Mike Reilly may have missed Friday’s walk-through practice because of the flu, but he still managed to play “lights out” Saturday afternoon, according to Head Coach Jason Maas.
After being sick just the day before the game, Reilly once again looked like the quarterback who has often spoiled Eskimos fans with dominant performances since being acquired in a trade with the BC Lions in 2013.
Reilly completed 31 of 38 passes for 369 yards while rushing for another 72 yards to help the Eskimos score a convincing 34-16 victory over the Ottawa RedBlacks in front of 27,163 spectators at The Brick Field at Commonwealth Stadium to stay in control of their own destiny in chasing a CFL playoff berth.
“It just felt good to get in the end zone again a couple of times,” Reilly said after the Eskimos ended their touchdown drought of 36 possessions over 152 minutes and 21 seconds with kick-returner/running back Martese Jackson scoring on a 13-yard scamper at the 11:56 mark of the first quarter.
“More than anything, we just needed a win to get back on track,” he continued. “It was a solid game in all three phases – offence, defence, special teams.”
With their sixth win in eight home games, the Eskimos snapped a three-game losing streak and evened their record at 8-8 with games against the BC Lions, 8-7, and Winnipeg Blue Bombers, 9-7, remaining in the regular season. All three teams are probably fighting over third place in the West Division, although second place may not be mathematically out of reach with the Saskatchewan Roughriders sitting at 10-6.
“It hasn’t been the road that we wanted it to be, but you’ve got to let all that go,” Reilly said. “We’ve got two regular-season games left, and the ball’s in our court in terms of getting to the post-season. If we take care of business, we’ll make it to the post-season, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. But if we falter and stumble, it’s going to be a much tougher road.
“We’ve got to be locked in,” he added. “We’re going to BC and playing against a very good football team (at 8 p.m. MDT Friday). They’re playing some great football right now, and it’s a road game. We’ve been terrible on the road (2-6), so we’ve got to figure it out because this next (game) is even bigger than the last one we just played.”
Several Eskimos players were calling Saturday’s contest the “Flu Game” afterwards, referring to former Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan’s incredible outing (38 points, including a three-pointer with less than a minute to play, seven rebounds, five assists, three steals and a block) while severely under the weather in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals. It was discovered years later that Jordan had been actually suffering from food poisoning.
“He was possessed today,” Maas said about Reilly. “He knew how important this game was for our team.
“Whether he was running it, throwing it or reading the defence, there wasn’t much out there he didn’t do well. It was the best I’ve seen him in play in a long time, and that’s saying something because I think he plays at a high level just about every week.”
Maas suggested that being sick may have even worked in Reilly’s favour because “sometimes when you’re not 100 per cent” you have to conserve energy by just concentrating on the most important things.
“Maybe it’s just that focus when you feel the way he felt two days ago, and now you feel you can play a football game, I think you just forget about what’s been happening to us over the last five weeks and now it’s just ‘I have to focus on one thing – doing my job,’ ” Maas said. “I think that’s what he did tonight.
“I know he got help with the O-line, help with the running backs and help with the receivers, but he played to his ability and then some tonight.”
While the Esks rallied with 27 unanswered points after falling behind 16-7 in the second quarter, Edmonton’s defence also played just as well. The defence twice stopped Ottawa at the nine-yard line in the second quarter, forcing kicker Lewis Ward to boot short field goals to extend his CFL record to 43 in a row, and blanked the RedBlacks for the final 33 minutes and 54 seconds while limiting the visitors to just three first downs and 73 yards of net offence in the second half.
“We know as a defence they had the one big play (a 61-yard pass-and-run TD by Diontae Spencer in the second quarter),” said Eskimos safety Neil King. “They have (just) three field goals if we take away that one explosion play.”
The Eskimos defensive line had five quarterback sacks (two by defensive end Alex Bazzie and one each by defensive tackles Almondo Sewell and Jake Ceresna and defensive end Kwaku Boateng) plus 11 defensive tackles while King had his second interception of the season and fifth of his six-year CFL career late in the game.
“At that time of the game, you know they’re going to try to take a shot and do something big,” King said. “Arjen (Colquhoun) had great coverage on the double-move that they had on him on the outside, and I was able just to see the ball and go get the ball.
“It took a while to come back down. I’m not going to lie. I was kind of sitting there like, ‘OK, hurry up, hurry up. I know there are people around me right now.’
