It may be a short week to get ready for the rematch with the Calgary Stampeders, but Eskimos head coach Jason Maas said it’s plenty of time for his CFL football club to make some much-needed improvements.
“I told our guys in the locker room: ‘Their best has to get better and their weaknesses have to improve if we’re going to win on Saturday,’ ” Maas said on the 630 CHED post-game show after the Eskimos lost 39-18 in Monday’s Labour Day Classic at Calgary’s McMahon Stadium.
The Eskimos will be looking for redemption – or at least a chance “to get that bad taste out of our mouths,” according to linebacker Kenny Ladler – when they complete the annual mid-season home-and-home series with the Stampeders at 7 p.m. Saturday at The Brick Field at Commonwealth Stadium.
“I’m excited that we get to play them again in just a couple of days and play them in our spot,” said Esks quarterback Mike Reilly, who completed 34 of 53 passes for 320 yards and two touchdowns. “I know we’re a better football team than what we showed out there today, but that’s all talk until you prove it.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of ourselves between now and Saturday. We’re not going to hang our heads. If we hang our heads, we’ll get smoked on Saturday. If we take the coaching and take the learning and improve on it and come out and play with confidence on Saturday, we’ll be just fine.”
After getting off to a sensational 7-0 start despite the ridiculous run of injuries that has plagued the team this season, the Eskimos have fallen into a time warp where they keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again and continue to get the same disappointing results.
For three straight games, the Esks have had slow starts and fallen behind 17-3, 26-6 and 26-6 by halftime to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Stampeders, respectively.
Add in turnovers and costly penalties and the Eskimos (7-3) now find themselves in a tie for second place with the Bombers behind the 9-1-1 Stampeders and just ahead of the 5-4 Roughriders and 5-5 B.C. Lions in what could become a wild five-team race for the three playoff spots in the West Division.
“It’s been basically the same story for the last three weeks,” Maas said. “We’ve done enough to hurt ourselves in all three games and other teams have capitalized on it. We’ve dug ourselves too big of a hole to come back from.
“Until we stop doing that, until we stop playing the Eskimos plus whomever we’re playing, it’s going to be very difficult.”
Maas noted that Edmonton has played “the three best teams in the league” in the back-to-back-to-back games “and we haven’t shown up enough. We haven’t made enough plays, we’ve continued to hurt ourselves, we’ve continued to be undisciplined. It’s got to stop.”
For example, Maas referred to a couple of series early in the game. The first time the Eskimos had the ball, they gambled on a third-and-two at the Edmonton 43 only to draw Calgary defensive lineman Micah Johnson offside to get a first down.
Two plays later, slotback Cory Watson lost a fumble at the Calgary 45-yard line after making a catch and running for a first down. The Stampeders scored a touchdown seven plays later to jump out to an early 11-0 lead.
During that drive, Calgary lined up for a third-and-three play and Edmonton defensive lineman Mike Moore jumped offside, giving the Stamps an easy first down. Three plays later, Jerome Messam ran four yards for the TD.
“That’s the way the games have gone the last three weeks,” Maas said. “It seems like when we screw up, we screw up enough to where it really damn (well) hurts us and we cannot get out of our own way and other teams are capitalizing on it far more than we’re able to capitalize on their mistakes.
“A punt-return touchdown hurts you. A drop here. A bad throw there. There’s a little bit of everything.”
Calgary kick-returner Roy Finch returned a 58-yard Hugh O’Neill punt 90 yards for his third punt-return touchdown of the season, giving the Stamps a commanding 25-3 lead with 6-1/2 minutes left in the first half.
If that seems like déjà vu, Finch also had an 85-yard punt-return TD late in the first quarter of last year’s Labour Day Classic for his first CFL major and an 18-point Calgary lead in a game the Stamps won 45-24.
Here’s some more things that may sound all too familiar:
- For the second game in a row, Eskimos quarterback Mike Reilly threw two interceptions in the third quarter – this time both to linebacker Shaq Richardson. Calgary used those plays to put another 10 points on the scoreboard to jump out to a 36-6 lead after three quarters.
- “We went into the game saying we needed to hit their quarterback. I don’t know how much we hit him, but I know it wasn’t very much,” Maas said. “And we need to protect our (quarterback) better and I know we didn’t do that as well, either, compared to them.” The Edmonton defence had zero quarterback sacks and only five “pressures” on Stampeders QB Bo Levi Mitchell while Calgary registered three sacks and 14 pressures, hitting Reilly several times just after he released the ball, especially in the fourth quarter.
- Calgary wide receiver Anthony Parker, who scored one of Calgary’s early touchdowns in last year’s Labour Day Classic, scored on a 24-yard run for his first career rushing TD early in the second quarter.
- Calgary extended its winning streaks to six straight games this season and in the Labour Day Classic. The Stamps have led from start to finish in five of those six Labour Day wins.
- The Stampeders have won 15 games in a row at home.
Ladler, who tied for the Eskimos high with five defensive tackles and knocked down two Calgary passes, said allowing a 45-yard pass-and-run play to start the game gave the Stampeders a lot of momentum.
“We held them to a field goal, but we just needed to settle down and play our game that we usually play,” Ladler said. “It took us a little while to get going. We’ve got to put ourselves in a better situation.”
The Eskimos rallied with two touchdown catches in the fourth quarter by Kenny Stafford (seven yards) and Brandon Zylstra (41 yards) and almost got a third with a pass deep into the corner of the Calgary end zone to rookie wide receiver Duke Williams with 39 seconds left in the game. The Esks failed to score on two-point convert attempts after each major.
“We finally played some decent football in the last quarter,” Reilly said. “We need to play football the entire game like we did for those couple of drives in the fourth (quarter).
“We showed that you can put up points on them, but we also showed what happens when you get in your own way and you take penalties and turn the ball over and those type of things,” he continued. “It’s going to hurt you and it’s going to make it very, very hard to win the football game.
“It’s not like we need to reinvent the wheel or do anything drastically different. We just need to get back to playing good clean football like we were earlier in the season. If we do that, these results will be different, but that’s easy to talk about and harder to achieve.”
SHORT YARDAGE: Zylstra led the Edmonton receivers with nine catches for 127 yards. Adarius Bowman had five catches for 41 yards in his first game back in the lineup after missing six games with a hamstring injury … Chris Milo, who joined the Eskimos on Saturday, made both of his field-goal attempts from 22 and 46 yards … Defensive back Forrest Hightower stopped a Calgary drive with an interception at the Esks four-yard line in the fourth quarter.