Photo courtesy: Arthur Ward/CFL.
There’s an old football proverb: good teams win, but great teams cover.
For the first time in quite a while, the Saskatchewan Roughriders left no doubt who the better team was on Sunday night thanks to a 38-7 beatdown of the Bo Levi Mitchell-less Hamilton Ticats.
Despite the lopsided score, the Riders probably should have won by even more. Even in a blowout, they managed to make a game more interesting than it deserved to be.
I’m also left wondering what this game might have been if the injured Bo Levi Mitchell had been under centre for the Ticats.
As another old saying goes, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have Merry Christmas. The Riders took care of business against a team they should have beaten.
Here’s the good, the bad, and the dumb of the Riders’ fourth win of the season.
The Good
On a day where no one wanted to turn on their oven given the heat, the Riders’ defence finally baked the turnovers they’ve been looking for.
A year ago, the Riders feasted on turnovers on the way to their fifth Grey Cup championship. While some regression to the mean was to be expected, the number of times they’ve managed to give the ball back to their offence with a sudden change had almost completely dried up, with just three coming into this game.
In one night, Joshua Bell’s unit managed to more than double their turnover count with another short-yardage stop, a fumble recovery by Marcus Sayles, a massive 107-yard pick-six from Josh Woods, and a third-down sack late in the fourth quarter. Strangely enough, Woods is still the only Rider defender with an interception on the season, after producing the team’s other pick a couple of weeks ago against the Toronto Argonauts.
They would have had a fifth turnover in this game had Tevaugh Campbell simply fallen on a loose ball instead of unsuccessfully trying to scoop it up to run.
Strangely enough, the Riders came into the game with exactly one interception and one fumble recovery. They now have exactly two of each.
No matter how they add up, the Riders are glad to see that number finally rise.
Bonus Good
If there’s one thing Corey Mace has proven to be in his time as a head coach, it’s a quick learner.
Following an injury to returner Mathew Sexton, Mace did not repeat the same mistake he made a couple of weeks ago when he put Samuel Emlius in that spot. Instead, we saw Daniel Wiebe handle return duties the rest of the night.
The Bad
If you’ve been reading this column long enough, you know that one thing I believe in is process over results. Good decisions sometimes don’t work out, and sometimes bad decisions do.
Mace made a few decisions that I didn’t necessarily agree with. One worked out, and one did not.
The puzzling decisions came in the first quarter when he opted to punt from the Hamilton 41 and 40-yard line on back-to-back possessions. I think it’s safe to assume the decision stems from Alex Hale missing a 35-yarder, another kick that you’d expect a professional kicker to make in the year 2026.
I’m not suggesting that Mace should have sent Hale out there; I certainly wouldn’t have either. Something needs to change there, but that’s another issue. In previous games, we’ve seen Mace get into a similar area of the field on third downs with medium distance to go and elect to go for it. He’s previously been rewarded for his aggressiveness with one of those decisions leading to a touchdown.
The first punt worked out beautifully, as Oscar Chapman pinned Hamilton at their own five-yard line. The second rolled out the back of the end zone, netting the play zero yards.
In my book, anything below the 45-yard line is go-for-it territory, and that’s if I’m feeling conservative. In fairness to Mace, perhaps his decision would have been different if he were playing a team that showed signs of life on offence. I can see why you’d decide to punt in this game, given that it took Jake Dolegala until the fourth quarter to pass the 100-yard passing mark.
The Dumb
One trick we’ve seen time and time again when it gets really hot is cooking an egg on the sidewalk.
We saw shots numerous times during the game, both on TSN and in the stadium, of such an attempt, as temperatures hovered around 50 degrees in the sun at field level to start the game.
The big issue with the experiment? The egg was placed in a pan, and simply did not cook fast enough to get the full effect. Unless that pan had been pre-heated or out in the sun all day as well, it was going to take far too long to cook the egg enough. Toward the end of the game, some of the white had started to cook, but that was about it.
That egg needed to be cracked on the bare cement to have any chance of true success.
