‘I don’t believe in curses’: Davis Alexander expects Alouettes to win despite poor track record in Vancouver

Photo courtesy: Steven Chang/B.C. Lions

The numbers are impossible to ignore.

The Montreal Alouettes haven’t won at BC Place Stadium since August 2015. In fact, the club has only one victory at the venue over the last 25 years, a stretch that has turned every trip to Vancouver into a talking point.

Not for Davis Alexander, who doesn’t spend any time thinking about it.

“I don’t believe in curses,” the quarterback said this week. “We expect to win every game that we play, and that’s the way it is.”

Montreal heads into B.C. with a 10-2 record after defeating the Lions 37-30 at Percival Molson Stadium last week.

If the Alouettes are going to end their BC Place losing streak, Alexander will have an especially large cheering section behind him, as nearly 30 members of his family are expected to be in attendance.

Still, the 27-year-old views the matchup no differently than any other on Montreal’s schedule.

“I don’t care at all,” he added. “We will be ready to go. We believe we are going to win every single game that we play. It will feel like a normal game to us.”

Alouettes head coach Jason Maas also isn’t interested in discussing curses.

While he acknowledged Montreal’s struggles in Vancouver have lasted more than a decade, long pre-dating his tenure with the organization, he believes the explanation is far simpler than bad luck or travel conditions.

“I will give B.C. credit, because they’ve been a very good football team over these 11 years. People will speculate on the travel over there, the long weeks, the short weeks; it just comes down to them being better than us over an 11-year span.”

Instead of dwelling on the past, Maas said his focus has remained entirely on the upcoming challenge. He also pointed out that streaks are made to be broken. Before Montreal defeated the Lions last week, the Alouettes hadn’t beaten B.C. during his tenure as head coach.

“We prepared this week to go and beat them. It’s a tough place to play. It doesn’t weigh on me whatsoever,” he said. “Before we played them at home, we were 0-and-6 in three years, and we beat them. We don’t really care about the past here.”

Whether Montreal finally puts an end to its BC Place drought remains to be seen. The Lions have made life difficult for visiting teams in Vancouver for years, and the Alouettes haven’t celebrated a victory in the building since Tanner Marsh and Rakeem Cato shared quarterback duties.

But if you ask Alexander, none of that matters.

The Alouettes aren’t flying across the country to rewrite history. They’re going to Vancouver expecting the same thing they expect every week: a win.