The good, the bad, and the dumb of the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ 16-9 regular-season finale win over Edmonton

Photo: Tanner Piper/3DownNation. All rights reserved.

The Riders’ path to repeat as Grey Cup champions is now set. With their 16-9 win over the Edmonton Elks on Saturday afternoon, Saskatchewan will head to Vancouver to take on the B.C. Lions in the West Semi-Final.

Corey Mace and his squad will be hoping for another matchup with the Green and Gold in a couple of weeks.  

As for the game itself, it was an afternoon where both teams were just trying to get through it unscathed and take a look at some players a little further down the depth chart. 

Here’s the good, the bad, and the dumb of the Riders’ 10th win of the season.

The Good

The best thing the Saskatchewan Roughriders did this week was a decision made early, announcing that Trevor Harris wouldn’t be playing at all. They went as far as not even dressing Harris as the third-string quarterback, as we’ve seen some teams do when resting their starting pivot. 

It’s been a difficult end of the year for Harris, who hasn’t looked like himself down the stretch, especially last week against the Montreal Alouettes. The 40-year-old still offers the team their best chance to win in the playoffs, and giving him a complete week to rest might be their best hope at seeing the offence rebound in the postseason. 

Resting Harris also gave the coaching staff a chance to check out both Jack Coan and Brayden Schager, who saw time in the fourth quarter. 

Coan had a bit of a slow start but eventually found his legs and looked like a serviceable backup, finishing the game 15-of-26 for 178 yards and one interception. Was there the spark you’d hope to see from a possible heir apparent? Not really, but the offence got to the red zone twice with him under centre and was red zone adjacent a couple other times. That’s more than you could say for the last few weeks.

Schager didn’t exactly inspire confidence either, especially when he threw short to Daniel Wiebe, who was wide open in the end zone. We can perhaps give him a bit of a pass, though, as he came into the game cold and it’s still a relatively small sample size. 

On another quarterback note, Tommy Stevens set a new team record for rushing touchdowns in a season, surpassing the great George Reed with 17. He also topped Caleb Evans for rushing touchdowns in a season by a CFL quarterback. 

The Bad

The only thing this game had to decide was which team would be heading to Toronto and who would be heading to B.C., so a number of starters were rested on both sides. The hope was that it would at least still be an entertaining game that moved at a decent pace. It was not.

While the game was slightly more entertaining than what we saw last week, it was still hardly a work of art. 

The biggest problem was the pace of play, as both teams struggled mightily with discipline, combining for 25 accepted penalties for 261 yards — the most in the CFL this season. The Riders committed 11 of those penalties for 115 yards. While some may complain about the officials for throwing the flags too often, and there is probably some validity to that, it’s up to the players to be more disciplined and not put themselves in the position to get flagged. 

At its core, professional sports is an entertainment product. This game won’t receive much in the way of critical praise, and it’s possible we see a lot more games like this next season when only one team doesn’t make the playoffs. 

Can’t wait. 

The Dumb

Speaking of penalties, the Elks essentially single-handedly led the Riders to the end zone for their first major of the game. 

Late in the second quarter, the Riders forced Edmonton to turn the ball over on downs at their own 43-yard line. After that, they went on a five-play drive that only netted them five yards and a touchdown. 

The Riders got to the Elks’ one-yard line with just one five-yard run from Deon Jackson. The rest of the drive featured a 42-yard pass interference penalty, two offsides, and an unnecessary roughness call that set up a one-yard touchdown from Stevens. 

Just how you draw it up.