Stampeders.com
You may recall another Calgary Stampeders injury plague from just a couple of years ago, one reminiscent of this season’s receivers injury epidemic.
Back then, in 2016, offensive lineman after offensive lineman bit the dust and position coach Pat DelMonaco kept on pulling rabbits out of hats, and the unit marched on in impressive fashion despite the constant change of new faces in new places.
Back then, Receivers Coach Pete Costanza was one of the assistants on Head Coach Dave Dickenson’s staff who would playfully elbow DelMonaco about the situation, about the extra work needed, about having to plow through the driving rain and hail of ‘plug and play.’
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Chris Matthews returned to the Canadian Football League as a member of the Stamps just a few weeks ago (Stampeders.com)
“When all the O-linemen were getting hurt and he had to go keep pluggin’ and playin’ and doing a great job with it, we would all tease him,” says Costanza, taking a few minutes to talk about the Stamps’ injury situation, this week.
Costanza teases no more.
“When the injury bug struck our position, I told him I’ll never bust his chops again when something like that happens to him,” he says, chuckling.
These days, it is Costanza, in his 11th season as the Stamps’ receivers coach, who is working his tail off, adjusting and readjusting to a corps that has changed and changed and changed again over the course of the season.
“It’s a challenge,” says Costanza, brightly rather than grimly. “You have a small window to bring guys up to speed, try to get them on the same page as Bo.”
Quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell has had the burden of an ever-changing fleet of receivers sprinting downfield in front of him, and right now, most of Calgary’s original prime targets are on the sidelines, with replacements being inserted continually.
The pressure is on. The Stampeders still have control of the West, two points up on second place Saskatchewan, and carrying a game in hand. However, the Roughriders won the season series between the two and therefore hold the hammer in a possible tiebreaker situation. Calgary has lost two games straight – both at home – with their vaunted passing attack being held to 215 and then 221 yards in those losses.
With road games against the surging Winnipeg Blue Bombers this Friday night, and then against the similarly cresting BC Lions the week after, and with the playoffs coming up the walkway, Costanza wants to get his receiving corps glued together right now. The heavy lifting is being put in by both he and the players in order to get that done.
“It’s unfortunate where the injuries have taken us,” says Costanza. “But at the same time, the guys that are in here now, they wouldn’t be here if we didn’t believe we could win football games with them. We have talented players.”
“It’s my job to help them fast track so they can understand what we’re doing.”
Before we turn our attention to the players on that fast track, here’s a quick refresher on the injury wave that has pummelled the Stampeders’ attack in 2018.
On opening night, Calgary had DaVaris Daniels, Kamar Jorden, Marken Michel, Juwan Brescacin, Reggie Begelton and Eric Rogers all in the line-up. Now, from that group, they have Rogers and Brescacin suiting up, and Rogers missed ten games during this season due to knee troubles, returning to the active roster just this month.
Daniels, Jorden and Michel form a murderers’ row of pass catchers. Begelton emerged as a primo target in their absence, and then he got injured too. “One of those nights when you’re laying in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out ‘where do we go now?'” says Costanza of the night Begelton went down near the end of September, adding even more snow to the injury avalanche.
Jorden and Begelton are out for the season. There is the possibility that Daniels and/or Michel might return for the playoffs, but it’s pretty iffy.
Those four receivers on the injury list right now? Together they amount to 2,614 yards on 161 receptions pulled in, including 19 touchdown catches.
“I was just like ‘holy crap, what’s going on here?’” says Costanza, recalling the stunned feeling that came over him as the injuries mounted. There wasn’t much time to wallow, however, and there isn’t now, either.
“You gotta wash it and move forward and try to figure out a way to fix it. And keep getting better,” he says.
With a relatively healthy receiving corps for the entirety of the season, who knows what kinds of numbers Mitchell and that offence might have put up? That’s a supposition for the “what if” crowd. Costanza has no such luxury as he faces the reality of who is on the field now and how to get productivity soaring. He is optimistic about getting the passing game back on the rails, pronto.
