Off to Toronto, Tiger-Cats are carrying what they learned in Winnipeg

In the moment there will be nothing else but blue, two shades of it, in front of the Tiger-Cats. This game, this series, this play. Nothing else exists. No long-term future, no short-term past.

But heading into Saturday afternoon’s divisional showdown at BMO Field with the arch-rival Toronto Argonauts, to a man the Ticats have said all week that they had to face up to and extract lessons from an all-round sub-par performance in a 40-3 defeat last Saturday in Winnipeg. All the while with their focus straight ahead on the Big Smoke.

The Ticats are still in first place, but only two points up on the Montréal Alouettes with three games remaining. Their future is firmly in their own grasp. If they stay ahead of the Als, they finish first and get a bye directly into the East Final, and they can do that by winning their last two games, no matter what Montréal (idle this week) does in their final three games.

But the Argos are a bit like the Bombers were last week, but even more cornered. It’s a must-win. If they lose, their flicker of a hope for a playoff berth is formally extinguished, just a year after they won the Grey Cup.

So the Ticats have to be ready for a desperate team which will try to keep what’s expected to be a large crowd, for BMO Field, in the game from the outset. The Ticats started poorly on the prairies last week and it continued from the opening kickoff return for a Bomber TD to the final whistle, with only a few glimmers of the team they’d been in their three-game winning streak up to that point and the roiling six-game heater that stretched from late June to early August.

The Ticats are 9-6 and guaranteed of a home game in the playoffs while the Argos are 5-10, but form charts go out the window not only when the two freeway rivals meet but also at this time of year when wins are the hardest to close out, even for division leaders.

So the Ticats not only have to play better for 60 full minutes but also start out on the front foot, not the back one. Cover kicks with more authority, get to Argo quarterback Nick Arbuckle, and score more first-quarter points. The usual demands, in other words. Then the big plays which have been their forte on so many occasions, even during some losses, can become really big—as in game-deciding—plays.

“Obviously the effort has to be better,” Bo Levi Mitchell said Thursday. “I think any time you’re playing a rival there’s always a little extra added juice. That’s just naturally going to come, playing in their place or ours. But after last week I think it doesn’t really matter who you play. You’re not going out there to play the other team, you’re going out there to play yourself, prove you can come out there with the intensity you need in order to win the game.

“For us, it’s just about going out there and getting a win.”

The Ticats ran up a 51-38 victory at BMO Field in early July to drop the Argos to 1-5, but Toronto responded with a 35-33 victory on Lirim Hajrullahu’s last-second field goal in a riveting Labour Day Classic defeat, Hamilton’s third loss. The Ticats then ripped off three wins in a row before last weekend’s three-phase sag in Manitoba.

“(Toronto) has been playing well in the secondary,” Ticat head coach and offensive coordinator Scott Milanovich said. “They rush the passer. It’s the same things that we say against them all the time. Every time we play those guys it’s a dogfight.

“It’s going to come down to the last three minutes of the game. Obviously, their backs are against the wall. We know that, just like we knew Winnipeg’s backs were against the wall last week. So we know we’re going to get a playoff effort from them. And we’ve got to raise our level of execution and intensity.”

As Milanovich indicated it’s far more likely to be a close game, like Labour Day, than a blowout as it was in July when Kenny Lawler scored three touchdowns and Mitchell threw five strikes for majors for the second time in his career. The Argos’ last four games have been decided by five or fewer points and Hajrullahu is coming off a game when he made three field goals of 50 yards or longer to tie Justin Medlock’s record set 16 years ago.

The Argos are just as aggressive as the Ticats in the defensive backfield and have 10 more sacks, led by Andrew Chatfield, fellow defensive lineman Derek Parish and linebacker Aaron Casey who have 17 quarterback takedowns among them. With Cameron Judge and Wynton McManis, they field one of the best linebacking duos in the entire league.

But while the Argos are ranked third in the league against the pass and the Ticats have been among the aerial leaders most of the season despite a more conservative, take-what-they-give you approach lately, Toronto has surrendered more big plays than anyone else in the league. So it’s possible this one will see a lot of points. The two teams have combined for 157 points in just two head-to-heads this year. Might drive coaches crazy, but it’s entertaining.

Both teams will try to nullify the run first. Even though the Argos trail the league in rushing, and running back Spencer Brown doesn’t usually get more than eight carries in a game, he catches the ball well out of the backfield and Arbuckle can engage his own legs to buy time and angles for his arm, and can roll to open up space for his receivers or take off for good yardage.

So neutering the rush partially involves squaring him off and forcing him inside and getting to him much more quickly, notching more sacks and especially more hurries, compelling him to throw before he can make all his checkdowns and allowing the Ticat secondary to cover closely and aggressively.

“We’ve gotta keep him contained,” agrees Ticat defensive end Philip Ossai. “And we have to collapse the pocket. That’s our job. Make his life a living hell. He’s going to try to get his checkdowns and do all those things he’s comfortable doing. We just have to make him uncomfortable doing that. Give our secondary help.”

The Ticats’ Greg Bell, meanwhile,  has had a remarkable 70 carries for 474 yards over the past four games after having 70 carries over the seven games before that.

The Ticats went from averaging 72 rushing yards a game through the first 11 games to a very impressive 155 over the past four, as Milanovich continues to commit to more balance in the attack.

