Just like they did in 2024, the Saskatchewan Roughriders rebounded from their first loss of the season to improve to 5-1 on the year.
Last year, the Riders won a slugfest against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at Mosaic Stadium 19-9. This time around, the Green and White raced out to an early lead against the B.C. Lions and never gave it up en route to a 33-27 win that was never as close as the six-point spread indicated.
So far, this season has felt a lot like last season for the Riders and their fans with an identical record with wins and losses coming at the same pace through six games.
Saskatchewan fans hope that this is where the comparisons will end as at this point last year, the team began its seven-game midseason winless skid.
One big difference between this year’s team and last year’s squad is that quarterback Trevor Harris is still in the lineup. Will that be the difference to avoid a long winless streak? Only time will tell.
Here’s the good, the bad, and the dumb of the Riders’ fifth win of the season.
The Good
If you didn’t watch the Riders play last week, first of all, congratulations on a good decision. Second, you wouldn’t have guessed they played so poorly based on their performance against the Lions.
It was a rebound game across the board for the team that did very little right against the Calgary Stampeders a week ago.
Most notable was the team’s performance on second down on both sides of the ball. Calgary’s offence had their way with the Riders defence a week ago, converting on nearly 60 percent of their second downs, including a number of big ones deep in their own territory. The Lions were less successful converting on half of their second downs, but that included some in garbage time late in the game when the outcome was basically decided.
On the other side, the Riders only managed nine second down conversions on 20 attempts last week. This week, they were the ones who converted on nearly 60 percent of their attempts. The conversions were especially important early on when the Marc Mueller’s unit didn’t convert for a first down until their fifth drive of the game last week, giving the defence little time to rest.
The offence still went silent for an entire quarter, allowing the Lions to make this game more interesting than it deserved to be, but overall it was a much better effort from the unit than we saw a week ago.
The Bad
Every so often you see an injury happen in real time and you just know it’s bad.
Unfortunately, we saw that on Saturday night at BC Place when Riders’ running back Ka’Deem Carey took a hit following a five-yard run late in the third quarter that saw his leg get badly twisted. Before they went to break, it sure looked like part of Carey was where it shouldn’t have been.
Thankfully, TSN only showed one replay of the hit and it was from an angle where you didn’t really get the full sense of what had happened. Based on how it felt live, TSN made the right call not to show us anything more than they did. I can only imagine how gruesome the outcome was. I also wonder why the cart wasn’t used to get Carey off the field and into the locker room.
With Canadian running back Thomas Bertrand-Hudon moved to the six-game injured list, the Riders were already getting thin at the position. One would have to assume that we won’t see Carey again this season.
Once again, general manager Jeremy O’Day is going to have to dip into free agency to provide some depth behind A.J. Ouellette.
The Dumb
Was there a memo sent out to CFL quarterbacks this week regarding spin-o-ramas?
Through three games this week we’ve seen three quarterbacks pull off the normally famous hockey move before throwing a pass down field. Stampeders quarterback Vernon Adams Jr.’s was so good it caused a Blue Bombers defensive back to freeze in place, leaving Damien Alford wide open. Nathan Rourke pulled off a great spin for a two-point conversion to Stanley Berryhill III.
The third attempt? Well, Trevor Harris gets some credit for trying but it wasn’t nearly as graceful as he tried his own at the end of the third quarter before chucking the ball right at two Lions defenders.
Harris is good at many things, but apparently spin-o-ramas isn’t one of them.
