The game should have been played on Halloween.
It was very scary.
The Saskatchewan Roughriders came dressed up as a competitive football team and the Edmonton Eskimos like ghosts of themselves.
In the end, the Eskimos won their seventh straight game. It ended up 35-24.
For the first time in 24 years to stretch their record to 13-4 and leave the Roughriders at 2-14 as Edmonton moved with one win (or a Calgary Stampeders loss) of clinching first place and a Western Conference final in Commonwealth Stadium for the first time since 2003. It was the first time in 12 years the Eskimos had put together a 13-win season.
But whoa was that a shock to their system for starters.
It was ‘Game On’ early as quarterback Mike Reilly, who had thrown an interception in each of the previous five games, didn’t waste any time extending that streak.
Reilly was intercepted on his third pass of the game. Riders’ Junior Mertile returned it to the Edmonton 42. A 40-yard pass from Brett Smith to Naaman Roosevelt set the Riders up on the two from where Rob Bagg scored on the next play on a sweep and it was 7-0 before the first Pilsner had been drained.
On Saskatchewan’s second possession and the fifth offensive play of the game, Ryan Smith hauled in a 65-yard touchdown pass and it was 14-3 eight and a half minutes into the game.
Reilly appeared to get the Eskimos out of jail with a big play pass to Adarius Bowman. He dropped it.
A pair of penalties and Edmonton was punting from the endzone. Chris Jones decided not to give up the safety touch. And what happened next defined the day.
Saskatchewan sent in former U Washington Huskies quarterback Keith Price for his first down of professional football.
He threw a 29-yard touchdown pass to Roosevelt.
Saskatchewan 21, Edmonton 3.
In 34 games with Jones as head coach the Eskimos had held opponents to under 20 points in 18 of them. And they’d given up 21 in the first 15 minutes and 23 seconds of this one against a team that has won two games all season.
The Eskimos returned to being a top team and the Roughriders returned to being the worst club in the league for the duration, however.
Bowman started catching, not dropping, passes. Reilly started finding receivers Derel Walker while everybody around him stopped taking penalties and the Eskimos managed to take a 24-21 lead to the dressing room at the half.
When ex-Rider Cory Watson caught a pass for a touchdown and Reilly ran in a two point convert, the Eskimos had a 35-21 lead and had scored 32 consecutive points.
There were thousands of empty seats in Old Mosaic Stadium (New Mosaic is being build 300 yards away and received rave reviews after a media tour here Saturday afternoon). Due to their high season ticket count, the attendance was announced as 30,448 but the no-show factor was about 40%.
That resulted in a total attendance of 280,606 for Saskatchewan despite their sorry season. The Eskimos need a crowd of 27,963 to end up leading the league in attendance.
Source: www.edmontonsun.com