If the Saskatchewan Roughriders didn’t have bad luck during their Week 8 loss in Montreal, they’d have no luck at all.
In a game that easily exceeded the expectations of a battle of backup quarterbacks, what began as a stinky ground-and-pound first half transformed into a finish worthy of two 5-and-1 teams. It was the type of product the league would want to showcase to its American TV partners at CBS Sports Network.
So, what bad luck are we talking about?
For starters, Brett Lauther’s 57-yard-field-goal try in the first quarter hitting the crossbar kept the Riders off the scoreboard and gave the Alouettes great field position. All the sports gambling ads and in-game promotions in the world remarkably haven’t shown us the odds of something like that happening.
Making that kick — which was right down the pipe but didn’t have quite enough leg — scoring a rouge or having a modest return come back out of the end zone were all far more likely scenarios than doinking it off the crossbar, which proved to be the worst-case scenario for the Riders.
The odds of hitting the iron a second time from outside of 50 yards would have to be much longer than that but Lauther hit the upright from 53 yards out, once again ending a promising drive empty-handed and providing a short porch for the Alouette offence to work with. It was true to form for a typical Roughrider visit to Montreal, where things rarely go as planned.
“We took a couple of shots there with Brett to put some points on there for us. The chances of ringing two off the post are pretty slim,” head coach Corey Mace admitted. “We’ve got faith in Brett. Kicking from that distance, the leg’s there, the distance is there. We just got unlucky, man.”
Those two bad bounces wiped anywhere from two to six points off the board which would have come in handy when the Riders couldn’t come up with the game-winning touchdown drive in the dying seconds. Had those doinks not occurred, a very makeable field goal would have sufficed.
However, those weren’t even the worst bounces the Riders faced in Percival Molson Stadium on Thursday night.
Alouettes’ third-string quarterback Davis Alexander, who took over from Caleb Evans after he stank up the joint in the second half, fumbled the ball late in the game after being stripped by Bryan Cox Jr. However, it was recovered going forward by his Montreal teammate, resulting in a makeable third-and-one gamble instead of a third-and-long field goal try. Predictably, the Alouettes would get their first down and churn up more valuable seconds while nursing a fourth-quarter lead that the Riders would never come back from.
It wasn’t all luck, of course. Saskatchewan did let a perennial benchwarmer walk all over them in what was the lousiest half of football Mace’s vaunted defence has displayed so far this year. Just how was Davis Alexander allowed to look more like Anthony Calvillo in that second half with just three incompletions on 18 passes?
The great running attack led by Frankie Hickson, filling in admirably for A.J. Ouellette, which churned up 98 yards in the first half while building a 16-3 lead looked more like an afterthought in the final 30 minutes. That and a clear-cut failure to pick up blitzes from Alouettes linebackers on that final game-losing drive exposed vulnerabilities in the Riders’ offensive gameplan, suggesting boy-wonder offensive coordinator Marc Mueller still has some whiskers to earn.
The Roughriders could have and should have won this game, especially since they faced St. Catharines Street on a relatively calm Wednesday night instead of a raucous weekend in one of North America’s most legendary party cities. A short week with travel should have been made much easier without those temptations.
“I’m proud of the way all the guys played tonight. It went down to the end, as we suspected,” Mace said. “We were close, but that only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”
Excuses are for losers, particularly in the world of pro football, but since Saskatchewan came out of this one on the losing end, we’ll cut Mace’s men a little slack and let them indulge.
This one’s on the football gods as much as any player in green and white. Lady luck did not smile down on Riderville this time around.
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Brendan McGuire has covered the CFL since 2006 in radio and print. Based in Regina, he has a front-row view of Rider Nation.
