The Toronto Argonauts have long been known for the Argo Bounce, a fortuitous carom of the football that traditionally benefited the CFL team.
This week, the Saskatchewan Roughriders are eager to experience an Argo Bounce-back.
Saskatchewan is coming off a disappointing 30-25 loss Saturday to the Ottawa Redblacks as it prepares to visit the Argonauts this coming Saturday. The defeat at Mosaic Stadium snapped the Roughriders’ four-game winning streak and, perhaps, brought them back to earth.
Rebounding from that loss is Job #1 on Saturday.
“We’ve got to get that bad taste out of our mouth and get back to winning; that’s all it comes down to,” defensive back Ed Gainey said after Tuesday’s practice at Mosaic Stadium. “We’re going to put a good week together, prepare for Toronto and get back to the X’s and O’s. It’s nothing special; we know what we can do.
“We’ve got to come together and stay together. We can’t come apart after one loss and act like the whole world is about to end. We’re still sitting in a good position. We’ve just got to finish the season strong, get that momentum and ride that wave toward the end of the season.”
The Roughriders went 4-2-0 during the second third of their 18-game regular season, taking down the Calgary Stampeders, B.C. Lions and Winnipeg Blue Bombers (twice). Losses to the Edmonton Eskimos and Ottawa were the bookends to those four wins.
Saskatchewan owns a 7-5-0 record and is tied with the Eskimos (7-5-0) for second place in the West Division, behind only Calgary (10-2-0). The Roughriders technically are in third because Edmonton won the teams’ only previous meeting this season.
To maintain their current standing or to move up, the Roughriders have to get back in the win column — and their next opportunity to do so is Saturday in Toronto.
“Pretty much every game from here on out is probably going to be a dogfight, so we’ve got to learn how to have fortitude, continue to fight and rally with one another and continue to make plays,” Gainey said. “If we do that, I’m pretty sure we’ll be good.”
The Roughriders have to put behind them a game that didn’t meet their previous standards.
Saskatchewan managed just 240 yards of net offence (its second-lowest total of the season) while the defence surrendered 481 net yards to the Redblacks (the highest total allowed by Saskatchewan in 2018).
Not surprisingly, neither total sat well with the Roughriders. But head coach-GM Chris Jones isn’t planning major alterations to his club in advance of Saturday’s game.
“We’ve got very good coaches and we’ve won a lot of football games in the past, so we’re not going to sit there and panic over something that happened yesterday,” Jones said. “We’re going to continue to work and try to get better at all phases.
“We haven’t played good defence since before the break. We have not played the defence that we played early in the season, so we’re going to keep working and get back to what we’ve always done.”
Jones noted that, even during his team’s four-game winning streak, he wasn’t totally pleased with the play of the defence. He suggested that while that unit may have scored two touchdowns in a 32-27 victory over the host Bombers on Sept. 8, it also gave up 375 yards of net offence — a total that would leave the defence ranked seventh in the CFL if that was its per-game average.
“Our expectation levels across the board from players, coaches and everybody is higher than that,” Jones said. “That’s the thing that gets hidden sometimes.”
Entering Saturday’s game in Toronto, Jones wants the defence to once again get the ball back for the offence, whether through turnovers (the Roughriders failed to record a takeaway against Ottawa) or through two-and-outs (Saskatchewan forced just three by the Redblacks).
As for Saskatchewan’s offence, Jones wants to see it keep possession of the football and to be effective in both the running and passing games.
“The biggest key,” he said, “is consistency.”
That hasn’t always been evident this season.
Saskatchewan’s offence has struggled to score (it has a league-low 15 touchdowns) and to move the ball through the air (it’s eighth in the league with an average of 209.1 passing yards per game). The Roughriders also are last in the CFL in red-zone efficiency, scoring on just eight of 25 drives.
For guard Brendon LaBatte, the only thing the offence can do is keep plugging away in hopes of improving. His hope is that the recent four-game winning streak didn’t create a false sense of security among the offensive players.
“We’re still in the bottom of the league in some stats,” he said. “You’ve got to be pretty objective. That four-game win streak, offensively, might have been a little bit flattering because we still didn’t pull our weight and play to the level that we expect out of ourselves. There’s a lot to work on this week.”
Quarterback Zach Collaros concurred, suggesting simply that the film of Saturday’s loss to Ottawa showed that the Roughriders didn’t play well enough to win and that they have to get better before they face Toronto.
But it’s unlikely that huge changes will be made to help in that area.
“(The Ottawa outing) is one game; we’ve watched the film and we’re trying to clean up our mistakes and move forward,” Collaros said. “We’re not going to rewrite the book here. We’re going to continue to do what we believe in and try to get better at it.”
