The good, the bad, and the dumb of the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ 19-6 Banjo Bowl loss to Winnipeg

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Death, taxes, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders struggling through the Banjo Bowl.

Though the Riders are marginally more successful in Winnipeg than the Bombers are in Regina in the first two weekends of September, this year’s results in the annual back-to-back should shock absolutely no one. Even when the Riders do manage to win the Banjo Bowl, it’s rarely pretty.

This one was not only ugly — especially for the Green and White — but the Riders never really gave themselves a chance to pick up the win. Even though the score was never technically out of reach, it didn’t feel like the Riders were going to be able to muster up enough to pull it off.

Here’s the good, the bad, and the dumb of the Riders’ fifth loss of the season.

The Good

It was another solid week for the Riders’ defence. More often than not, if you hold your opponent to fewer than 20 points, you’re going to win a football game. Unfortunately for Josh Bell’s unit, they didn’t get much help from their offence (we’ll get to that in a little bit).

The Bombers only managed to put together 291 yards of net offence. Before leaving the game due to injury, Zach Collaros had just 175 yards on 19 pass attempts. Brady Olivera did have a solid game, rushing for 100 yards on 14 carries, but he had to earn many of those yards, and he didn’t take over the game as we know he can.

It was another solid outing from the defensive front, as they managed to take down Collaros and Dru Brown a total of five times and came close on a few more. After a quiet first two-thirds of the season, the defence also added two more interceptions to their total, with the latest coming from Aubrey Miller Jr. and Seyi Oladipo Jr.

That’s two weeks in a row the defence has looked like the group we saw last season. That’s a good sign if you’re a Rider fan.

The Bad

As good as the defence was for the Riders, the offence was pretty much the exact opposite.

It hasn’t exactly been an explosive run for Marc Mueller’s crew, and I certainly wasn’t expecting this team to start lighting up the scoreboard in a game where they rarely put up a bunch of points. However, they managed to fall short of even those low expectations.

There isn’t really one thing you could point to as the issue either; it was an all-around effort that kept the Riders out of the end zone for the entirety of the game.

Of course, the Bombers defence deserves a lot of credit for the work they did on Saturday afternoon, but the Riders did themselves no favours either.

There are probably several throws that Trevor Harris would like to have back, and it was far from one of his best games, but he also didn’t get much help from his receiver, who struggled to find much space all afternoon. More often than not, Harris was throwing into tight windows or at pass catchers who had defenders draped all over them.

Harris finished the game with just 231 passing yards on 45 attempts.

When they did make some plays, the Riders had drives end in fumbles from D’Sean Mimbs and KeeSean Johnson. In all, Saskatchewan turned the ball over five times, one of them being a turnover on downs in the final minute of the game. That summed up their performance as Johnson couldn’t hang on to a ball that would have given his team a first down after it was tipped in front of him. It wasn’t a blatant drop, but he couldn’t help out his pivot, who had to make a tough throw to even try and make the play.

The lone bright spot was probably running back Quali Conley, who had a strong start to the game before quickly being forgotten about.

The Dumb

We saw something we don’t see all that often in this game from Trevor Harris.

In the final few seconds of the first quarter, Harris had a pass knocked down by Willie Jefferson. It would bounce off some other players before Harris eventually caught it and took off — well, kind of. Harris had to settle for a loss of one yard on the play.

Harris targeted himself once in the game for one reception for a total of negative-one yard. I don’t know what Harris’ career receiving numbers are, but that surely won’t help.

This probably won’t help my dream of seeing Tommy Stevens throw it to Harris when they are both on the field.