August 24, 2018

Eskimos Shocked After Ti-Cats Rally For Win

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! would have loved Thursday night’s CFL game at Hamilton’s Tim Hortons Field.

All sorts of unbelievable things happened – Tiger-Cats quarterback Jeremiah Masoli threw two passes off the uprights from his own end zone and had two possible touchdown passes bounce off receivers’ facemasks.

The Ti-Cats, who have had trouble finishing off close games this year, rallied for 12 fourth-quarter points to shock the Eskimos 25-24 in front of 23,281 fans in the final Thursday night game of the CFL season.

Lirim Hajrullahu kicked a 29-yard field goal for the winning points on the final play of the game as Hamilton swept the two-game series from Edmonton this season.

“We have to be way better than that defensively,” Eskimos defensive back Aaron Grymes said during the 630 CHED post-game show. “I just feel like we let our foot off the gas a little bit.

“We’ve got to stop them on second down,” he continued. “We’ve got to get off the field and give our offence more chances out there in the second half. Especially in that fourth quarter when it’s crunch time, we’ve got to come up big in all three phases (offence, defence and special teams).

“But defensively, when you go into the half, and you’re up 14 points, you’ve got to do everything you can to keep them off the scoreboard. We didn’t do that. We weren’t good enough tonight.”

While the Eskimos surrendered 552 yards of net offence (419 yards passing, 138 yards rushing), the weirdest thing about the entire game was Edmonton’s failure to score in the second half after exploding for 24 unanswered points in the second quarter to take what looked like a commanding 14-point lead.

“If we would have put anything on the board in the second half, we would have won,” said disappointed quarterback Mike Reilly, who is usually a master of the fourth-quarter rally with 21 come-from-behind victories already to his credit.

It was the second time in three games that the Eskimos wasted a double-digit halftime lead, having already let a 20-10 advantage slip through their fingers in a 31-23 loss to the B.C. Lions on Aug. 9. It was also the third time this year that they’ve allowed the opponent to rally for the winning points in the fourth quarter.

“We talked about it in our locker room at halftime,” said Esks head coach Jason Maas. “We learned a lesson two weeks ago, we thought, to go out there and play a great 30 minutes of football to finish off an opponent. … We’ve absolutely got to be better.”

Reilly, who didn’t have any answers after the game, completed only 15 of 25 passes for 250 yards and three touchdowns and ran four times for 31 yards.

“It’s hard to say,” he told Morley Scott and Dave Campbell on the post-game show. “It was the same stuff in the first quarter that was killing us in the third and the fourth. We just couldn’t get sustained drives and march down the field. Any time we broke off a chunk and had something good happen, we stalled out.

“If we play better in the third quarter, it doesn’t come down to the fourth quarter. It’s not just the fourth. It’s a combination of a lot of different things. We certainly need to figure out what those reasons are. We’ll have a lot of extra days to look long and hard at it and try to get it figured out.”

After playing Thursday’s game on only five days’ rest, the Eskimos (6-4) will have twice as long to prepare for the Labour Day Classic against the Calgary Stampeders (7-1) on Monday, Sept. 3.

But instead of being (at least temporarily) tied with the Stampeders for first place with 14 points, the Esks remain in second place in the West Division, just two points ahead of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (5-4).

“We know how important those two games are going to be for us to define our season, at least that stretch of it anyway,” Maas said about the home-and-home series with Calgary. “We still have a lot of life in us. We’ve just got to get better.”

Reilly pointed out that the Eskimos played good football offensively for only a quarter of the game.

“In the second quarter, we had things clicking – (we were) firing on all cylinders and got some momentum and were able to march down the field a couple of times and put quite a few points on the board,” he said. “But the rest of the game, we were just kind of off a little bit. We just couldn’t get anything going. Certainly, we had to be better than that.”

The Tiger-Cats had twice as many first downs as the Eskimos (25 to 13) and possession of the football for twice as long in the first half – 19:26 compared to Edmonton’s 10:24. The Esks trailed 10-0 after the first quarter, managing only 16 yards of offence (11 passing yards on three completions and five rushing yards) and getting their lone first down on a Hamilton penalty.

It was a different story in the second quarter as Reilly passed for 182 yards, throwing touchdown passes of 36 and 17 yards to Derel Walker and hooking up with a wide-open D’haquille (Duke) Williams for a 95-yard pass-and-run TD after scrambling away from the Hamilton pressure and releasing the ball just as he was approaching the line of scrimmage.

The Eskimos scored 14 of those points off turnovers. Reilly needed only two plays to take advantage of safety Josh Woodman’s fumble recovery to hit Walker (four catches for 59 yards) for Edmonton’s first TD and put together a lightning-quick four-play, 74-yard drive to set up Walker’s second major with 12 seconds left in the first half.

Walker leads the CFL with eight receiving touchdowns while Williams is closing in on his first 1,000-yard season with a league-leading 947 yards.

Sean Whyte booted a 52-yard field goal to match his longest kick of the season to get the Eskimos on the scoreboard and added three converts.

After scoring 24 points with the wind at their backs in the second quarter, the Eskimos had the wind behind them again in the third quarter, but all they managed were two first downs and 23 yards of offence (17 yards rushing and six yards passing on two completions) while Hamilton picked up a field goal after running back C.J. Gable lost a fumble at the Edmonton 26.

With the exception of two plays – a 30-yard pass-and-run effort by Nate Adjei and a 61-yard gallop by Gable – it was more of the same in the fourth quarter. Both of those drives quickly stalled after two more plays at the Edmonton 49 and Hamilton 38, respectively, and Reilly completed back-to-back passes only once and was sacked twice (the first time after fumbling the snap) during the final 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, Masoli converted three second-down passes into big plays of 21, 18 and 84 yards and a third-down gamble for a 51-yard pass-and-run touchdown by Luke Tasker (nine catches for 156 yards) with 3:05 left to play. Tasker has scored all three of his touchdowns this season against the Eskimos.

“We had them backed up in a couple of different situations they got out of,” Maas said. “We would have liked to see us do better in that area.

“When our defence is on the field, we’ve got to be able to get them off and sustain a drive (offensively), and we can’t do it.”

Reilly said penalties were an issue once again, pointing to a roughness infraction on offence that pushed the Eskimos out of field goal range after middle linebacker J.C. Sherritt’s second interception of the season on the second play of the game gave Edmonton the ball at Hamilton’s 36-yard line.

“That stuff continues to show up,” Reilly said. “There were penalties throughout the game in all three phases – offence, defence and special teams – that cost us.”

The Eskimos took 11 penalties for 65 yards overall.

SHORT YARDAGE: The loss snapped a three-game winning streak for the Eskimos in Hamilton … Williams had three catches for 116 yards to extend the Esks’ streak of having a 100-yard receiver in every game this season … Defensive backs Hightower and Mercy Maston tied for the team-high with seven defensive tackles while defensive tackle Almondo Sewell had Edmonton’s only quarterback sack … Reilly, who has thrown a touchdown pass in 10 consecutive games, moved into 18th place on the CFL’s all-time passing list with 25,359 yards … Walker passed Marco Cyncar for 14th place on the Eskimos all-time receiving list with 4,208 yards.