VANCOUVER – People always knew Ricky Ray had a pair of solid legs, but some CFL fans might have suspected they came with two left feet.
The quarterback from Happy Camp. Calif., could never be confused with Tracy Ham or Matt Dunigan or Warren Moon, other Edmonton Eskimos’ QBs known for their agility and running ability.
Ray had averaged just eight yards rushing per game in 14 previous starts this season before he and the Esks fooled everybody – but mainly the B.C. Lions – to win 31-28 in overtime Saturday night at Empire Field.
Although the result leaves both the Lions and Eskimos tied for third place in the West Division with 5-10 records, the win gives the Eskimos a 2-1 tiebreaker advantage in the season series, should the teams finish with identical records at the end of the regular season.
And the Lions will be hardpressed to go 3-0 over their remaining schedule, with games against Calgary, on the road, Saskatchewan and an away game against Hamilton on the docket.
In the first quarter — in what, at first, appeared to be an optical illusion – Ray went around the right end of the Lions defensive line and sprinted for 45 yards to set up a nine-yard touchdown throw to Fred Stamps. And, damn, if that didn’t inspire him into more feats of daring with his feet.
Ray also had runs of 14, nine and seven yards on a 10-play drive that was finished off by Mathieu Bertrand on a one-yard touchdown plunge to put the Eskimos ahead 20-15 in the third quarter after the Lions had taken a 15-13 lead at the half.
He finished the game with 135 yards rushing, five more than Ray had accumulated in his previous 14 games.
“People told me they’d never seen me run for 100 yards before,” Ray said. “Truth is, I never have either. I’ve never been involved in a game like that before. We just kept running that play and they [Lions] weren’t containing very well. It was there, so we just kept taking it. We didn’t go into the game with the idea of doing it. It just sort of presented itself.”
The Lions had little reason to respect the Eskimos’ ability to run the football, however. The Esks averaged just 96.4 yards rushing in their earlier games. Indeed, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats held them to just 35 rushing yards in total in a 36-11 Hamilton win just a week ago.
But 12 times against the Lions the Eskimos ran for plays of 10 yards or more and rushed the ball 22 times on 38 occasions in which they lined up on first down. Completely fooled? The Lions certainly looked it.
The Eskimos finished with a net total of 346 yards rushing, 171 of them coming from running back Daniel Porter who had just 56 yards on 11 carries coming into the game. Porter took advantage of the fact that the Lions became so spooked by Ray that they seemed to forget about him.
“We had a couple of blown assignments, a couple of missed assignments,” said Lions defensive tackle Jonathan Brown. “I’ve been in this league eight years, and I’ve never seen Ricky Ray run for 30 yards, 20 yards. It’s kind of funny that he ran for 135 on us. Come on, now. You’re not going into a game and having your top-dollar quarterback intentionally run for that many. He was just being a football player. He saw that we had nobody covering him. He just took off and ran.”
The Lions’ apparent state of confusion was evident even before kickoff when Paul McCallum
dressed as the team’s kicker but never saw the field.
A clerical error — somebody forgot to include McCallum’s name on the declared 42-man game roster – made him ineligible to play. Receiver Paris Jackson was pressed into emergency service as the team’s punter on the Lions’ first two-and-out in the first quarter – Jackson pulled off a decent 34-yard effort – and backup kicker Sean Whyte hurriedly left for the locker room to get dressed. Whyte was in civvies and was not supposed to play. Good thing he decided to show up.
Whyte had two field goals, including a clutch 48-yard effort on the final play of regulation time to tie it at 25-25 and send the game into overtime. The Lions trailed 25-15 when quarterback Travis Lulay took the team on a 12-play, 75-yard drive to bring B.C. within three before Jamal Robertson scored on a one-yard run with 1:31 left.
In OT, Whyte booted a 17-yard field goal to put the Lions ahead 28-25 after an apparent touchdown pass from Lulay to Steven Black was controversially waved off because of an illegal contact penalty on Eskimo defender Randee Drew.
Needing a field goal to match the Lions and send the game into a second overtime session, Ray handed off twice to Porter for 30 yards, then ran the ball in himself from one-yard out after a pass interference call against Lions halfback Stanley Franks.
Lulay, the Lions acknowledged No. 1 quarterbac following the release of Caey Printers earlier last week, completed his first 11 pass attempts and finished with 25 completions on 33 attempts for 278 yards and a touchdown pass, a six-yarder to Black. He was also the Lions’ top rusher, with 63 yards, but on this night he was nowhere in Ray’s class as a sprinter.
“To me, that’s just the sign of a good veteran quarterback,” Lulay said. “That’s not something he normally does. So, for him to make an adjustment in his game, you’ve got to give him a lot of the credit for that.”
In fact, the Eskimos were almost compelled to run after they lost two receivers – Kamau Peterson, who suffered a suspected torn Achilles, and Kelly Campbell, who was concussed after being levelled by Lions safety David Hyland.
“We were so short on receivers, we had to line up Calvin [McCarty, a running back] as a slotback,” Ray said.
The Lions also lost special teamer/backup safety J.R. LaRose with a suspected broken leg on the first play of the game and had to re-jig their defensive secondary after cornerback Davis Sanchez dislocated his elbow on a pass breakup.
Besides their inability to contain Ray, and the snafu with McCallum, the Lions four times were flagged for procedure or offside calls and a fifth time for a time count violation among their 11 penalties. On Ray’s touchdown pass to Stamps, the Lions lined up only 11 players and, at other times, looked liked the football version of Dad’s Army. It was a lack of cohesion you might have seen on June 20, when the same two teams played a preseason game at Empire Field, not what you expect from a team with playoff intentions.
But then, the Lions didn’t look like a team headed to the postseason on Saturday night.
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