Thankfully, he has had the dependable Brescacin in the group and Brescacin, the 25-year-old native of Mississauga, Ontario, has been solid with 33 reception for 522 yards and three touchdowns. In his third year with the Stampeders, he knows the offence well.
“He’s done a really nice job for us,” says Costanza of Brescacin. “He knows almost all the spots on the offence. He plays the hardest positions for us where we ask him to do the most things. Every year he’s gotten better but this year, forced into more of the limelight, he’s really had broad shoulders and done a nice job carrying that load.”
Outside of Brescacin, though, the receiving doors have been swinging freely with newcomers being brought in and stable back-up vets being asked to do more. With either of those options, building an easy flow with Mitchell takes some time. What Costanza strives to do is crunch that timeline as much as possible.
“When a receiver understands the playbook, understands what a defence is trying to do to us, he can play fast and doesn’t have to think,” explains Costanza. “And that’s what we’re working for right now.”
Canadian receiver Lemar Durant, in his fourth year as a Stamp, has been expected to step up in the face of the injuries. He, too, was injured, taken out of last week’s game against Saskatchewan when he suffered a head shot during the late going. Durant has been practicing this week (after going through concussion protocols) and is a possibility to play on Friday night in Winnipeg. Or maybe the Stampeders will have to plug and play yet again, with first-year man Richard Sindani (a graduate of the Calgary Colts program) taking up the slack.
Bo Levi Mitchell has had many different combinations of receivers to throw to this season because of injuries (Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)
Markeith Ambles is in his first year with the team and will play in just his fifth game on Friday night, coming off a nice effort versus Saskatchewan, hauling in 8 passes for 84 yards and a touchdown. Although he’s been with the team since training camp, he saw no action until the injuries began to pile up, and is working on growing an on-field connection with Mitchell as well.
“Bo, he’s always talking to the receivers,” says Costanza, when asked about the urgency in the process of building rapport. “He talks to them in the afternoon after practice and I’m sure they talk at night and text back and forth. The situation we’re in right now, those guys are getting on the same page.”
At the centre of the building chemistry are Eric Rogers – expected to be part of that process all along before the aforementioned knee injury took him out of the equation for half the season – and Chris Matthews, the CFL’s Most Outstanding Rookie while with Winnipeg in 2012.
Matthews is a key, you’d have to think. Everyone knows what you get from Rogers and even if his progress on the field was stalled by injury, his knowledge of the Calgary playbook was not, as it no doubt served as reading material during his rehab.
Matthews, who went on to spend four years in the NFL after his second season in Winnipeg was ended by injury, returned to the CFL earlier this month and as Costanza puts it, has been “just trying to, basically, eat an elephant one piece at a time.” Immersed in Calgary’s complicated playbook, the big, talented receiver’s presence would be a real boon, if he can be at all as he was during his rookie year and provide opposing defences with real reason to worry. That, in turn, would give someone like Rogers a little more room.
“The one thing you could tell about Chris right away, he was a pro,” says Costanza, enthusiastically. “You could see that. His time in the NFL has probably helped him in preparing to win football games. He does a really nice job, if he does make a mistake, of correcting that mistake. Our offence isn’t easy to learn by any means. I hoping to see him continuing to take steps forward as we finish out the year.”
And there could be more moves.
Recently, the Stampeders signed another familiar, veteran receiver, Bakari Grant, who played with the club in 2016. Released by the Saskatchewan Roughriders prior to the regular season, he’d been looking for a football job since. Costanza likes that Grant is familiar with the Calgary way of doing things and when or if he gets into the Stamps’ line-up depends on how fast he gets back into game shape.
That’s just another possibility for a Calgary pass-catching crew that has seen more than its share of misfortune, and a coach that has seen the pressure and the workload mount with every fallen receiver.
Costanza has to deal with that, not to mention the slings and arrows of a certain offensive line coach with a long memory.
“He gives me a hard time but that’s just how it is in this office,” he says, laughing off DelMonaco’s revenge. “Ya gotta have a thick skin around here.”
The ability to reformulate plans in a hurry comes in handy too.
