It’s pretty amazing that we’re going to have the opportunity to host a playoff game — the West Division championship game. I mean, it’s still a few weeks away but we know what that opportunity means — it means we’re one win away from going to the Grey Cup.
Now between now and then, there’s still lots of work to do but we’ve worked hard all year and, as with any football season, we’ve had ups and downs, but we’ve put ourselves in a great position where we can host this game in a few weeks.
Like I said, any team has it ups and downs, but it’s your full body of work that gets you where you want to be. So had we not done what we did earlier on in the season, we wouldn’t have been in the situation where we needed just one win or just one Riders loss to clinch the division.
Now, for the last two weeks of the regular season, we’re looking for a little more consistent play in all three facets of the game — offence, defence, special teams. In all three phases of the game, we’ve made errors that have put us in difficult situations whether it’s trying to comeback from being down on the scoreboard or we’ve given the other team a short field.
The flip side to that is that we’ve done a lot of really good things. The last two weeks, we’ve spotted our opponent 14-to-20-point leads and we were able to make those leads up and be in positions to win those games, which we did in Saskatchewan and we came up a play or two short against BC.
We have to build on the good things we’ve done — and there are a lot — and try to eliminate the bad things. Penalties is one of the things that have been hurting, and turnovers are another. That’s the fundamentals of football.
Even though we’ve clinched the bye, we still want to win the next two games. We’re paid to play and we’re paid to compete and we’re paid to win. We want the fans in the stands Friday night against the Ticats just like we’ll want them to be there for that Western Final game. Any time we have a chance to show what we can do, we want our fans there with us.
It’s Tuesday, which means it’s the Chevy and Nasty show on the FAN960 starting at 4 p.m. Obviously, we’re going to break down the game a little bit and break down the weekend that was because there was a bit of a weird flow to the way things happened in the CFL this past week.
We’re also going to talk about how we approach these last two games of the regular season when there isn’t any impact on the standings. Hope you can join us.
Randy Chevrier, #56
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