Jamie Douglas/CFL.ca
Hello, Stefan Flintoft.
I trust your feud with the scoreboard at BC Place is over, yes?
Now that the scoreboard has had enough and has actually kept a ball up there it’s time to call a truce, right? Or do we need to put you two into couple’s counselling or something?
Yada, yada, yada, here are this week’s takeaways.
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CAN’T WIN WITH FIELD GOALS? I KNOW TWO GUYS WHO’D LIKE A WORD
“We can’t have eight field goals,” said Argos’ head coach Ryan Dinwiddie after his team’s 37-31 win over Montreal on Saturday night.
He was leaning into an old football adage that says you can’t win with field goals. That you have to convert those chances when you get into another team’s territory, otherwise, the points you leave off the board are going to haunt you.
Lirim Hajrullahu’s 8/8 performance, though, combined with a convert to give him a total of 25 points on the night, tells us that you can indeed win with field goals. At least you can when you dominate time of possession and rush for 234 yards.
It’s an outlier? Oh, okay.
Just hours before, and 2,000 kilometres away, in Regina, Roughriders’ placekicker Brett Lauther went 7/7 in his team’s 29-16 victory over Ottawa.
Been awhile since I handed out a Ron Swanson ‘Give Me All The Bacon And Eggs You Have’ Award but Lauther and Hajrullahu split the honours after first splitting the uprights 15 times on 15 attempts.
Can’t win with field goals? Yes you can. You just need a lot of ‘em.
THERE IS ART. AND THEN THERE IS KENNY LAWLER
Are you kidding me Kenny Lawler??! What a grab for the @Wpg_BlueBombers pass-catcher!#CFLGameDay LIVE on @TSN_Sports & @CBSSportsNet
📱: Stream on CFL+ pic.twitter.com/4qJ4iVTudB— CFL (@CFL) September 28, 2024
You know that saying that people like to use, “hang it in the Louvre”?
Winnipeg receiver Kenny Lawler could have his own wall in the famed Paris art gallery. Hell, he could have an entire wing dedicated to him by now.
The toe-tap touchdown in the Bombers’ win over Edmonton was a masterpiece and it wasn’t even his best catch in the game. That one came earlier, a splendid one-handed nab on an out pattern that had his quarterback, Zach Collaros, questioning reality.
“Kenny’s catch was like a glitch in the matrix,” Collaros told reporters after the game. “He just got there with his claw. His big claw. The DB looked surprised too.”
Everyone looked surprised. Except Kenny Lawler.
That’s the thing with artistic genius. The creator often reacts to heaping amounts of praise with a shrug and “it’s just a thing I did.”
SURE, IT’S A FOOTBALL PROBLEM BUT IT MIGHT BE AN EXISTENTIAL ONE TOO
After two losses in a row to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Edmonton quarterback McLeod Bethel-Thompson was in a mood, as I’m sure you can understand. That second loss in particular was the kind that can give a guy pause to ponder.
“You gotta fight.” Bethel-Thompson told reporters. “It’s about pride. It’s about how the heck do you want to show up?” Then he got probingly philosophical. “What’s in your soul?”
In Vancouver, the stop-and-start Lions – currently in stop mode – have head coach Rick Campbell looking for his team to embrace the pain of an overtime loss to Hamilton, hoping it can lead his players to a better place, mentally. “We don’t respond well when things don’t go our way,” Campbell said, post-game. “We need to be better at that.”
In other words, and in dictionary-defined existential terms: Be responsible agents who determine their own development through acts of the will.
In Ottawa, the suddenly chilly REDBLACKS – losers of three in a row – might not be facing a crisis of existentialism at all. Might be, they figure, more like ‘executionalism,’ a word I just now made up. A crisis of Xs and Os.
“We gotta fix it,” quarterback Jeremiah Masoli told TSN 1200 Radio. “We gotta figure it out.”
In the end, thinking and talking only go so far in football, of course. It’s what happens next, on the field, that matters most.
Or, in a mash-up of the great philosophers Lenny Bruce (via Seinfeld) and Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over yada, yada yada.”
YOU HAVE BEEN CHALLENGED, WINNIPEG FANS
Winnipeg head coach Mike O’Shea is a details guy.
He looks at every possible thing before, during and after a football game in an effort to squeeze any and all advantages out of what is available to him and his team.
Following the Bombers’ 55-27 victory over the Edmonton Elks, O’Shea was asked about another sellout at Princess Auto Stadium and the great lift the fans give his team during a game.
While grateful, O’Shea then asked what he constantly asks of himself, his staff, and his players.
Could he have even more, please? Noise, that is.
“What I notice is the oppositions are operating pretty well,” O’Shea told the scrum. The (play) clock’s not getting close to them takin’ time counts like in the past.”
Then, as a devilish smirk began to emerge on the coach’s face, he continued.
“But I think our fan base will keep working and they’ll keep trying to force their will upon the opposition as good fan bases do. As long as they keep showing up and they keep making noise, they’ll get one sooner or later.”
Mike O’Shea just did for Winnipeg fans what he’s done for players for so many years. He coached them up, and challenged them as if to say ‘you’re great already but how can we make you even greater?’
YOU CAN COUNT ON THE CANADIAN CAVALRY
THOMAS BERTRAND-HUDON BREAKS THROUGH 🥶 @tombh11 #CFLGameday on CTV
📲: Stream on CFL+ pic.twitter.com/GqptykKfQe— CFL (@CFL) September 28, 2024
Both the Hamilton Ticats and Saskatchewan Roughriders faced difficulty during crucial games in Week 17, with starting running backs going down due to injury.
Hamilton’s Greg Bell left Friday night’s game against the BC Lions midway through the final period and while his replacement, Vancouver native Ante Milanovic-Litre rushed just once for four yards during the fourth quarter, he worked well in overtime, with 13 yards on four touches including a fancy little one-yard off-tackle scamper for the winning touchdown.
In Sasky, starter Ryquell Armstead was sidelined in the fourth quarter after being held in check by the REDBLACKS throughout. That meant Thomas Bertrand-Hudon was pressed into action and the native of Mont-Sainte-Hilaire, QC gobbled up 72 yards on nine carries, including the only Saskatchewan touchdown of the day on a 26-yard run.
Key wins for each of the Ticats and Roughriders, gotten in large part due to Canadian players hearing the call of the trumpet and galloping into action.
AND FINALLY… Ka’Deem Carey rushed for 90 yards on Saturday night. His helmet picked up an additional 17 yards on its own. Yet it did not get a post-game interview on national TV. I mean, what’s a helmet gotta do?
