Monday Morning Sentimonies: Are We Better?

There was much rejoicing in Rider Nation when Craig Dickenson was shown the door and replaced by Corey Mace. After two seasons that ended in absolute misery there was hope on the horizon. And the early results were extremely positive. But after not winning a game in two calendar months (also known as pulling a Dickenson here in Saskatchewan) its fair to ask, are we actually on the road recovery or are we still stuck in an endless cycle of misery? 

Side note: Being a Rider fan in general is a commitment to an endless cycle of misery. Just follow the team history through 1956, 1972, 1976, most of the 80s and 90s, 2004 and 2009. Better yet, don't go back and remember those. For today I’m focused solely on the recent history. 

To give a clearer indication on whether we have progressed under Mace let’s look at the the statistical numbers between 2023 and 2024:

 

After 13 games	2023	2024	Difference
Wins	6	5.5	-0.5
Avg Margin of Defeat	18.7	5.9	+12.8
Points For	275	333	+58
TDs	25	33	+8
Pass yds	3479	3671	+192
Rush Yds	1084	1023	-61
Sacks Allowed	39	24	-15
Points Allowed	389	330	-59
Yds Allowed	4642	4552	-90
Sacks	27	31	+4
Turnover Ratio	-7	14	+21
Penalties yds	839	852	+13

 

A few observations: 

In terms of winning we are about the same. But the average margin of defeat shows we are a much more competitive team. Last year when we lost, we tended to get embarrassed. Like finding out at the exact moment your pants fall down that you forgot to wear underwear type of embarrassed. This year we are hanging with every team we play. 

Offense is showing improvement. I would argue that’s more to do with QB play than OC at this point. Turns out having capable QBs like Harris and Patterson improves your offensive firepower over Dolegala and Fine. Most telling for me is that we are scoring more TDs. Those had almost become an extinct species in previous years. The other big thing is sacks being way down. When you put that in context of having almost every starter on the 6 game and playing basically a new combination every week that is amazing. I know improved QB play helps the line but don’t tell me coaching doesn’t impact things. OL Coach Edwin Harrison may be one of our best offseason additions. The one negative is there that has been no improvement in our run game. 

I was most surprised by the defense. Obviously I expected turnovers and sack to be up but given our complete inability to stop the pass I was a bit surprised to see we are allowing less yards. I must have successfully repressed how bad last season was. To really understand our D you have to break it down. D-line gives you reason for a ton of hope. Micah is playing like man half his age. Cox and Carney are stepping up. Also remember that our best lineman in Lanier remains our as do Albright and Dabire (who are important rotation guys). Linebackers are steady and solid. They quietly take care of business for the most part. Secondary is where the concern is Milligan is playing at an MOP level. Sayles is a reliable starter more often than not. The rest of that secondary is a liability more often than not. And you can’t even blame the issues on injury… these are our anticipated starters. There is no miracle cure sitting on the IR waiting to heal up and save the day. 

On the whole, I hope this breakdown helps alleviate a bit of the doom and gloom. Don’t get me wrong, losing still sucks and we need to start seeing some improvement. But we are definitely better than last year even if the standings don’t reflect it. There are many valid criticisms of Mace at this point but he does have this team trending in a positive direction.  

Monday Morning Sentimonies: Same Old

Riders 21 – Bombers 26

Someone asked me yesterday what was more frustrating: last year when we were clearly a bad team and got blown out? Or this year when we are competitive in every single game but couldn’t win a game if you gave us the ball, the lead and 30 seconds on the clock? I honestly don’t know the answer but am almost leaning to this year. At least last year we knew we were just letting things burn to the ground before blowing it up in the offseason. This year… we are the equivalent having a nice sports car but it has a manual transmission and we are watching our teenage nephew struggle to have any clue how to get it into gear. 

Honestly we played better than expected. We didn’t embarrass ourselves or give up 50. We tried really hard to embarrass ourselves, managing to give up a blocked punt and INT within the first 5 minutes but we recovered. We were competitive… but still lost. But really, at no point in that game did it feel like we the aggressor. Yet again we just played chase. 

