sean Whyte kicked a 34-yard field goal with four minutes and 16 seconds left in the third quarter, the Eskimos rallied to within a touchdown of tying or winning the game – just like the six-game winning streak they carried into the West final – only to come up a little short of advancing to the Grey Cup for a second time in three years.
The Stampeders recovered a fumbled punt return at the Eskimos’ 34-yard line with 13 seconds remaining to close out a 32-28 victory with the game’s only turnover before a noisy crowd of 30,116 spectators.
“I knew our team was going to come back and be effective in the fourth quarter,” Reilly added. “It was just too little, too late. Against a great team like Calgary, you’ve got to have four solid quarters and we just didn’t play well enough today.”
“It was a fun ride,” said 35-year-old Eskimos defensive end John Chick, who came over from the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in a trade on Aug. 20. “I wish we were still going, but they played well today.
Fellow defensive lineman Almondo Sewell said: “We came out on fire, we had them on the ropes and, hey, we made mistakes and they capitalized on our mistakes.
“It was a good year, though. I’m proud of these guys in this locker room. It’s probably one of the better teams I’ve ever played on. We fought through adversity. We lost six straight and then we won six straight. This has just proven who we are as a team.”
Eskimos head coach Jason Maas suggested that it’ll take a while to get over Sunday’s loss.
“I’m disappointed for the guys in our locker room because it really felt like we had a great shot of winning a Grey Cup this year,” he said.
“At the end of the game, I just felt like, at that moment, we could kick the field goal, have our defence stand on its head and get us the ball back with enough time … to do what we felt like we could do (on offence),” explained Maas, who also had a time-out to stop the clock.
Quarterback Mike Reilly had already led the Eskimos to six game-winning drives this season. One more was certainly possible.
“Yes, you could say, ‘Well, if you felt that way about that situation, why didn’t you just go for it on third-and-four and that’s a fair question?’ ” Maas admitted. “But we decided to go the other route and it didn’t work.
“Will I look back on it and wonder? Maybe. But I won’t ever regret it because I have faith in our football team,” he continued. “That’s what it was – it was a faith decision saying your defence is going to get the stop, special teams is going to get you the ball back and your offence is going to go down and score again. I have faith that all three of those things could happen. We’ve proved in different spots all year that those things can happen. Ultimately, in this one game, in this one moment, it didn’t. At the end of the day, we’ll all live with it and it’ll go down as a loss.”
There were a few other elements which came into play on Sunday, which could have affected the outcome of the game.
- What if the swirling winds that were reportedly gusting close to 50 km/h at nearby Canada Olympic Park hadn’t blown two of Whyte’s attempted field goals wide of the mark, costing the Eskimos five points?
- What if Eskimos wide receiver Vidal Hazelton didn’t have to twist himself into a pretzel to catch a 43-yard bomb that the wind pushed towards the sideline in the third quarter?
“I’ve played a lot of games in this stadium and that was some crazy wind to deal with,” said Maas, who wasn’t using the wind as an excuse for the loss. “It was swirling. You couldn’t really tell (which direction it was blowing). We took the ball in the second half. Had we not taken the ball and taken the wind, I wouldn’t know which way to take it because it seemed like it was swirling all over the place. So we just decided to take the ball and let them deal with it and we ended up having the wind in the fourth quarter just because it was hard to judge.”
Whyte said the wind was “super strong,” blowing over the kicking net that he and punter Hugh O’Neill used during the game, but also swirling “so it was very hard to figure out which way it was going.”
“On my field goals, I just tried to hit them down the middle and hope for the best,” he said.
That worked on his field goals from 34 and 20 yards, plus all three converts. But his missed kicks from 42 and 30 yards were both pushed to the left while the flags were blowing right “so it was super confusing and I didn’t know where to aim.”
Whyte, who made 16 of 17 field goals during his first seven games this year (returning from more than three months on the injured list three games ago), even tested the wind by throwing grass into the air before the 30-yard attempt. While the grass also went right, “the ball went hard left and hit the upright.”
“Both kicks felt really good to me, so I don’t really have an explanation,” he said.
What if Hazelton could have stayed in-bounds after his catch at the Calgary 27-yard line in the third quarter? He had a clear path to the end zone and Whyte wouldn’t have had to kick his 34-yard field goal two incompletions later. That would have been four more points.
“The wind kind of took (the ball) in a weird way and then I caught it and I was out of bounds so I was really upset about that,” said Hazelton, who whipped the ball into the corner of the end zone after stepping out of play “because I felt like it was a touchdown.”
Hazelton, who finished with a game-high 113 yards on seven catches, was also a yard short of getting into the end zone when he went out of bounds after a 30-yard gain midway through the fourth quarter, but at least Reilly followed that up with a touchdown plunge into the end zone.
The Stampeders used a thunder-and-lightning attack to rush for 182 yards, with the elusive Finch darting for 81 yards on four carries and the bulldog Messam rushing 13 times for 71 yards and adding 44 yards on four receptions. Finch also had 139 yards on nine punt and kickoff returns.
Maas called Finch’s TD with 22 seconds left in the first half “a huge play” because it gave Calgary the lead for the first time – 22-15 after Messam’s three-yard run for a two-point convert.
“It felt like we had him cornered and tackled and he makes a couple of guys miss in space and cuts it back across the grain and we can’t get him down,” Maas said about Finch.
The Eskimos opened the scoring with an eight-yard touchdown run by running back C.J. Gable on a third-and-one gamble six minutes into the game and added a 69-yard pass-and-run play with wide receiver Derel Walker, who caught the ball at the Calgary 25, less than three minutes later.