Football digest, Week 2: Nixon goes down as Huskies' romp

CANADA WEST


Helping out with the Streaming Sports Network (ssncanada.ca) broadcast of the Can-Am Shootout here in Ottawa (well, Kanata) precluded following Alberta's 25-13 win over Simon Fraser and Manitoba's 25-12 victory over Regina.

The Golden Bears showed they can run -- Tendayi Jozzi carried 24 times for 141 yards and Alberta had a nice balance in its win over SFU, whose losing streak now stands at ... one.

The wind was gusting at about 50-60 km/h, so that played hell with the passing game in the Bisons' 13-point win over Regina. Forget special teams player of the week -- maybe Manitoba kicker Scott Dixon should get offensive player of the week after going 6-for-6 on field goals in windy conditions.

Regina is without its two best deep threats, Jordan Sisco and Kolten Solomon, the latter of whom has a little ineligibility imbroglio going happen (so sayeth the dot-orgers, God love 'em). The Rams meet Saskatchewan next week. For all his virtues, Teale Orban does need some receivers.

Speaking of which, a shoulder injury to Laurence Nixon was the big takeaway from Saskatchewan's 25-0 romp over Calgary on Friday night.

Nixon (18-of-24, 220 yards, 2 TDs against one interception) was spot-on during what seemed to otherwise be the typical flag-filled, defence-dominated first game. It's his non-throwing shoulder and the scuttlebutt among the dot-orgers is that it's not a season-ender. The View From The Stands (a good primer if anyone out there is thinking of starting a school-specific blog; there really ought to be more) seems pretty confident that Trevor Barss, who finished the game for Saskatchewan, has a grasp of the offence.

The Huskies' D did a job on Calgary -- apparently it was rookie David Rybinski who knocked Dinos QB Jordan Flagel out of the game, and the Dinos' couldn't run-block their way out of a wet paper bag. (One sidebar to the game: Aaron Ifield, the Calgary kicker and a Saskatoon native, didn't get to do any placekicking last night. There's some schadenfreude for ya.

(What are the odds that the winning team in each Can West game this week would score 25 points? Un-fluffin'-believable.)

ONTARIO

All's quiet until Monday, but Windsor has named rookie Sam Malian its starting QB for their opener vs. York. It's way too late at night to fake a knowledge of Malian. What happened to Billy McConkey?

One rule that would be put into place if I got to run the Canadian media for a day: No one would be allowed to write an article, column or blog post about U of T's football losing streak unless (a) wrote about two teams doing well or (b) proved they could name the last 10 Vanier Cup champions in reverse order. It's tiresome to have the media choose to use the worst team in the country to define the league for them.

One National Post blog hasn't seldom seen fit to comment on university sports since the start of the year, but oh, they write posts about U of T and Simon Fraser instead of the other 25 schools. Objections have been filed with the writers in questions, for what it's worth.
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6 comments:

  1. And you're shocked at the Toronto media why? I called this shot last week, too. There are three stories the Toronto media will write each year when it comes to CIS football:
    1) Toronto starts the year as the worst team ever
    2) Toronto plays York this weekend
    3) York beat Toronto on the weekend; Toronto still bad

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  2. You forgot one Greg:
    4)York is still bad too.

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  3. Ryerson should get a football team: then the Toronto media would have three bad teams to follow.

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  4. I'm not shocked at all. I'm just sick and tired of it, especially because it pushes talented people who devote a lot of energy to CIS coverage, like all 3 of you, out to the margins.

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  5. Today's Toronto Star has Greg's #1 topic covered. It's on A2 -- not the sports section, the front section. There are bon mots from at least two U of T profs, using the letters after their names to tell us that losing sucks.

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  6. What was the one line from that psych prof about how winning is not as important as "camaraderie."

    Let's see what the turnout is for the reunion of the 2005 Laurier team and the 2005 U of T team.

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