MONTREAL — The league’s second-ranked offence came to play in Montreal, scoring 44 points in a convincing victory over the Alouettes on Thursday night.
Mike Reilly was mobile in the pocket, running seven times for 26 yards and scoring once. He wasn’t shabby throwing the ball either, completing 24 of 32 passes for 415 yards and four touchdowns.
“Every win is big, I don’t care where we are,” Eskimos head coach Jason Maas said. “On the road it’s extra hard.”
Maas went on to praise all sides of the ball, not just the offence.
“Anytime you can put up 44 on anyone in this league, you’re doing some good things, and that takes all three phases,” he said.
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The winning quarterback commended both his offensive line and receivers for their roles in the offensive onslaught.
“We don’t have a weak link in our receiving core,” Reilly said. “These guys are all very, very good.”
Despite the victory, Reilly admitted that the Eskimos still have the potential to improve.
“This game wasn’t without its warts,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff that we need to clean up.”
One of those areas is discipline. Edmonton was penalized 17 times for nearly 200 yards, the majority of that total coming on the defensive side of the ball.
“We’ve been preaching that all season long, and it showed up again tonight which, honestly, was very disappointing,” Reilly said.
Maas agreed.
“We had a lot of them, and a lot of high-yardage [penalties],” he said. However, the head coach didn’t want that to be the focus on what was a convincing victory.
“Overall, I don’t want that to take away from what we did tonight.”
Reilly saw a silver lining in all the orange flags.
“On the flip side of that, to have that many breakdowns on the penalty side of it and still put 44 on the board and the other team having 23 and coming away with a convincing win, that shows how good we played in the other areas.”
The victory marked the first time Edmonton has won back-to-back games this season. The Eskimos haven’t lost at Percival Molson Stadium since 2013.
