After their win in Ottawa in Week 19, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ playoff chances are still alive. A win next week puts them into the post-season; the right combination of wins and losses for Toronto and Montreal will cement them in first place.
But despite their reasonable chances of getting into the playoffs, this Hamilton team isn’t going to repeat last year’s success. They probably will not even win a post-season game, and last year’s improbable run is out of the question. Much as it will hurt Ticats fans to confront reality, here are the five main reasons their season will come to a premature end.
Depth at Receiver
The minor injury to Andy Fantuz in the last two weeks shows how weak the Ticats are without a downfield threat. With Fantuz off the field, the opponent’s pass defence becomes much simpler, because no one else on the team needs that level of coverage. Luke Tasker is reliable, and Bakari Grant is an underrated veteran, but when Fantuz is out, Zach Collaros necessarily turns to the short pass, finding the running backs and slot backs for minor yardage.
The stats tell the story: Moissis Madu is the #4 receiver for Hamilton this year, ahead of a number of wide receivers. When you don’t have a long threat who forces the secondary to make decisions, you start looking for the easy pass, and the simple options for the offence are the simple options to cover for the defence.
Offensive Line
With Collaros (and Dan LeFevour when Collaros was injured), the Ticats have a mobile threat that they didn’t have with Henry Burris last year. Even better, Collaros is a great passer on the move, with remarkable accuracy while he’s running.
The problem is that he’s moving too much. The porous offensive line that gave up ten sacks in the first game of the season did improve after Week 1, but they remain an issue. Collaros can run, but he can’t hide, and when his receivers can’t find room he gets sacked for big losses. The o-line needs to give him more protection, and in recent games – even against Ottawa, the team last in sacks over the year – they have failed him miserably.
Ground Game
Earlier in the season, the defensive line was remarkably stingy against the run – not always a feature of Hamilton teams. But that part of Orlondo Steinauer’s scheme is starting to crumble. Ottawa especially has burned Hamilton for big yards on the ground. The revolving door at the Ticats’ linebacker positions may have something to do with it, but in general they’ve just lacked a solid game plan on the ground.
Worse is the offence on the ground. Hamilton has gone through running backs like Spinal Tap through drummers; even getting Nic Grigsby hasn’t helped to give them a legitimate threat (look back to the o-line here, too). Knowing the rush isn’t a danger, defences can drop back, and stifle the Hamilton air game as well.
Kicking
The Canadian game has always been a ratio game, and a non-import player kicking or punting can be a significant advantage. Hence the successful Josh Bartel experiment in recent years, as well as the less successful Luca Congi and Sandro DeAngelis experiments as well. Finding a player who can kick and punt effectively is an even bigger advantage for many rosters.
Justin Medlock is a seasoned vet and an accurate place kicker; he is not, as it turns out, a great punter. On Labour Day, Swayze Waters alone kept Toronto in the game with some phenomenal punts; that’s what a good kicker can do. Medlock, by comparison, trails the entire league in punting yards, and fans in Hamilton have not seen a single punt out of bounds to pin the opposing team deep in their end. Hamilton consistently loses the field position game, a key factor in their many close losses this year.
Coaching
Coaching is a catch-all for team problems; it’s easy, and sometimes erroneous, to single out the head coach for all of the blame. And Kent Austin has a Grey Cup appearance with the Cats and a win with the Riders to prove his capability as a head coach.
But Hamilton is the most penalized team in the league. They have come out flat in too many games – in five games they’ve failed to score a single point in the first quarter. This is not the 2013 Tiger-Cats, either; they’ve had their injuries, but nothing like last year, where they dressed over 90 players over the season.
The only place to look is the coaching. Maybe Austin’s style just doesn’t work with this group; maybe he’s just being out-coached by the rest of the league. But a good coach can take a competent team and make them a good team; unfortunately, this team is going in the other direction.
So even the most die-hard Hamilton fans will have a hard time watching the next three weeks in the CFL. But unless this team finds its groove and solves at least some of these problems very, very quickly, their improbable run in 2013 will not even nearly be repeated.
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