“I think it’s the constant improvement that’s so impressive,” Mitchell says of Bell. “There were some slips early in the year on screens and things like that, things where you get frustrated;  you’re finally the main back, you’re not competing for it. I think he wanted to prove himself early on but I feel like our offence has really evolved as he’s evolved. It’s taken 17 weeks where he’s almost at 1,000 yards and it took me 13 years. (Mitchell hit 1000 yards rushing for his career a month ago in Montréal). So  it’s pretty impressive for him to do that.”

Milanovich adds, “The last five or six weeks you can see him kind of catching his groove, and he’s playing well both in the run game and the pass game.

“Going into the playoffs, the running game is of paramount importance.”

That may have kept the passing game to lower recent totals but the Cats are still likely to have three receivers go over 1000 yards with Kiondré Smith and Tim White nibbling at the edges and Kenny Lawler already there. Lawler’s coming off what he described as an awful game but no one expects that to continue, especially against Toronto. He leads the league in receiving touchdowns and in the two games against Toronto, Lawler has 15 catches—many of them spectacular—330 yards and five touchdowns.  So he’s definitely going to draw defensive attention.

As will Toronto receiver Jake Herzel who’s been absolutely on fire the past seven games. He has good wheels and a nose for the gaps in a defence. He scored a touchdown in six straight games, with nine total majors in that half dozen games, including a pair against the Ticats on Labour Day. And even when that touchdown streak was broken last week he caught a career-high 10 passes for over 100 yards. Despite proven stars  DaVaris Daniels and Damonte Coxie being on the injured list,  the Argos’ receiving corps still has dangerous Makai Polk, speedster Kevin Mital and Dejon Brissett, whose daring last-minute catch and run set up the winning field goal on Labour Day.

With his experienced eye and strong release Arbuckle intelligently distributes the ball among them. The Ticats have to blur that vision with constant 60-minute pressure and sound execution of their game-plan assignments.

The Ticats will dress eight defensive linemen this week, one more than they used in Winnipeg. Jose Ramirez, signed barely a week ago after a year on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers overall roster, joins the defensive complement of Ossai, team sacks leader Julian Howsare and Owen Hubert.

Shutdown cornerback Jamal Peters, who missed last week’s game, returns to face his former team and with left offensive tackle Brendan Bordner on the one-game injured list, veteran Jordan Murray gets his first start in two months.

The Argos have a long injury list which now includes former Ticat offensive lineman Darius Ciraco, the Burlington Assumption graduate native. Six Nations’ Sage Doxtator moves in to start at left guard. He’ll be flanked by left tackle Hampton Ergle who gets his first action since June.

“They’re going to give it their all,” Ossai says of the Argos, who will come out energetically fanning the diminishing flames of their playoff hopes. “Every time we play them, we like to call it hate week. There’s something in the air. You know they’re going to come with their all every time  and we have to match it. They’re going to be scrappy and they’re going to want to win. But we’ve got to want it more.”

And, in contrast to a week earlier, arrive ready to play from the opening kickoff.

CATS CLAUSES: K Marc Liegghio was the only Ticat to make last weekend’s CFL Honour Roll, although DE Julian Howsare got an honourable mention …WR  Kiondré Smith is the Ticats’ nominee for the Jake Gaudaur Veterans’ Award which recognizes strength, perseverance, courage, comradeship and community contribution. Smith needs 67 yards to reach 1000 receiving yards and 28 yards to surpass his career high … Bo Levi Mitchell needs 429 yards to leapfrog Matt Dunigan into eighth place on the CFL career-passing list … The Ticats released LB Ray Wilborn and DL  Maalik Hall this week… in the 11 games of his CFL career Argos WR Jake Herslow has 10 touchdowns and 47 catches … Nick Arbuckle is a career 2–4 against the Ticats. He had rung up 300 or more yards passing in six straight games before having 261 and 281 in his last two starts. He’s thrown at least one TD pass in every game. He stands second in TD passes and yardage with Mitchell leading both categories … Argo WR Kevin Mital’s 84 receptions lead the league … Hamilton’s Jamal Peters and Toronto’s Tarvarus McFadden are tied for second in CFL interceptions with five, one off the lead … in the last five games the Argos have scored 61 points in the fourth quarter but only 24 in the first. In that same span the Ticats have 39 first-quarter points and 38 in the fourth but overall have outscored opponents by 47 points in the fourth quarter. Last week (14 points) was the first time in eight games the Ticats have given up more than 7 points in the opening quarter   … Argos’ WR/returner Janarian Grant has 1483 combined yards, 93 of those on a July field goal return for a touchdown against the Ticats … punter John Haggerty is one of three CFLers averaging over 50 yards. Ticats P Nic Constantinou is second in the CFL with 9 punts inside the opponent’s 10-yard line … Toronto is second in scoring per game, at 29.1, with the Ticats third at 28.2 points per game. The Argos trail the league, surrendering 31 points a game, three more than the Ticats … in an unusual statistic, the Ticats’ Scott Milanovich has challenged the fewest officials’ calls of any coach in the league with just four, and hasn’t yet won one. While the Argos Ryan Dinwiddie is just 1-for-7 … across the CFL completion percentage (69.7 per cent) and red zone success rate (61.5 per cent) are the highest in the 19 years the league has tracked those stats … home teams have won eight of the last nine CFL games.