Ticats Looking To Re-Write The History Books In Calgary

As they toiled through Day 2 at practice today, the Ticats are into their regular season routine, with the starters getting most of the reps but their backups also stepping in for some snaps.

Head coach Scott Milanovich said he thought Bo Levi Mitchell and the rest of the offence were sharper today than they were Monday and that’s understandable. Many of the offensive players saw no action on the weekend in Guelph and didn’t play much in the second half of the first preseason game, so there was a lack of crispness on Monday. Tuesday, though, was different as the receivers ran generally great routes and Mitchell, a couple of days away from returning to Calgary for the first time in an opposition uniform, was throwing tight spirals to the correct shoulders of his receivers. Steven Dunbar Jr. looked especially effective.

The Ticats will head out even earlier than normal to Calgary, catching a flight tomorrow night instead of Thursday morning. That gives them a little extra time to adjust to the time change and each other. And….Calgary is a very tough place to win, so it won’t hurt to have some extra acclimatization hours.

As we mentioned in Ticats Today on Monday, when Hamilton last was in Calgary they prevailed 35-32 and that was their first win there in 18 years. A big part of that was Tim White—who looked good today—making a tremendous grab to set up the game-winning touchdown and hanging onto the ball despite a thunderous hit from Branden Dozier. He feels that getting that win two years ago is something that can be enlarged upon, even though many of the current players weren’t with the team then.

Milanovich, meanwhile, thinks it’s quite important, from a momentum standpoint to get off to a decent start, as does veteran defensive tackle Casey Sayles,  the only defensive lineman on the game roster who was here last year. It’s not the end of the world, or even close to it if they don’t win, but hey a win is a win.

Back to the general concepts of winning in Calgary and starting the season on the front foot.  Not to be too cynical, but one thing the Ticats need to change about that regular-season routine I mentioned earlier is getting off to a better start.

Friday night in Calgary is Game 1 of a very long schedule so it’s not a must-win,–especially the way this team has recently shown it can finish a schedule when it has to—but your odds of earning a sixth straight playoff berth and hosting a home playoff game for the first time in three years, increase dramatically if you’re not chasing the standings from the get-go.

Sorry, but there are some unavoidable numbers here—facts, they’re called—and we’ll bring them to light. The kind of numbers that if your bookkeeper threw them at you about your own life, you’d be looking for a new accountant.

For the sake of balance, we’ll start with some positive figures. The Ticats won their opening game of the season in the magical year of 2019—that was the 15-3 juggernaut—when they beat Saskatchewan at Tim Hortons Field. And that was only three years after they also won the first game, this time on the road, of 2016 against Toronto, then coached by, yes, Scott Milanovich.

Feeling good so far? Well, unfortunately here comes the fork in the road.

Other than those two, the Ticats have not won their season’s opener since—get something between your teeth you can bite down on to dull the pain—2003. So, in the last 20 seasons, they’re 2-18 in Game 1. Ouch. Double ouch.

And in the 21st Century, they’ve gone 1-0 just four times. The two things of beauty we just cited, plus the Danny McManus teams of 2002 and 2004.

This isn’t a new development, either. Even in some of their greatest decades, the Ticats haven’t shot out of the Game 1 blocks like Usain Bolt, although that kind of thing is what gave birth to one of those clichés in professional team sports; it’s not how you start….it’s how you finish. But a win in June gives you the same two points you can get for a win in October, and it’s always preferable to already have them in the bank.

There’s some bizarre math here that you would never suspect, the depth of which we rarely plumb. But, well, we’re in a plumbing mood today.

Since the great home Grey Cup win of 1972, when John Barrow, Garney Henley, Chuck Ealey and Big Ang put the ball into range for Ian Sunter’s famous field goal right at Hamilton’s newly renamed Ivor Wynne Stadium, the Ticats have played 50 opening day games. A half-century’s worth.  And they’ve won 14.

Because they’re always different teams—themselves and their opponents—every year, that 28 per cent isn’t really true math, but the cumulative effect is overwhelming. Football is a practice game, they work out four times for every meaningful game they play, and you are often defined for the next week–by the other team, the fans, and yourselves—by how you have performed the week before. A loss can always be motivational and instructional, but you can learn from winning too. And it makes you feel a lot better about yourself. It also makes you two points further up the standings.

It’s really more about how you do over the first third of the season. You don’t want to be 1-5 or 0-6, because then the playbook contracts and you have to do some things just to win NOW. But it’s easier to do well in the first third if you win the first one, isn’t it?

So often in recent years, the Ticats have opened on the road and so often it’s been in the west, against a strong team. Calgary has made some changes this year, they’re always well-coached and managed and they’ve really got something to prove after an early playoff exit last year.

As we mentioned this will be the first time the Ticats return to McMahon Stadium with Bo Levi Mitchell as their quarterback. Last year Hamilton, bizarrely, didn’t travel to Calgary.

The last time they were there Mitchell was in a Calgary uniform but didn’t play in the game against the Ticats, which turned into a major milestone for the Hamilton franchise. They beat the Stamps in Alberta for the first time in 18 years. 

Tim White, who made the key catch in that comeback 35-32 win in October 2022, was a 10-year-old the previous time the Ticats had won in McMahon Stadium, Richard Leonard, whose two interceptions including a pick six turned the game around, was 12, and Canadian inside receiver Kiondré Smith was only four.

All three are expected to be in the starting lineup Friday.

As often as they’ve started on the road, this is only the fifth time in Ticats history they’ve opened their year in Calgary. If you’ve been following the theme here, you won’t be surprised that they’ve lost the previous four, in 1998, 2007, 2015 (the Speedy Banks Grey Cup rematch) and in 2018.

In half of those, in 1998 and 2015, the margin of defeat was just one point. And that’s the thing with the Stampeders and Ticats the past few years. Yes, Calgary has a large advantage in the head-to-head history of these two teams, with 67 wins and just 34 losses in the 101 CFL games the two have played. But since 2014, the year Tim Hortons Field opened, Calgary and Hamilton have played each other 16 times, with the Stamps winning a dozen. But in those 16 games, 12 have been decided in the final three minutes, and 10 of those were by seven points or fewer. One score, one pick, one runback, one fumble, one something from going the other way.

So a) don’t turn the ball over and b) do create turnovers.

And even though both teams have changed significantly since then, that’s something that the Ticats can draw upon from two years ago in Calgary. They could have easily lost that must-win  October victory at McMahon after showing some of the characteristics of many of their losses from earlier that year. But they did NOT fall short. Tim White talked today about how important that was and how he’ll be mentioning it to his teammates.  That time it was them that had that something, a couple of somethings, that turned the game their way.

They broke a mould there two years ago. And, so far, they seem to have the talent to break another mould this year by setting a new tone with a win in Game 1.