“We killed ourselves, it killed our drives, and it was a huge factor. You can’t give a team like that all that momentum,” said Brandon Whitaker after the Montreal Alouettes took 20 penalties in a game vs. the BC Lions.

Avoiding the Flag
Through 11 weeks, the Als have been flagged 95 times for 781 yards. 18 have arrived while on offence, 38 while on defence and 22 while on special teams.

For all their inconsistencies, the Alouettes were remarkably consistent in the sheer and utter chaos that was the BC Place Flag Festival, only the latest in a macabre series of Montreal defeats in Vancouver.

The Alouettes drew five flags in the first quarter, five more in the second, and 10 in the second half.     

What’s worse is the fact that the Montreal coaching staff was unable to pin exactly where the problem rooted from, as flags were flying on all parts of the field.

While the defence drew the majority of the penalties, quarterback Anthony Calvillo’s reputed bodyguards took as many holding calls as they had in the first nine games of the season (just two). Special Teams committed several infractions as well.

For the first time all season, at least all three phases of the game were contributing. Never before had a CFL officiating crew come within a yard of throwing for more yards than Calvillo.

“Hopefully this is something that won’t become a virus for us as we move along,” Head Coach Marc Trestman offered in the form of mea culpa.  

“I don’t think it will.”

The earnest disciplinarian may as well have changed the team mantra from “Win the Day” to “You gonna pick that up?”

Trestman was called for delay of game, an act of frustration to get the officials attention on a non-challengeable play. At that point in the game the flag-waving was already 10-2 against the Als, not to say they weren’t guilty as charged.

“I felt that I was going to do anything to give our team a boost, I knew it would cost 10 yards,” admits Trestman.  
“I’m grateful for the team for having my back. Our field-goal block team did a great job rushing (Paul) McCallum and he hit it to the left of the goalpost, but at that moment when I saw the flag come from the end zone I felt the official had called too-many-men on the field and was trying to pick up the flag. I wanted to let the team know I had their back.”

“We have to go back and keep each other accountable to make this thing right,” realizes Whitaker, who himself is no innocent bystander since his offside penalty almost completely negated his total receiving yards in the game. “We know in the locker room everybody’s got each other’s back.”

BC’s Angus Reid may be handing out knives for those backs by suggesting the penalties stem back to an Alouette leadership deficit on the field and in the locker room.

Coach Trestman begs to differ.

“I try not to use one game as a signal for what kind of team we are.  We’ve played very disciplined and very composed football for five weeks before BC.  You can’t win when you have 20 penalties. We had three penalties two weeks ago.  It’s something we had to address, but at this time I don’t feel we have to overreact to it.”

Trestman is never prone to overstate. At the 98th Grey Cup in Edmonton, he downplayed questions about his club leading the CFL in penalty yardage, noting there was no correlation between championship success and penalties.  

Coach must have done his homework: the CFL single-season mark for penalty yards is held by the 1994 Lions (2,121) who beat the ancestral forefathers of the Nouveau Als, the Baltimore Stallions at BC Place.

The Als’ 20 penalties in a game was nowhere close to the record of 27 set by the 1992 Tiger-Cats, a club that advanced to the Eastern Final that year.

Still, Trestman is never shy about getting in the ear hole of an offending player.
“If there’s something to be said, I’ll say it. I tell our players all the time when they come to the sideline they’re not going to meet the enemy. When a coach has a heated discussion with him, it’s more about the coach than the player and I don’t think it’s fair to the players to create that kind of environment.”  

“It’s not in the framework of scolding or disrespecting a player... because we shouldn’t.  They’ve worked too hard to get where they are on that day.

“We just tell them the truth:  ‘this is a play that should have been called, and this was NOT a play that should have been a penalty.’  

“We try to handle the penalties that we can control...the pre-snap penalties, hands to the face, objectionable conduct that we have physical and emotional control over.

Curiously, the Als were model citizens before the BC game; second in the CFL discipline department with 13 fewer infractions than their opponents.  But after 10 games, their pace threatens to soon outstrip the entire season total from Trestman’s first year in the CFL (124 penalties in 2008).  

The team total jumped dramatically in 2009 (164 flags) and again in 2010 (195), perhaps the burden of defending oneself when every rival wants a shot at the Grey Cup champs.

“We’re not taking it personal, that the officials are out to get us either. It’s not that way, but if we only had nine penalties it would still be too many against a highly competitive football team.”