I would have loved a victory today. But in all honestly I was not expecting a win. Montreal is hot right now. We are struggling with an amazing number of injuries. We have all our first string threats sitting on the bench. Montreal's first string players managed to beat a battered Rider team. Pretty much what I expected.
Not that I think we played particularly well. A win today would have been a miracle IMO. I am not going to bitch and complain about the Riders today. I leave that to you guys.
It's a lot easier to take a loss knowing the team played to it's full potential. Right now our full potential is probably not where some other teams with a mostly healthy roster are at. I think that's what's upsetting about this loss, everyone knows we don't have our full range of weapons on offense, but we made too many mistakes and bad decisions that should be ironed out in the preseason games like our goal line package. In our last 5 attempts from the 1 yard line we couldn't get a single yard, that's unacceptable if your backups or starters.
my main concern is why would Miller stay with Bishop when he couldn't punch the ball in for a TD? I'm of the belief that a QB gets 5 drives to see if they can be successful. If they are successful...keep them playing. If the QB is out of sync, bring in the backup. I don't think the fans would be angry with the change, because it shows that Miller doesn't suffer from the Danny Barrett philosophy of sticking with your #1 QB, come hell or high water!
We were still in this game, right up to the fourth quarter, when the Als scored to go ahead by 29.
Including the 2 weeks of perplexing QB decisions, the coaching has been very poor on the offensive side of the ball. LaPolice isn't calling plays that are leading to success for the type of offense that we are running right now, not rolling out, not running the ball at all this week, next to no play action, and not allot of underneath stuff. There is allot of owness on the receivers inability to get open.
Things right now are just very ugly on offense no other way to put it, when every single one of your offensive stars at the start of the season are riding pine with injuries.......... well things look grim and they have for a while now.
I honestly don't know what has gotten into this team over the past three weeks. I know, we have tons of injuries but we are killing ourselves out there. The first game against BC penalties killed us. We would get over half and end up backing ourselves into a whole because of holding calls and what not. Last game against BC 8 turnovers sure didn't help us much. This game Bishop was making terrible decisions. Coaching has taken a major slid over the past couple weeks. It's time to wake up. It never seems to fail with the Rider organization. Last year we could've had homefield advantage and a first round bye but let B.C creep up behind us. This year it's looking more and more like we won't even make it to a playoff game in the west let alone host a playoff game. I for one am very frustrated with this team right now, but won't get off the bandwagon. I was there in the rough years, last year when we won the Grey Cup and this year even tho we are choking hard yet again.
I tend to agree. Not taking anything away from Montreal but the 'Riders beat themselves today. The defense once again played a great game - if not for some critical turnovers and those horrid 2 and outs in the first half they would have held Montreal to a score that our offense should easily be able to match (even without all our starters).
There’s really only this game and the Edmonton loss this year where the 'Riders weren’t in a position that they could have won in the last minute or two of the game. Given the number of injuries they have sustained I don’t know that you could ask for anything more.
Here's the thing - the mistakes you're seeing - those are exactly the mistakes teams make when they are playing with new people every week, which we are, at least on offence.
As for Lapo's play calling - it looks like we aren't even sound on the basics, so adding MORE creativity will only make things worse. What can he do besides the most vanilla stuff, when even at that there are mistakes? We've got people we cut in TC that we are now expecting to lead us. Not just play a role, but lead us. I read somewhere where one of the coaches said our offence is at about training camp level in terms the amount of the system we are actually using.
As for the QB thing, I was of a similar mind as many - pulling MB against BC was weird, leaving him in against Mtl also weird, but it was either Suitor or one of the panelists who said with what we've got available, there's no point playing DD as it would just wreck him. That makes some sense.
We were extremely lucky in weeks 1-6 in terms of getting the breaks needed to win games. Evertything that had to happen did. Now, we're playing with less ability, and we're not getting those breaks, and losses are the inevitable result.
The fact that you guys managed to go 6-0 despite the ridiculous number of injuries is a testament mostly to your team and coaching, but in some part to your opponents fumbling games away. I'm not saying you didn't deserve to start hot, only that the 6-0 start was probably misleading and could have easily been 4-2. Similarly, a few more bounces here and there during your current losing skid and you could have 1-2 more wins as well.