Win over Als will mean zilch if we don’t gain bye

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/10/2011 (5153 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To win the Eastern Division, earn a first-round bye and have one game at home to punch a ticket to the Grey Cup, this team is going to have to break free from our tendency in the second half of the season to play uninspired football the week after a colossal win.

Not to dismiss the jubilation and euphoria in the locker-room after defeating the Montreal Alouettes by a point on Saturday — it was easy to get swept up in the celebratory mood after the game — the truth of the scenario we find ourselves in is very grounding.

Yes, we won the regular-season series against the two-time defending Grey Cup champions and have guaranteed ourselves a home playoff game and a winning season for the first time since 2007. But if Montreal wins one more game than we do in the remaining two games, winning the season series will become irrelevant.

If you can put a finger on a consistent problem this team has had in a maddeningly inconsistent 2011 season, it is probably the fact that we lose games to teams everyone expects us to beat, and we win games against teams that most of the free world have written us off in. This is a trend that needs to be eradicated if we are to achieve our goals in the two remaining weeks of the season.

To recap the season thus far, our neighbors to the west may have had things a little backwards back when we went to visit them at 7-1, while they sported a 1-7 record, but they didn’t pay too much attention to the standings when they beat us by an average of three touchdowns in the two games.

So naturally, after losing back-to-back games to the team with the worst win-loss record, we went into Montreal and beat the Alouettes on their turf, which is no small feat. Building off of that momentum, we travelled into Toronto and fell flat on our faces, losing by a point to another team that the experts felt we should have beaten. After a loss to Montreal at home in the most excruciating fashion, we shrugged off our devastation and waltzed into Hamilton and beat them in their ballpark. We parlayed that success into a shellacking at the hands of the Edmonton Eskimos, and then, in the biggest game of the season, we beat Montreal at home.

You don’t have to be a genius to see where this is going, with Toronto on deck and out of the playoff picture with a 4-12 record.

Unless we are the thickest of slow-thinking organisms, we should have learned by now that this year in the CFL, matchups are the deciding variable when it comes to winning and losing. What weighs heaviest on game day is how your players and schemes mix and match with those of your opponent — not your record. It does not matter who you have beaten and how many times you have beaten them, it’s any given Sunday seven days a week in the CFL in 2011.

That being said, I would dare suggest that the level of effort, intensity, and energy required to defeat the Toronto Argonauts this Friday at home will have to mirror or exceed the efforts put forth against Montreal. In the three games we have played against the Argos this season, the games have been decided by an average of slightly more than five points. That’s not a big margin separating two teams that have 12 points between them in the regular-season standings. Whether we get complacent after big wins, match up poorly against certain teams, or have trouble dealing with success and letting it swell our heads this late in the season, we better recreate the urgency and desperation we played with last week or stealing the season series from Montreal may prove to have been an exercise in futility.

One last thing. Before you start tallying up the $5 fines for the use of the words, ‘Grey Cup,’ ‘Eastern Final’, or ‘first place,’ this column was started the day before our head coach’s edict to fine all aforementioned buzz words, so I’m hoping it should be exempt from the collection department.

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.