“It was good to get that,” he added. “That’s just huge momentum. We’re just looking to continue that and carry it on to the next game.”
Ceresna, who played with the RedBlacks in his rookie CFL season last year, liked beating his former team, “but it’s more important as a team that we just focus on us and that we get the ‘W’ no matter who it is.”
Turnovers had been killing the Eskimos’ momentum in recent games while penalties were also an issue earlier in the season. Both cropped up again in the middle of the first half – as receivers Bryant Mitchell and D’haquille (Duke) Williams lost fumbles – “but outside of those three drives, our offence played great,” Reilly said.
“Our team rallied,” said Mitchell. “Our team came together. This is a time when we were a team, and it showed.”
Mitchell, 26, who was playing just his 17th game in four seasons with the Eskimos, turned the negative of his fumble into a positive by using it as an incentive to catch a career-high 13 passes for 190 yards.
“When adversity hits, it’s how you respond,” he said. “That’s the first fumble of my career, in my life. I have not ever fumbled in a game since I started playing this sport.
“I was trying to stiff-arm (Ottawa linebacker Kyries) Hebert and my hand kind of got caught in his facemask, so he grabbed my hand and he kind of turned me and the ball just showed,” Mitchell explained how the fumble happened. “They saw it (and stripped the ball out of his grasp).
“After that, I came off (the field) smiling, just saying it’s going to be a big game. That’s how I felt.”
Mitchell’s career-best receiving game was 210 yards in a junior college championship game. He also had a 170-yard performance in high school, but never caught more than 10 passes in a game at any level.
His last catch Saturday was a 75-yard pass-and-run touchdown in the fourth quarter to clinch the win.
Mitchell, who had borrowed rookie running back Jordan Robinson’s cleats for the game, was running out of gas near the end of his long run.
“I was tired,” he said. “That cold was getting to me. I need to do some more conditioning.”
Reilly said his revamped offensive line – with seven-year veteran Matt O’Donnell shifting back to right guard from left tackle and Tommie Draheim playing at left tackle for the first time since breaking his thumb in the season opener – was “phenomenal” in pass protection and also did a good job of opening up holes for running back C.J. Gable.
“I thought they were physical up front,” Maas said about the O-line. “You don’t rush for 160 yards without being physical. I know Mike had some of those yards, but C.J. ran extremely tough.”
Reilly didn’t get sacked after going down 11 times in the previous three games.
“They do bring a lot of pressure,” Maas said about Ottawa’s defence, “but even with that, Mike still didn’t get hit very much. If he was, it was the extra guy generally, not the guys that the O-line and the running backs were accounting for.”
Gable ran 17 times for 87 yards and scored two rushing touchdowns of three and four yards for only the second time in 20 games with the Eskimos (including last year’s playoffs).
“I thought C.J. did a great job,” Reilly said, “and Martese scored on an awesome run early in the game.”
Reilly shares the CFL lead of 12 rushing TDs with former teammate James Franklin of the Toronto Argonauts but never made it into the end zone in this game while the Edmonton running backs scored three times.
“Yeah, that’s never going to happen again,” he quipped. “I told C.J. he better not get used to it. I think that’s the first time this year for sure, and maybe ever, that he’s rushed for more touchdowns than me.
“It was good to see,” Reilly continued, “but I said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to earn those because now if I hand it to you, you’re going to have to run it up the middle with 10 guys in the box at the end.”
Reilly had an eight-yard run from the Ottawa 11-yard line right before Gable’s first touchdown.
“If I wouldn’t have tripped, I think we probably would have scored on the sneak, and that was crazy because it was from the 11-yard line,” he said. “Our guys were getting a really good push up front. That’s not an easy defence to do it against. We struggled with them the last time we played them.”
Reilly was also impressed that the Eskimos were able to run down the clock with Gable.
“Our run game was solid all night, but we were able to stay on the field for chunks at a time and drive the ball at the end of the game,” he said. “We were running the same play five or six times in a row at the end there, and we were still churning up yards. It’s hard to do, but our guys up front made it possible.”
Short yardage
* Sean Whyte reached another milestone in his 10-year CFL career, making his 300th field goal with a 40-yard kick on Saturday. Whyte, who was with BC when he kicked his very first CFL field goal at The Brick Field in 2009, recently moved into 20th place on the CFL’s all-time scoring list with 1,269 points. He also kicked a 15-yard field goal and four converts against the RedBlacks.