Peter McCabe/CFL.ca
The chants started out as small rumblings early in the game. A smattering of fans in the southwest section of Molson Stadium, another in the northwest, half heartedly asking for Johnny Manziel to make his CFL debut.
By the final three minutes of the third quarter, with the Alouettes trailing the Edmonton Eskimos by 19 points, the chants started to carry some weight. With the game out of reach but a sizeable amount of time left, the crowd pushed to see the star quarterback the team had traded for just five days earlier.
It didn’t fall on deaf ears, but 16,654 people weren’t going to convince coach Mike Sherman.
“I think once you start listening to the fans it’s not long before you become one,” he said after his team fell 44-23 to Edmonton. “(There) wasn’t much pressure there on that decision.”
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Like he did in Hamilton for the Ticats’ first five games of the season, Manziel stayed on the sideline for the entirety of Thursday night’s game in Montreal. Ironically enough he was watching another No. 8 — this time Vernon Adams — lead the team.
Sherman admitted that there was about a 20 per cent chance that he’d put Manziel in the game. It would have had to have been a lopsided win, with a basic, limited playbook, given that Manziel had only one heavy practice with the team in a short week.
“It was a combination of things,” Sherman said.
“I don’t know what you guys think we do in football while we practise, but we practise because we have to learn the schemes and techniques and timing and rhythm.
“It’d be like putting on a Broadway play with one day of rehearsal. One day of rehearsal you put on a Broadway play, it doesn’t work. One actor comes on and doesn’t know his lines.”
In both the analogy and in reality, the book is heavy with a lot to commit to memory.
“He has to know protections and he has to know hot reads. He knows a lot of those things already, but not without terminology and not without players,” Sherman said.
“The timing of our different guys, how B.J. (Cunningham) runs a route as opposed to Vernon (Adams reading it), it’s just different. To put him out there and have him hesitate and then all of a sudden have him take a shot to the head and he’s out for three or four weeks it just didn’t make any sense to me at this point.”
In watching, Manziel got an up-close look at how different things will be for him in Montreal than in Hamilton. Adams played better than his numbers — 15 of 28 passing for 217 yards with one interception, with eight carries for 72 yards and a touchdown — will show. There were dropped passes; a surefire touchdown toss to the end zone for Chris Harper in the second quarter that went through the receiver’s hands. Adams wasn’t perfect, throwing a ball pretty much directly to Esks halfback Aaron Grymes, but it felt like the deck was stacked against him.
The pocket evaporated on him after the snap, leaving him with little choice but to run much of the night. There was the crowd, that reached peak agitation in the third quarter, booing him when he returned to the field and chanting for Manziel. Then there was the pressure that has to come with this situation. Should he hold onto the starting job for another week, Adams will be the only starter in the league who will have what’s normally a shrug-it-off mistake be the bat-signal for the guy behind him.
Sherman said his offensive line had issues on Thursday.
“I never ever really talk much about the fact that we have a rookie right tackle (Na’Ty Rodgers) and a guy that walked in the other day at left tackle (Tony Washington, as part of the Manziel deal),” the coach said.
“We have a guy that played tight end who just came in too (Landon Rice). There’s a maturation period within your system that they have to go through. We threw them out there, I’ll watch the tape and find out how they did.”
Manziel will eventually start for the Als, the team has guaranteed that. But when he does, he’ll face the same challenges that Adams faced on Thursday and that Drew Willy and Matt Shiltz — who injured his shoulder holding on a field goal and didn’t return — have encountered.
Earlier in the week, when the aches from Saturday’s game in Calgary and the shock of Sunday evening’s trade were still fresh, Als running back Tyrell Sutton summed things up for the offence’s problems.
“We’ve had three quarterbacks in there and all three have knicks and bruises,” he said. “If we don’t protect these guys around here…nothing against (Manziel), I don’t think it’ll matter who we have back there if we can’t protect whoever it is.”
There’s opportunity for Manziel in Montreal, but it will come with unique challenges.
