Marc Bouget/Ottawa REDBLACKS
OTTAWA — Some things on the Ottawa REDBLACKS offence will be different this year and they’re OK with that. Some things will stay the same and they’re alright with that too.
Either way the Ottawa REDBLACKS are confident their offence won’t miss a beat this season.
The defending East Division Champions were hit hard by key departures this off-season, from half a dozen players on defence to Offensive Coordinator Jason Maas.
While the defence looks to fill holes through competition in camp, losing Maas, the architect of 2015’s league-leading offence, is seen as a major blow in the nation’s capital.
Still, with Jaime Elizondo picking up where Maas left off at the end of a Grey Cup loss, the players are embracing both the similarities and the wrinkles.
“[Elizondo] brings a little evolution to what we had last year, said Greg Ellingson, who ranked third in the league with nine touchdowns last season and seventh with 1,061 receiving yards. “We’re evolving from where we were.”
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The REDBLACKS learned a lot under Maas, a former quarterback, going from 2-16 in their first season in the league to winning 12 games and appearing in the Grey Cup Championship. For all of that unit’s successes, there’s no way Elizondo would want to tear it all down.
Some wrinkles are inevitable but a lot of it is the same.
“He’s bringing different terms to keep the defence guessing so when you play those teams that are familiar with what we have, we have different terms and a different pace,” said Ellingson. “It’s a little bit of a change-up but we’re still running the base stuff.”
Ellingson was one of four 1,000-yard receivers on the team in 2015, a season that’ll be difficult for the REDBLACKS to replicate even in the best of years. Aside from such a drastic improvement in the win column, Ottawa also went from averaging 300 yards per game (seventh in the league) in 2014 to 386.3 yards per game in 2015 – first in the CFL by a wide margin.
The REDBLACKS ran a staggering 1,124 plays from scrimmage, not only helping them produce offensively but also keep the defence off the field, a unit that went from allowing the most yards in the league in 2014 to the fewest last season.
In short, Elizondo, now in his second stint as a CFL offensive coordinator, has his work cut out for him, and so does his offence if it’s going to have any semblance of last year’s.
“We’ve thrown in a lot so the execution – there are still too many mental mistakes,” said Elizondo. “We’ve got to clean that up. We’ve got a lot of work in front of us; we’ve got to continue to take the next step.
“I think these guys are hungry; they’re working well together but there’s a lot of cleanup.”
That much was evident from the first scrimmage of training camp over the weekend, when the players at TD Place were hammered by a torrential downpour and the offence wasn’t able to find the exact tempo it was looking for.
But with the first chance to feel live action before the first pre-season game on June 13, quarterback Henry Burris continues to see positives in the transition from Maas to Elizondo.
“Jason Maas last year, he set the foundation,” said Burris. “Jaime Elizondo has brought an even more in-depth approach to this offence.
“We have so much more character and complexity within this offence now,” he added. “We can dial so many things up as far as moving the pocket, moving the launch points in the pocket, different types of route combinations that we’ve added.
“It’s going to give us that many more toys to play with when it comes to game days and finding schemes to have success against the opposing defences.”
The REDBLACKS will put their new-look offence on the field on June 13 against the Bombers at TD Place as they kick off pre-season action, while the regular season starts June 25 in Edmonton with a Grey Cup rematch against the Esks.
