The CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders showed improvement from the first third of their 18-game regular season to the second.
But the progress wasn’t great enough to appease them.
“It was better, but it’s still not up to our standard,” safety Mike Edem said after Saturday’s 30-25 loss to the Ottawa Redblacks at Mosaic Stadium. “We’ve got to stand on how we work, our expectations and our goals and we’re not there yet.”
In 2017, Saskatchewan was 6-6-0 after 12 games and went on to finish with a 10-8-0 regular-season record.
The 2018 Roughriders, who were 3-3-0 after the first third of their regular-season slate, went 4-2-0 in their next six games. The two losses sandwiched a winning streak that featured four victories over three West Division rivals (the Calgary Stampeders, B.C. Lions and Winnipeg Blue Bombers, whom Saskatchewan beat twice).
The Roughriders’ final six-game stretch begins Saturday, when they visit the Toronto Argonauts.
“We have to show up and do all the little things,” Saskatchewan head coach-GM Chris Jones said when asked about the final third of the regular season.
“You can’t continue to get yourself in first-and-15 or first-and-20. There’s not a good play on the call sheet that anybody has schemed up that’s going to be 95-per-cent successful or 80-per-cent successful on first-and-extra-long or second-and-extra-long.
“We can’t keep putting our offence in that position. Up until recently, we’ve been not doing those sorts of things and we’ve been able to win the football game. We’re still a work in progress, that’s for sure.”
The Roughriders’ defence remains one of the league’s elite units, even though it surrendered 481 yards to the Redblacks on Saturday.
That group and the special teams have combined for a club-record 12 return touchdowns this season, taking six interceptions, three punts, two fumbles and a kickoff to the opponents’ end zone.
“I don’t look at the standings or what our record is, but defensively, I like where we’re at,” said linebacker Sam Eguavoen, who has one of the pick-sixes as well as a fumble return for a TD after a blocked punt. “We’ve got a bunch of hungry guys trying to make plays.
“This game (Saturday) didn’t show it, but I feel like we’ve all got the same mentality: We’re trying to get the ball, turn it over and score with it. I like the group of guys we’ve got.”
The problem for the Roughriders is this: Those 12 return touchdowns are just three fewer than the number of majors scored by the offence this season.
Zach Collaros threw a 34-yard scoring pass to Naaman Roosevelt on Saturday, giving the Roughriders eight passing touchdowns in 2018. Add in seven rushing TDs and Saskatchewan is ninth in the CFL in offensive majors.
By comparison, the 2017 Roughriders had 28 passing touchdowns and eight rushing TDs through 12 games.
“We’ve got to score points,” running back/returner Marcus Thigpen said. “We’ve been letting the team down I feel like the whole year and offensively we’ve just got to do better.
“We get in the red zone and it’s tough and it’s tight down there. We’ve got to score points, whether it’s field goals or touchdowns. We can’t leave empty-handed.”
Saskatchewan made two trips into the red zone Saturday and managed just three points on a Brett Lauther field goal. The other drive was snuffed out by an interception by Jonathan Rose at the Ottawa one-yard line.
The Roughriders, who went into the game ranked seventh in the league in net offence, had 240 net yards Saturday. That included 162 yards passing, a total that dropped the team’s average through its first 12 games of the season to 209.1 yards per game.
“We’ve got to find a way to score more touchdowns, plain and simple,” offensive tackle Thaddeus Coleman said. “We run the ball decently, but our passing game is struggling all around — O-line, receivers and quarterback.”
Edem doesn’t see one thing in particular that has to change in the final third of the Roughriders’ regular season. For him, the key is for the offence, defence and special teams to continue to play as a cohesive unit.
“We’ve got to keep working,” he said. “We can’t let the games we won in the past affect how we play or face opponents moving forward. We’ve got to take every opponent seriously and not take them lightly.
“We’re not good enough to just walk on the field and win games. We’ve got to actually put in the work, do our due diligence and make sure we come out with a W.”
Saskatchewan’s final six games include contests against four teams that currently have losing records (the Argos, Montreal Alouettes, Bombers and Lions) and two clubs with winning marks (the Edmonton Eskimos and Stampeders).
Jones noted Saturday that the Roughriders can’t predict how the final six games will go, but he was adamant that the coaches and players will return to practice Tuesday with the goal of improving.
“We’ve been here before,” he said. “The sky is not falling. We’re a good football team. We’re going to go right back to work like we did (at) the first of the year when everybody was saying all the bad things about us.”
“We’ll come back next week and get on it,” Coleman added. “You win some, you lose some. (The loss Saturday) will humble us once again and hopefully we’ll get back on a (winning) streak.
