Johnny Manziel may have been signing autographs for the fans in the south-east corner of the stands at The Brick Field at Commonwealth Stadium after Friday’s CFL game, but Jeremiah Masoli was the quarterback who delivered a star performance.
Masoli, whose introduction to the CFL was spending the 2012 season on Edmonton’s injured list, led the Hamilton Tiger-Cats offence to a shocking 519 yards of net offence in an equally surprising 38-21 victory in front of 31,334 spectators.
“We just played bad, just bad all around,” defensive tackle Almondo Sewell said after the Eskimos’ home opener. “Bad on D-line, bad at every single position out there. You can’t let them run 520 yards of offence on you; you’re going to lose every game like that.
“We can’t be losing like this, especially how hard the West (Division) is,” he continued. “The West is a hard division to play in. You lose five, six games out here, there’s a good chance you might not even make it to the playoffs.
“We’ve got to win all these games. We’ve got a Grey Cup here. We’ve got playoffs we have to worry about.”
Friday’s game was so bad that Eskimos quarterback Mike Reilly, who has masterminded 20 CFL game-winning drives in the fourth quarter (including last week’s season-opening victory over the Winnipeg Blue Bombers), couldn’t manufacture the magic needed to rally the team from a 24-14 halftime deficit or a 31-14 disadvantage halfway through the fourth quarter.
Reilly completed 20 of 30 passes for 286 yards and two touchdowns (an 88-yard pass-and-run play with slotback Duke Williams on the Esks’ second play from scrimmage and a five-yard toss to Derel Walker late in the first half) and scored on a one-yard plunge into the end zone after pass interference was called on Hamilton’s Jumal Rolle, who was defending against Kenny Stafford on a 47-yard toss deep in Hamilton’s zone.
Middle linebacker J.C. Sherritt (five defensive tackles) pointed out that the Eskimos “didn’t play great” while the Ticats “played phenomenal” to salvage a 1-1 record on Hamilton’s season-opening road trip to Alberta.
“That’s a mixture for what happened to us,” he explained.
The result was “embarrassing” for Sherritt and “deflating” for Reilly while defensive end Alex Bazzie said the Tiger-Cats made “a fool out of us” because “they beat us in every facet of the game (offence, defence and special teams) from start to finish. They didn’t let up.”
“They say you win as a team, and you lose as a team. We certainly did that tonight,” Reilly said on the 630 CHED post-game show. “We didn’t play well enough in any phases of the game, and there’s going to be a lot of things that need to be corrected.
“But that’s the way it goes,” he continued. “You’ve got to learn from it. I’m not going to hang my head about it. I know what this team is capable of; I know that we didn’t play up to it tonight, not even close. So we’ve got to be honest about it. We’ve got to figure out how to improve because if we don’t, we’re not going to win another game all season if we continue to play like we played tonight.
“But thankfully, I don’t think that’s the type of team we have so we’ll figure out what caused us to play so poorly tonight and we’ll do whatever we can to fix it.”
The Eskimos, 1-1, return to action at 8 p.m. next Friday against the B.C. Lions, 1-0, on Canadian Armed Forces Appreciation Night, presented by EPCOR, at The Brick Field at Commonwealth Stadium
There was an 18-minute delay at the start of Friday’s game due to a severe thunderstorm warning in the area, but the Eskimos weren’t using that as an excuse for their lack of performance.
“It was … nothing compared to what we dealt with last time (in Winnipeg), so that had no bearing on the game,” Reilly said.
Defensive halfback Aaron Grymes (five defensive tackles), who returned to the lineup after missing the first game to deal with some personal issues in the United States, talked about finding a way to get the team back on track quickly.
“That’s one game … but we’ve got 16 more games,” he said. “We’re 1-1 right now. We have an entirely new offence to go against next weekend, so we’re back to the drawing board in terms of we’ve got to put a new game plan together. But we’re not back to the drawing board … we’ve still got the same athletes that we had last week when we were out there ballin’. We’re keeping our heads up just knowing that they outplayed us today.
