Monday Morning Sentimonies: Done Like Thanksgiving Dinner

Riders 15 - Ti-Cats 30

Normally in this space on a Thanksgiving holiday Monday, I would pontificate on all that I am thankful for. About all I can say that I'm thankful for at this point is that I no longer have to listen to delusional dreamers talk about what needs to happen for the Riders to make the playoffs. There are only 2 ways the Riders were ever going to make the playoffs. One involved a DeLorean. The other would involve 3 other teams folding or disappearing from existence prior to the playoffs starting.

Friday was just a terrible performance by pretty much everyone involved. O-line was predictably bad (bad protection, no holes for the run game), Getzlaf made his returning presence known by taking penalties and dropping passing (or as its known locally: Getzlafing). I would have to learn 3 more languages to have enough curse words in my vocabulary to discuss the terribleness or our secondary, and I'm already bilingual. Play-calling was awful and unable to adjust on both sides of the ball. McCallum failed. And of course Glenn was terrible... again.

Two things really entertained me during the game (neither of which involved the actual play on the field). One was how they kept talking about trade speculation involving Glenn... despite the fact that he was playing like utter garbage literally as they spoke. Unless Kent Austin recently developed blindness and was hit in the head with a 2x4 and lost all his football memories, I highly doubt Friday's performance was really going to help Glenn's trade value (which was almost non-existent coming in). The other thing that entertained me was all the gushing about the phenomenal performance by Jake Matthews and how much he improved over his last start. No one seemed to clue into the fact that last week he played a solid Rich Stubler defense and this week they played the sad sack Rider D. We make stars out of any QB (well except Cromtpon and Brohm which gives you an idea of just how crappy those 2 are). Only Jock Climie seemed to clue into that fact.

Once again our O-line was bad. Hardly surprising when 2 starters (Watman and Hardrick) have no business starting. That certainly hampered Glenn but let's face it, he was bad and it continued a streak of bad that began in the second half of the Montreal game. Smith's mobility helps masks a lot of the OL shortcomings which is why he is able to do things. In one pass, Smith put up more yards then Glenn in the first half. That tells you all you need to know right there. For being such a supposed offensive guru, Chapdelaine sure seems to show no ability to adjust his game plan to a defense. If they have him figured out in the first quarter, we are pretty much screwed. At least we remembered who Dressler was.

Defensively I just won't bother getting too much into it... there's only so many alternatives for bad in the thesaurus. Chick had a good game. Munroe continues to be one of our best tacklers downfield... which tells you just how awful our actual cover guys are. We actually now have visual evidence that Matt Webster can make a play. It was on a fake FG (which was a super dick move by Austin) and not actually on defense but I figure if I'm gonna rip on the guy, the least I can do is acknowledge when makes a play. Tristan Jackson is struggling with the move to the short side CB, he looked lost for much of the game... though he fit it seamlessly with the other 4 DBs. Green got embarrassed repeatedly all night and if we can't trust him against a guy like Sinkfield, how can you trust him to be a HB where he will routinely be matched up on better receivers?

In summary I am thankful that there are only 3 more of these games to endure. Hopefully you find more joyful things to be thankful for this weekend.