By Stampeders.com staff

With Marquay McDaniel seeing his first live game action in eight weeks, John Hufnagel kept his expectations for the veteran slotback modest as Calgary met the BC Lions in the regular-season finale Friday night in Vancouver.

“I was hoping he would have a game to build on,” said the Stampeders head coach and general manager, “but that’s a tough one to build on.”

McDaniel, you see, wasn’t content with merely laying a foundation. Back in the lineup after missing six games with a broken hand, he built an opulent mansion with heated floors, an indoor pool and a four-car garage.

The 30-year-old Hampton University product established career highs with 12 catches for 165 yards as he played a large role in the Stamps’ 33-16 victory over the Lions.

“It was crazy,” said McDaniel in the visitors’ locker room at BC Place after the contest. “I felt real good out there. I thought the game was going to be a little faster than what it actually was and it slowed down. After I got that first catch and that first hit, I felt normal out there.”

The return of the Stamps’ most reliable receiver was one of the most crucial subplots as the Red and White put the finishing touches on a 15-3 regular season. A year ago, also at BC Place and also with a chance to finish 15-3, the Stamps suffered an ugly 26-7 loss and lost three veterans including McDaniel to season-ending injuries.

That made for a very grim post-game scene in the locker-room 12 months ago but this past Friday, spirits were much higher.

“It’s good,” nodded McDaniel. “It’s ending the season on a high note and that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to play better and I think we did that, but we still didn’t play the game we wanted to play, so that’s what we’ll work for.”

Despite missing six full games and virtually all of the Sept. 13 contest against Toronto because of the hand injury, McDaniel finishes the regular season as the Stamps’ leading receiver with 54 catches for 792 yards. Pro-rate those numbers over a full season and he would have surpassed the career highs of 76 and 1,047 from a 2013 campaign that saw him earn CFL all-star honours for the first time in his career.

Both Drew Tate and Bo Levi Mitchell saw action at quarterback for Calgary in the regular-season finale and both made a point of getting the ball to No. 16. McDaniel, in turn, was very complimentary of the QBs as each of them surpassed the 200-yard mark on the evening.

“We’ve got confidence in both of them,” said McDaniel. “They did a good job making reads. Our job is that if they want to play man-to-man, you’ve got to beat your man and we did a good job at it across the board.”

With McDaniel’s return and the late-season emergence of rookie Eric Rogers, who had his first two career touchdowns in Friday’s contest against the Lions, the Stamps appear to have a solid group of receivers heading into the Nov. 23 Western Final.

Injuries to McDaniel, Maurice Price, Joe West, Nik Lewis, Simon Charbonneau-Campeau, Jeff Fuller and Brad Sinopoli forced the Calgary coaches to mix and match their receiving corps all season long. As a result, 19 different players caught passes for the Stamps this season — including a dozen with at least 10 catches — and 13 different players had receiving touchdowns.