With 3:15 left to play it was like there was a tornado warning in town or something.
The way the fans all got up at the same time and with some haste, paraded to the parking lot.
But there was no tornado. There was a man-made disaster, one of the most colossal collapses in Edmonton Eskimos history.
For most of the game the fans thought the team they’d figured would show up for the first game of the season a week earlier had made its appearance.
For the longest time it looked like fun football had returned to Commonwealth Stadium and that it was going to be big play after big play after big play all day.
Not so fast, suckers.
After watching their entertaining Eskimos explode, they suddenly were sitting stunned seeing their still imperfect Inuit implode.
Plenty of points
If Kelly Campbell and Fred Stamps had not dropped touchdown passes in the third quarter, it would have been 30-11 at that point. And that was with plenty of points left on the table.
Instead, it turned around and ended up 33-23 for the Montreal Alouettes.
And allow me to now introduce the inglorious team which Sunday became the first Eskimos outfit to lose their first two games at home since 1969 — the last year of Neil Armstrong’s run as coach of the sad-sack team of the ’60s.
Stamps sat in the dressing room and wore it on behalf of the team. He said his 63 yard wide-open, all-alone, hit-him-in- the-hands touchdown pass that he miraculously managed to drop late in the third quarter was the play that turned the day.
“On a play like that, you gotta catch it,” said Stamps. “I can’t speak for Kelly, but I let the team down. It was the perfect pass. I took my eyes off it to get ready to run to the endzone. I didn’t realize I had dropped it until it hit the ground. I let the team down.
“Today we were playing the Grey Cup champions and I felt like we were the better team. But they just finished and we just didn’t. I take a lot of that on me.”
Stamps made big play catches of 43 and 42 yards and drew three more big yardage pass interference calls in a six reception day for 119-yards.
Campbell, too, was willing to wear it. He said he should have caught the pass he dropped in the endzone a few moments earlier. He caught passes for 40, 34 and 30 yards in going nine for 170-yards.
Previous week
The previous week, in an empty effort against the B.C. Lions, the Eskimos didn’t have a pass play longer than 21 yards and a total of 229 yards passing as Ray was sacked five times while the defence managed only one sack and zero interceptions while committing five turnovers.
This day, Ray had more yards passing than that at halftime. But he only had 101 yards in the second half as all the wheels fell off as stuff started to happen and, just before the fans left the stand, threw two interceptions, one of which went directly to the endzone.
“It was a total different feeling that last week,” said Ray.
“This time we came out pretty much firing on all cylinders. It’s tough. We did so much more good in this game but the bad outweighed everything.
“It’s a game of momentum and we had the momentum. Then it just all came undone.”
Coach Richie Hall said it’s tough to explain how it happened.
“It was like all of a sudden Murphy’s Law kicked in. Whatever could go wrong went wrong. We allowed some things to happen. We let them off the hook. For most of the game we played hard and inspired. For a long time we executed well and then at the wrong time we shot ourselves in the foot.
“We didn’t score in the red zone,” he said of rookie Derek Schiavone ending up with five field goals.
“It’s not so much we’re 0-2,” said Hall. “Last week we were an uninspired football team. This week we were an inspired team that shot itself in the foot.”
Next week they are in Saskatchewan against the 2-0 Roughriders and the week after they are in Winnipeg against a Blue Bombers team with one more win than they have and the following week they’re back here against a B.C. Lions outfit which has won their last four games in Commonwealth Stadium.
It’s probably not too early to panic.
terry.jones@sunmedia.ca