I’m not going to do a full breakdown but here are a few of my thoughts on the game:

-        I know he’s still learning and will grow into a solid OC over time, but after a hot start, the shine is starting to come off Marc Mueller a bit. He can coordinate a pass game but the run seems to be an afterthought. Week after week Frankie Hickson is our most reliable player on the field. Week after week he gets an insanely low number of carries. Just 9 total despite averaging 5 yards per carry. He touched the ball just once in the 3^rd quarter and 5 times total in the second half. I don’t know if you saw what he did in the 4^th when we actually fed him the ball, but maybe we could use a little more of that.

-        Also find Mueller gets too cute sometimes. I don’t mind the design on that shovel pass to Baker. I absolutely hate the timing of that call.

-        The stat line will show that the O-line gave up zero sacks and to be honest anything above utter embarrassment with the quality of the players we were starting is a win (so hats off to our OL coach who is earning every dime he makes this season), but the reality is that Harris bailed them out with quick throws. Sometime he made his decisions so quickly that he made the wrong read, but the lack of sacks are more a product of Harris than the OL. The Winnipeg pass rush was disruptive.

-        Defense followed the same script as last week. Start hot with a sack from Cox and then disappear. For the longest time I felt I was watching the same play on loop. We would stunt our D-line and Collaros would effortlessly throw over them to a wide open Olivera for a easy first down. Given that we’ve seen that play a million times you’d think we’d be prepared by maybe having someone spy him but we looked dumbfounded for half the game every time they ran it.

-        If you believe Miles Brown is a dirty player then you clearly aren’t watching the actual plays. In a plunge situation, Brown got low and attacked the point where 9 time out of 10 Streveler would be. He did his job. On top of that the O-lineman blocked him and took him down. So unless Brown suddenly develops the ability to defy gravity, momentum and the 300 pound man taking him to the ground, how was he supposed to end up anywhere but where he did. His arm hit above the knee. Last week’s hit on Collaros was a bad one and he was rightly flagged and fined. But this one?

-        Even Brady Olivera (noted for his strong pro-Rider bias) did not think it was a dirty play. Unfortunate? Yes. You never want to see players get hurt. But dirty? Not a chance.

-    Our games are coming down to 2-3 plays. Early in the season, we were making those plays. But over the past 2 months, when we absolutely need to a play, whether its on offense or defense, we just can't.

We mercifully get a bye week now and then Calgary in 2 weeks. This is it, this is the season. If can’t get our lives figured out over a bye week and against the only team in our division that is struggling like us then we are not winning another game this season. It’s the sad reality. It’s now or never. 

I’ll end on a bit of a lighter note, since we could use it amid this misery...

During the game as I again watched the continuing trend of Harris hitting receivers in the hands only to have them drop it, I tweeted a picture of out the famous Giselle Bundchen quote “My husband cannot throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time” and said “Trevor Harris’ wife”. The picture I tweeted had Giselle’s picture and attributed the quote to her by name. Some of you got my humour. But people (not a person but multiple people) legitimately thought it was a quote from Mrs. Harris and questioned why I would post that. It was getting to the point where I envisioned Mrs. Harris having to hold a press conference to clarify that she never said that. All because people think the stuff some idiot in a robe posts on twitter is anything more than poor attempts at humour. It almost turned into a Luca Congi’s girlfriend level incident.

Riders vs. Bombers: Banjo Bowl 2024

I’ll cut right to the chase… we’re screwed. There’s many reason’s I could point to. Where would you like to start?

Historically we suck at the Banjo Bowl. We don’t just lose, we get beat like we owe the Bombers money. We have one solitary win in the last 8 Banjo Bowls (Zach Collaros is the last Rider QB to win in Winnipeg). The average score in those games was 36-15. If you look at just the last 4 seasons, we have never held the Bombers under 30 (we allowed 50 each of the last 2 years) and only once score more than 10 points. Amazingly the most points we scored came in the year everyone got deathly ill on game day. That was our best performance.

Compound an abysmal history with the fact that we haven’t won in close to 2 calendar months.

Compound all that with having to field what might be the worst O-line I’ve seen us field in years (and the bar is pretty low there as O-line play has struggled in recent years). Our starting OL struggles with the noise in the Winnipeg. What hope do you think a line consisting of 3 guys who have no business starting will manage?

We are going to lose this one, plain and simple. I do think Mace will have this team better prepared for this game than Dickenson ever did. I do think Trevor Harris will eclipse the 6 points Dolegala put up last year. But we couldn’t beat them at home in a game where real starting O-lineman played most of the game. Take away Godber, Fry and our current best receiver in Meyers and you think the outcome of the game will change in the rematch?

