Rider Insider, Oct. 25/2015

Old Mosaic Stadium is the oldest, most-dilapidated stadium in the Canadian Football League and, I’m afraid to say, is home to the CFL’s worst team.

Saturday’s loss to the Eskimos dropped the Roughriders’ record to 2-14 and they seem hell-bent to secure their worst season in franchise history.

In this one, the Riders built up a 21-3 lead before the second quarter was a minute old. However the Edmonton Eskimos, who are so good, woke up and started playing. They came back to build a 24-21 lead by halftime and cruised to what turned out to be a relatively easy victory.

It was Edmonton’s seventh win in a row and upped their record to a league-best 13-4.

But all Saturday’s game showed me was the 2015 Saskatchewan Roughriders have now lost games every way imaginable.

From blown fourth quarter leads, to double-overtime losses, to games they were never really in, to, now, racing out to a big lead only to see it evaporate just as quickly.

They all get filed in the “L” column.

At his postgame news conference, Riders coach Bob Dyce was asked for his assessment of the game. Initially he growled like a bear into the microphone, in an address which was carried on province-wide radio. Then he paused for what seemed like an eternity. The gap only lasted about five seconds but it felt like five minutes as the Rider Nation hung on his every word.

“When you see a team go up 21-3 … and we’ve seen this team play some really good teams very well at times … it’s a challenging thing,” Dyce surmised. “We’d like consistency and some of that comes back on coaches because we need a consistent effort throughout. It’s our job to get a top level performance out of them at all times. It certainly is challenging.”

After the Riders’ 31-21 home loss to Hamilton in Week Five, then-coach Corey Chamblin advised that the “pain is now over”. He felt, at 0-5, the worst was behind them. However as it turned out, it was just getting started.

So now the home portion of the 2015 schedule is behind the Riders, and their ledger while defending their turf finished at 2-7. The paid attendance was 30,488 Saturday night however, an optimistic guess at the actual bums in the seats would be 22,000. Kudos to the fans who did show up, because they all seemed to be having a great time.

But when the effects of the Pilsner wore off, reality had to set in for them too.

The wont – from this blogger and broadcaster’s corner – is to start looking ahead now. Let’s get the 2015 post-mortem written and start examining the challenges ahead. They begin with naming a General Manager, a head coach, and then retooling the roster.

But we can’t. There are still two road games remaining against opponents who have an infinite amount of things to play for. The first is this Saturday in Calgary against a Stampeders team which is challenging for first place in the CFL West. They’re only a game back of Edmonton.

And then the season finishes with a date in Montreal on Sunday, Nov. 8 against an Alouettes team which is clamouring for a crossover playoff berth. They also currently have the CFL’s second-longest postseason streak dating back to 1996.

Perhaps now the pain for the Riders is indeed gone. All that’s left is playing out the string, but the days right now are agonizingly long.

There’s so much to look forward to this off-season! But right now the days are going by like weeks.

by Rod Pedersen

Rider Insider, Oct. 25/2015

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