Stampeders stave off doubt with Glenn as No. 1

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This article was published 19/07/2012 (5168 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CALGARY — Away from the friendly confines of the Calgary Stampeders’ McMahon Stadium locker-room, you’d be hard-pressed to find hometown fans who don’t have a doubt or two creeping in about the prospects of their favourite team.

Hard to blame them if you look at the balance sheet. The Stamps are coming off an 0-2 East Division road swing in which they gave up the winning points in both games in the final minute. They lost their starting quarterback.

And, oh yes, their next assignment is against the only unbeaten team in the Canadian Football League, the 3-0 Saskatchewan Roughriders.

Small wonder that what used to be a guaranteed sellout game now is a hard sell as the Stamps are pondering blacking out the game to local TV viewers with ticket sales hovering around the 32,000 mark — plenty of them promising to be clad in green and roaring in support of their surprising Riders.

“Oh, yeah. We know it,” nodded Stamps middle linebacker Juwan Simpson. “If you’ve been in the game long enough, you understand it. Even to the extent of people saying they’re not coming to the games. Hey, guys understand that. Look at B.C. last year. They went 0-and-5, and they came all the way back. It’s not about how you start, it’s about how you finish. And we have the tools we need to get the job done.”

If that refrain sounds familiar, it should, Four years ago, the Stamps sputtered out of the gate to a 3-3 start and the skeptics were coming out of the woodwork. Rather than succumb to the critics, the Stamps adopted an us-against-the-world mentality that carried them all the way to a Grey Cup title in Montreal.

It’s early times yet, of course, but there’s a sense that the Stamps believe they are far better than the 1-2 record they’ve compiled to date, and that they would take a great deal of pleasure in silencing their doubters, beginning Thursday against the Riders.

“That’s the position and that’s the nature of this sport. You name me a professional athlete that doesn’t have doubters — there isn’t one out there,” said quarterback Kevin Glenn, who’s been subjected to them more than any of his teammates over the past week. “The great ones have had doubters. Michael Jordan had doubters at one point in his career. When he retired and came back, there were still doubters. That kind of stuff kind of comes with the territory. It’s one of those things that I can’t control, so I try not to even worry about it.

“Some people use it as motivation. Some people ignore it. Some people don’t listen to it. Some people use it as fuel to light the fire to prove people wrong.”

In fact, there’s a school of thought that a little early adversity thrown at a team is not a terrible thing.

— Postmedia News