The Saskatchewan Roughriders haven’t had a lot go their way over the last few weeks of the CFL season, but the football gods finally smiled on the Green and White on Saturday afternoon.
Trailing by three with only 1:29 remaining in a game where the offence had struggled throughout, the Riders drove the length of the field before KeeSean Johnson hauled in a 17-yard pass. That catch secured a 16-12 victory and a playoff berth for Saskatchewan for the third straight season.
As a result, Saskatchewan improves to 9-8 on the campaign. The Riders can still finish in a three-way tie at 9-9 depending on how things turn out the rest of the season, the tiebreaker works in their favour in that situation and would see the team finish fourth and in the cross-over game.
It was as dramatic a victory as the Roughriders have had this season and couldn’t have come at a better time for a beleaguered club. The Riders had lost their previous four games and had their playoff hopes on life support, but now all that is in the rearview mirror.
“We just so desperately needed to remember what that felt like to be in the locker room and celebrate,” Roughriders coach Corey Mace said on the Rider Broadcast Network postgame show. “It wasn’t pretty, but we needed that, no doubt, and it was great.”
While the Riders didn’t get a whole lot going when they had the ball until the final drive — Saskatchewan had only 179 yards total offence until their final push — their defence did as much as they could to keep things close.
After having a host of big plays go against them in the 44-24 loss in the previous meeting with Montreal, the defence had only one bad drive in the first quarter that resulted in an explosion touchdown. The rest of the game saw the Alouettes only manage a single field goal and a pair of rouges. And that turned out to be just enough to get the job done.
“I thought it was a solid defensive performance on our part,” said linebacker Jaxon Ford, who had four tackles in the game. “We're always going to have the offence's back and we're always going to be cheering for them when we're on the sidelines and they're on the field there. We didn't lose any faith in them, and we made plays when we had to.”
Mace felt there were things to clean up, but the halftime adjustments helped get things on the right track.
“I thought our tackling needed to be a lot better. Our effort early in the first half, we weren’t playing with our hair on fire, like our season was kind of on the line,” Mace said. “That was in the totality of a team. We had a good talk at halftime, and I thought things started to pick up in the second half.”
Saskatchewan’s final drive gave the offence something to hang their hat on and included an all-important 22-yard run by quarterback Trevor Harris to set up the final touchdown pass. Again, a big play when big plays had been tough to come by.
“There was a second there I thought Trevor was going to house that thing,” Mace said with a laugh before adding that he was just as impressed with Harris’ composure to keep the drive going on an earlier third-down gamble.
“We needed a big play. We were talking about the momentum of one play, and he made a big one. Then finding KeeSean there on the corner, that was exceptional.”
Seeing Harris come through like he did was of little surprise to Johnson.
“Ever since day one, he was a guy you could always lean on to help you in any aspect of the game, off the field, on the field,” Johnson said. “He's a player. He's a playmaker. He's played a long time. He knows a lot of things that's going on. That just the guy he is.”
Now, Saskatchewan’s attention begins to turn to the big games ahead. After a meaningless contest against the Edmonton Elks next weekend, the defence of their Grey Cup begins in earnest.
“We punched our ticket into the second season, but what we understand more is that we still are not at the standard we want to get to,” Mace said. “We're not ignorant to that, but we're not afraid of continuing to push the button to push ourselves at work. Getting out of this four-game slide and officially getting ourselves into the second season, I think that'll take a lot off of our shoulders and allow us just to work.”
