By Howard Tsumura
VarsityLetters.ca
VANCOUVER — A team of the world’s best surgeons, each armed with golden scalpels, could have dissected the box score of Friday’s Canada West football game at Thunderbird Stadium until all that remained were ribbons and been no closer to explaining how the hometown Thunderbirds dropped a near must-win 24-10 decision to the Saskatchewan Huskies on the penultimate weekend of the Canada West regular season.
If you watched the game, however, the answer was nowhere near as elusive.
Despite becoming the only team in the Canada West this season to hold the No. 5 nationally-ranked Huskies (6-1) scoreless over an entire second half of play, the ‘Birds (2-5) needed to look no further than the final 93 seconds of the first half over which time Saskatchewan scored two touchdowns and then kicked a last-ditch field goal to turn a tense, defensive battle into a 24-3 halftime lead.
On Saturday, Regina’s Ty Gorniak kicked a 44-yard field goal with 30 seconds remaining too lift the Rams (6-1) to a 22-20 win over the host Alberta Golden Bears (1-6). Meanwhile Manitoba (4-3) held on for a 33-31 victory against visiting Calgary (2-5) as the Dinos’ Vince Triumbari missed a 34-yard game-tying field goal attempt on the final play of regulation. All of that means that UBC will clinch the fourth-and-final playoff spot with a win Friday (12 p.m. PT, Canada West TV) at Regina.
Back to Friday’s action at UBC:
Huskies’ back-up quarterback Jake Farrell, starting for the injured QB-1 Anton Amundrud, capped a 43-yard drive with a four-yard touchdown pass to receiver Daniel Wiebe with 1:33 remaining in the first half for an eventual 14-3 lead.
At the time, it seemed like nothing UBC didn’t have an immediate answer to, however that’s when the sky started to fall for the Thunderbirds.
Saskatchewan linebacker Seth Hundeby picked off UBC quarterback Drew Viotto and returned the ball 19 yards to the UBC 12-yard line.
From there, Wiebe caught a short pass from Farrell and proceeded to run for one of the most comprehensive majors you’re likely to see, first running laterally to the boundary sideline, then completely reversing his field before finding his way into the opposite corner end zone for a major that pushed the Huskies’ lead to 21-3 with 30 seconds left in the half.
UBC, which eventually took over from its own 20-yard line with 25 seconds remaining, curiously elected to gamble on third-and-two from its own 28-yard line with a run play that was stopped for no gain.
After the ball turned over on downs, Saskatchewan’s Lukas Scott brought the half to a close with a 13-yard field goal, capping a soul-crushing two minutes which would haunt UBC the rest of the night.
And all of that came on top of the way in which the Huskies had scored their first touchdown of the night.
After a scoreless opening quarter, Saskatchewan lined up to punt on third-and-six from the UBC 43-yard line.
The result: A direct snap to RB-1 Ryker Frank, who rumbled 40 yards down field to the opposition three-yard line, where two plays later running back Kayden Miller took it in for the game’s first major just under six minutes into the second quarter.
“All year we find different ways to self destruct and we had momentum, we had a chance,” said UBC head coach Blake Nill, whose team must now win next Friday in Regina and hope the rest of the playoff cards fall their way for either a third- or fourth-place finish.
“You know when they ran that fake punt, and we knew it was coming, and we had the call, but they executed it well… it’s tough when they think they fooled you. They didn’t fool us. We just didn’t execute it right.
“There is a humility factor,” Nill continued. “And there has to be. You have to have pride in your program That is what I told the kids at half time.”
The message did not fall on stone ears.
UBC turned in what was perhaps its best half of defensive football this season, on every count a clear step above the 32 second-half points it surrendered in its worst loss of the season, a 51-14 drubbing in Saskatoon to the Huskies back on Sept. 5.
“They’re a tough team, man,” Nill said of the Huskies. “We played better than we did (the last time), but right now, we’re not at their level.”
If you’re the UBC roster, that’s a tough pill to swallow.
The Birds’ defence held Saskatchewan to just 118 yards on 29 snaps over the second half.
Consider additionally that as part of a scoreless opening quarter UBC held the opposition to just 40 yards on 10 snaps, then you begin to understand why Nill was hammering home the point that nothing shy of a full 60-minute effort was going to matter this coming Friday in Regina.
BIRD BITS
UBC’s lone major came on a 32-yard strike from quarterback Drew Viotto to receiver Trey Montour with 3:25 remaining and was the only score of the second half… The ‘Birds biggest positive on offence emerged from the backfield where third-year running back Riley Michaud, a 5-foot-10, 190-pound bruiser out of Calgary-Ernest Manning, consistently found ways to keep his legs pumping as he pushed through the best gang-tackling efforts of the Huskies. Michaud finished 15 carries for 88 yards as he worked behind an offensive line which started 6-foot-5, 290-pound Toronto native and freshman Wolf Colavecchia at centre in place of the unit’s fifth-year senior leader, the injured Gavin Coakes… To offer some idea of how prolific you can expect the freshman quarterback Viotto to become in future years, consider this fact: On Friday, he was effective yet never truly in an extended passing rhythm but still went 21-of-33 for 306 yards with a touchdown and a pick. All of this coming off a 26-of-42 passing afternoon for 473 yards and three touchdowns in a 35-31 loss to Manitoba, one which stands as the third highest all-time single-game passing mark in program history. That’s 779 yards passing in his last two games.
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