Rather than my normal analysis, here’s somethings I would like to see that would at least give us a chance at keeping the score from getting to embarrassing levels.

-        Run the ball. Receivers can’t catch and we are on our 721^st o-line combination of the season. Let Hickson do his thing early and often.

-        For god sake let this be the game where Ford replaces Lokombo. I’m not even convinced Ford is anything special yet but I’m pretty sure he’s good enough to make some impact in pass defense. Any impact in the pass game would immediately place his 400 tiers above Lokombo who couldn’t break up a pass is if accidently stumbled directly into exact right spot.

-        I agree with the Brown penalty and fine. I’m glad they didn’t cave to pressure and needlessly suspend him. I find ironic that Collaros spent his time in Saskatchewan pretending to be heathy despite being medically a mess but as soon as he gets to Winnipeg he switches to pretending he's dying despite being fine. Anyway, I'm petty and want to see Micah Johnson hit him cleanly a few times for good measure.

Next week is the bye week. We will absorb this impending beatdown take a week off. Hopefully get a couple heathy bodies back and regroup for the final part of the season. By then it will be 2 months since we won so if we don’t show life in Week 16 against a struggling Calgary team, then we’re officially done.

 

Bombers by 18.

Tuesday Morning Sentimonies: Labour Day Letdown

Riders 33 – Bombers 35

Winning on Labour Day is not hard. Bad coaches have won on Labour Day. Bad QBs have won on Labour Day. Bad teams have won on Labour Day. But Corey Mace and crew managed to fail. Coach summed it up correctly in the post game presser “I thought that game sucked”. It sucked big time. The last second drama will gloss over just how not in that one we were. We were essentially chasing the whole game, when we should have been taking the play to them. Not sure what hurts more, losing on Labour Day or my head the morning after losing on Labour Day?

Everyone shares in the blame in this one. Of all people, Mario Alford screwed us (that’s a new one). Defense let a terrible offense hang 28 points on them and could not get stops when they needed them. Offense went dead for most of the 2^nd and 3^rd quarter. Receivers continue to catch the ball like they think its covered in herpes. We aren’t a good enough team to overcome all the difficulties we seem to inflict on ourselves.

I was actually pretty happy with the offense overall. We put up 3 TDs on a very stingy defense. 33 points scored should be enough to win you a game. This was done behind an O-line that you can’t even call patchwork because that would be an upgrade. Zerr, Tate and Johnson were not intended to be seeing the field this season. Though Micah did so damn good I might just go get a nameless 57 jersey as an homage. The biggest issue with our O is that the supposed “good” receivers we have who are been paid decent money are not our best. Emilus is half good, half bad and it’s a roll of the dice which one you get on any given play. Bane is below even at Emilus levels right now. Meanwhile Johnson and Meyers (who we are paying league minimum) are setting the standard on the field. After laying an egg last week, Harris did his job. His only issue was that he quit working 3 mins into the second quarter and woke back up halfway through the fourth. 

Defense did not do their job. Its becoming painfully obvious that we have a MOP calibre DB in Milligan, a guy who is more good than bad in Sayles, and the rest of our secondary is more useless than a lifeguard at an Olympic swimming event. We can’t stop the pass. I pray Jaxon Ford is healthy soon because the only time I ever notice Lokombo is when he’s late getting to a play over the middle. He adds no value back there and opposing teams are exploiting it. D-line used up their one good play on the first drive and then managed to have next to no impact for the rest of the game. Micah being pulled to O likely impacted that but still. That was about the lowest calibre O-lines we are going to get. I will give the D credit for only allowing 6 points after halftime but realistically the game was over at half. 

We suck. We have not won since July 13. When our winless streak inevitable gets extended next week in the Banjo Bowl that will 2 calendar months without a win. That some Dickenson level terribleness. If we can't even win on Labour Day then I'm gonna need Wisers to sponsor me to afford the rest of the painful season.  

Other random thoughts:

-        I get the idea of having the fans sing the anthem but they screwed up by not having someone say the first 2 words and then hold the mic up. The fans are more than willing to sing but just assuming they will all start unprompted was a bad call.