The sure sign of a football team in despair is that no two defeats ever look the same.
The Argos lost a game last night they should have won -- and they did it without turning the ball over on offence.
They lost while scoring 28 points at home; lost while doing the impossible: Giving up 10 points in the final 29 seconds of the game.
That's what happens to terrible football teams. They find ways to lose. Last week, the Argos got shut out. The week before, they lost on a last second missed field goal after a penalty for delay of game.
They find ways to lose when they deserve better, when their new starting quarterback passes for more than 300 yards, looks composed and hardly makes a mistake.
They find ways to lose when their import place-kicker is 7-for-7 on field goals, making it look easy.
At various times last night against the B.C. Lions, the Argos looked like they had the better offence, the better defence, the better kicker, the better special teams and weird as this might seem, looked like Bart Andrus was outcoaching Wally Buono, who is a couple of weeks away from becoming the all-time winning coach in Canadian Football League history.
PAINFUL
It was that weird, that wild, that unimaginably painful for the Argos. You can fathom a 25-0 loss in Montreal. You can almost live with that, knowing you got your butt kicked. But how do you come to grips with this?
How do you come to grips with a secondary losing its composure in the second half, giving all kinds of leeway to the horribly erratic quarterback Jarious Jackson, taking pass-interference after pass-interference penalties in between leaving Geroy Simon and Paris Jackson and friends wide open?
This one was impossible to explain and just where Andrus will start is anyone's guess.
At least, now, he knows he has a quarterback; he didn't know that yesterday.
Cody Pickett, the son of a rodeo cowboy, stayed on the bronc all night long, passing for more than 300 yards, doing everything but producing touchdowns.
Quarterbacks who don't turn the ball over are supposed to win football games. Hell, Trent Dilfer won a Super Bowl with a pretty good defence and so did Jeff Hostetler.
You can win when a quarterback doesn't defeat your offence.
And the Argos did every-thing but win against the Lions last night.
LEARNING CURVE
That's the part that has to hurt and that's the part that showed -- late in the game and maybe early in the game, some of what Andrus has to learn in the CFL.
Early on, with the Argos in the lead, Andrus did not instruct his punt returner to give up a single point on what was an obvious single situation. Instead, the Argos ran the ball out, didn't get any field position, and within minutes the Lions had their first touchdown of the game.
Plain and simple, that's just dumb coaching.
In the final quarter, with the Lions gaining momentum and Toronto growing more and more confused on defence, the Argos seemed to have no answer for the Lions. This, after dominating the first half of the game.
This reminds one of the old Joe Gibbs years with the Washington Redskins. It didn't always matter what happened with the Redskins in the first half. You knew in the second half they were going to come back.
Same thing last night: The Buono-coached Lions came back in the fourth quarter. Took the game away. Stole it really, when they didn't bloody deserve it.
They know that today, at a lucky 3-4. They know they stole one. The Argos will watch film and try and figure how it is they are 2-5.
One week it's offence. One week it's defence. One week it's special teams. This is how losing football teams lose. There never is an easy answer.
STEVE.SIMMONS@SUNMEDIA.CA