“Unfortunately, we let our fans down.”
The Eskimos weren’t using it as an excuse, but they are missing five defensive players expected to be starters because of injuries, including three in the secondary.
“We do have a lot of young guys out there, a lot of fresh faces,” Grymes admitted. “It was just a learning experience for us. We’re going to grow and move forward.”
The architect of the Eskimos’ loss was Masoli, who was the league’s most productive QB through the final 10 games of the 2017 season. He threw for 3,032 yards and rushed for another 384 yards as the previously winless Ticats rallied to win six of their last 10 contests.
“He’s a great quarterback,” Reilly said. “I’ve been saying it since last year. He’s earned that job over there as a starter. He’s earned a place to be a starter in this league, and he’s one of the better starters. Tonight, he was making plays all over the place.”
On Friday, Masoli passed for 332 yards and three touchdowns (two to slotback Luke Tasker, who caught five passes for 103 yards, and one to wide receiver Brandon Banks, who had six catches for 117 yards). He also rushed seven times for another 59 yards while his high-profile backup, Manziel, sat on the sidelines.
“They make it very difficult to get pressure on him the way they protect and (with) the number of protectors they have back there, but even when we got pressure, he escaped and made some plays,” Esks head coach Jason Maas said about Masoli. “I thought Jeremiah played a great game tonight. He was very calm and collected back there. Even when we got pressure, he seemed to get out of it and find somebody. He did that multiple times tonight, and some of that was on second-and-long, and he made plays.”
“To me, he did it with his arm, he did it with his legs,” said Grymes. “If you left a gap open in the zone, he was going to hit it. If you had a little bit of space in man(-to-man coverage), he was going to hit it. If you were covering really well, then he would scramble and eventually somebody would get open, and he’d hit it. If nobody were open, then he would run.
“I don’t know, man. He was on tonight, and it’s hard to stop him.”
“I’ve seen it on film now for a while,” Sherritt said about Masoli’s performance. “If you look at his body of work the last seven, eight games, he’s playing at as high a level as anybody in this league, point-blank. I saw it in Calgary (in the Ticats’ season-opener). The guy made one bad throw, and it was a pick (interception), but he’s still making throws day-in and day-out that a lot of guys can’t make in this league. When you get him corralled, he seems to get out of it. He’s not looking to run; he’s looking downfield to make a pass, and a play and those are the most dangerous people.”
“He even made me look like a fool for a touchdown on missing a (quarterback) sack,” Bazzie added.
It wasn’t just defending against Hamilton’s passing attack that the Eskimos had trouble with. They also gave up 196 rushing yards, including 133 yards on 17 carries by national fullback Mercer Timmis, a third-year CFL veteran out of the University of Calgary.
“We have to get better, and we’ve got to get better right now,” Sherritt said about Edmonton’s run defence. “It’s unacceptable. You can’t win in this league giving up that many yards. We’re embarrassed as a group, but thankfully for us, we get to come to work tomorrow and get better.”
The Eskimos also hurt themselves by taking nine penalties for 80 yards.
“You take stupid penalties like that against a high-octane offence, and they’re just going to hang points on you,” Sherritt said.
Meanwhile, the Eskimos couldn’t get either their high-octane offence or their ball-control offence ignited. Reilly completed the 88-yarder to Williams and a 55-yard pass to Stafford, but a few other deep throws landed incomplete.
“You’d like to stay on the field more often as an offence and not rely just on big plays,” Maas said. “I know we were fortunate and had a few of them (big plays), but if we could have stayed on the field, that would have helped our defence, too.”
Reilly said Friday’s performance wasn’t the Eskimos’ “brand of football.”
“Offensively, we take pride in dominating the time of possession, staying on the field, converting (second-down plays), getting first downs and just maintaining the ball,” he said. “Today, that was not our game.
“Hamilton beat us at our own game. They owned the time of possession (35 minutes and 46 seconds to Edmonton’s 24:14), they made a lot of conversions on second-and-long and just stayed on the field. That was disappointing for sure.”