You can only feel bad for anyone who gave up on the Vanier Cup yesterday when it became painfully obvious a combination of a Prairie cold snap and the FrozenTurf at Saskatoon's Griffiths Stadium was going to make for a low-scoring game. Or to use the Canadian Press' word, "lacklustre."
They missed coach Glen Constantin's Laval Rouge et Or staking their claim as one of the dominant university football teams this country has seen in decades with a 13-8 victory over the host Saskatchewan Huskies in front of 13,000 mostly disappointed hometown fans at Griffiths Stadium.
That makes it three Vanier Cups in four years for Laval. The only other team to win three Vaniers in four years was the Western Mustangs under Frank Cosentino and then Darwin Semotiuk in the mid-'70s. Stephen Brunt once wrote in the Globe & Mail that Western in that era was "as close to a football factory as this country has ever seen."
Not to start a unity debate (Stephen Harper already did that a few days ago), but if the Rouge et Or played in southern Ontario and not Quebec City -- the other solitude within the Other Solitude -- the media would write the same thing about Laval. Believe you me, there are fans in Quebec, and not all of them Francophone, who feel this team hasn't received its proper due, even after four national titles in eight years. Laval's status as a privately funded program gives it one helluva leg up (I'll tackle that in an upcoming column), but they've still had to win the games, eh?
Yesterday, it was a one-touchdown game until the Rouge et Or's Olivier Turcotte-Létourneau broke up U of S QB Bret Thompson's final third-down pass with about a minute to play, but once Laval opened a 10-2 lead with 1:11 left in the first half on a two-yard TD run by Guillaume Allard-Caméus (pictured), did it ever feel like the Huskies had anything more than a puncher's chance, even with a hometown crowd behind them and their defence playing way over its head? Not really.
Like Dave Smart's Carleton Ravens here in Ottawa, whose men's basketball dynasty has run concurrently with Laval's reign in football, the Rouge et Or's trick is that it can play against a nearly equal opponent, be only a few points ahead the whole way -- and yet actually be in complete control.
They know it; their opponents and most observers, not so much. With collegiate teams of teenagers and young 20-somethings, everyone's going to blow a close one eventually, especially in playoffs, but Laval only does so very occasionally. In all four of their Vanier wins -- by scores 14-10, 14-7, 7-1 and now 13-8 -- they've left a heartbroken group of Huskies (either the Saint Mary's or Saskatchewan variety) wondering why they didn't get the one or two plays that would have changed the outcome.
Constantin's crew did it yesterday with a defence led by Michael Jean-Louis and game MVP Eric Maranda (seven tackles and crucial late interception) that rendered almost all other elements of the game -- including the elements themselves -- academic. Western Canada teams have dominated Easterners in national playoff games held out West since 1963, when Frank Tindall took his Queen's Golden Gaels out to Alberta by a World War II-era plane to play the Alberta Golden Bears in a precursor to the Vanier Cup. No Eastern team had gone out West for a national playoff game and come home a winner since way back in '68, when the Gaels won a national semi-final against the Manitoba Bisons. It didn't matter.
Saskatchewan led in the game stats, with 33:03 in possession time and a 293-175 advantage in net offence. It didn't matter.
The FrozenTurf at Griffiths Stadium had a "slip factor" of about 9.3, because the tiny pellets that you usually see spray into the air on TV replays when a player makes a sharp cut had congealed with the ground, as Tim Micallef and Duane Forde pointed out on The Score. It didn't matter. Tyler O'Gorman ran hard for the U of S (and who knows how it might've turned out if Scott Stevens had been able to suit up), but Laval's front seven never let him break free for a long gainer.
On the FrozenTurf, Laval couldn't do much offensively, never sustaining a drive all day. It didn't matter. They eked out a 10-point second quarter and that was enough. It was 0-0 midway through the second quarter when Samuel Grégoire-Champagne got open for a 42-yard catch -- almost one-quarter of his team's total offence on the day -- to set up a Cam Takacs field goal. Laval's only touchdown drive, coming after Dylan Barker's quarterback sack inside the 5-yard line led to a conceded safety, wasn't even a drive at all. Laval covered the kickoff that followed the safety and the defence forced a two-and-out. Nic Bisaillon's 22-yard return on the ensuing punt with a 15-yard penalty tacked on for a late hit followed by a flag for illegal contact on a receiver on the next snap moved the ball inside Saskatchewan's 10. Almost any team is going to score a touchdown when its offence gets first-and-goal without even running an official play.
It's too bad for Saskatchewan. The Huskies played their hearts out, and for all the sniping about the weather, Saskatoon by all accounts did a great job as host and should get another chance sooner rather than later. By the final gun yesterday, though, you could only wonder what Laval might have done in conditions that were more fit for football and not the ice-sculpture carving contest they hold in Quebec City every year at the Winter Carnival.
Laval had next to no offence, thanks to the Huskies and the conditions. It didn't matter. Groulx only threw for 106 yards, but he made the one play he needed to, consuming valuable time with a 13-yard run on quarterback draw inside the final two minutes.
Hostile crowd, freeze-ass cold weather -- all together now, it didn't matter. Laval, which was supposed to have a down year after losing some of the stars off their 2005 team that lost the same U of S Huskies in the Mitchell Bowl, was fast, talented and well-coached enough to get 'er done. It might have all turned out differently if the Rouge et Or had not pulled an overtime win over the Concordia Stingers back in mid-October, but that's neither here nor there.
Like the weather in Saskatchwan yesterday, it's chilling for fans of other programs to know that under the current setup in CIS football, Laval is capable of winning the Vanier Cup even when it's supposed to be in a down year. Here's something else that's a little chilling: Next year's championship game will be indoors at the Rogers Centre. Should Laval make it back, there won't be any minus-20 temperatures to slow them down.
(Much thanks to Jay Ouellet for contributing his photo of Guillaume Allard-Caméus, taken earlier this season. Click here to visit the main page.)
That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
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