Feeling Double Blue: Argos come to terms with 2023 season
Andrew Lahodynskyj/CFL.ca
Just days removed from the greatest disappointment of his young CFL career, Chad Kelly still wasn’t ready to look back.
“I haven’t even looked at the film, I don’t want to look at the film. I’m obviously going to have to at some point, but right now mentally I’m still trying to get over the mistakes that played a part of the game,” the Toronto Argonauts’ quarterback said on Wednesday, after arriving in Hamilton ahead of the CFL Awards.
In a season where Kelly played so well that he made football fans across Canada forget that he was a first-year starter, his worst showing of the year came for him this past Saturday. Five days later he was in Niagara Falls, accepting the league’s George Reed Most Outstanding Player award. In an emotional speech, Kelly called Thursday night the best moment of his life.
It provided a nice temporary relief from a game that he described a day earlier as a nightmare. His team’s crushing Eastern Final loss to the Montreal Alouettes made the Argos the second team in CFL history to go 16-2 and lose in its Division Final. If you’d ever wanted to see the personification of the moment that you drink orange juice immediately after brushing your teeth, it arrived for you in spades on Thursday.
It wasn’t just for Kelly. Three of his teammates, along with head coach Ryan Dinwiddie, won awards.
“Life goes on,” Kelly had said about 24 hours before he’d take the awards stage.
“You win some, you lose some and you just try to see some type of positive in the season that we had. That’s kind of where I am mentally. I think we have such a great core group of guys that we’ll get through this moment and get better from it.”
110th GREY CUP
» Argos rise to the top at 2023 CFL Awards
» Ryan Dinwiddie wins Coach of the Year
» Qwan’tez Stiggers takes home Most Outstanding Rookie
The Argos dominated the CFL Awards night just like they did the regular season. Along with Kelly’s MOP win, Dejon Allen won Most Outstanding Offensive Lineman, Javon Leake was named Most Outstanding Special Teams Player, Qwan’tez Stiggers took Most Outstanding Rookie honours and Dinwiddie claimed Coach of the Year.
As they heard Argo name after name called, the team and its fans were still trying to process the fact that the Argos wouldn’t be lifting any new hardware on Sunday, in the 110th Grey Cup.
Kelly isn’t the first CFL MOP candidate to to begrudgingly make his way to the award show.
“I could tell you this about the award show. I remember in 2004 when we had lost in the Eastern Final and I was up for the MOP award. I hated it,” said Anthony Calvillo, whose Alouettes won 14 games that year in a season where he topped the 6,000-yard passing mark, but fell to the Toronto Argonauts. Calvillo is back at the Grey Cup again this year as an Alouette as the team’s offensive coordinator.
“I think the biggest thing is when you lose, whether it’s a game, a championship…I always asked myself, ‘OK, what can I do to challenge myself so that this is not happening?'”
It may be too soon for the Argos to dive into self-examination, though Kelly said he’d already started preparing his body for next season.
“I’ve already worked out twice since (the game),” he said. “I’ve already moved on to the next year.”
Edmonton’s 1989 team is the only other club to go 16-2 since the league moved to an 18-game schedule.
CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie was an offensive lineman on that team which dropped the Western Final 29 years ago to the 9-9 Saskatchewan Roughriders. The Riders went on to win the Grey Cup.
“You never forget it, by the way,” Ambrosie said this week.
“Still, I mean, during the (Eastern Final last week), they were showing clips of the ’89 loss and I figured prominently in one of those clips. You never forget it.
“But good coaches as coach Dinwiddie is, and good organizations like they have — and I’m thinking of (general manager) Michael Clemons and (team president) Bill Manning and (VP of business operations) Chris Shewfelt — they will use this to fuel them.
“They’ll start the season in 2024 a little PO’d. They’ll be frustrated and they’ll want to prove themselves. Actually, in the hands of really good people like coach Dinwiddie and Michael and that organization, I think they will harness the power of a bitter disappointment and they’ll grow from here and it’ll make them stronger.
“They’ll never forget it,” Ambrosie added, “and it’ll always elicit a groan, which it does for me to this day and that’s a long time ago now. But I think they’ll turn a negative into a positive.”
Kevin Sousa/CFL.ca
In May, the Milwaukee Bucks were bounced from the first round of the NBA playoffs, a No. 1 seed that had won a league-best 58 games, ousted by a Miami Heat team that played its way into the playoffs. The Bucks’ star player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, gave an impassioned speech after being eliminated about finding success in failure.
“There’s always steps to it,” Antetokounmpo said, via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships; the other nine years was a failure? That’s what you’re telling me?
“There’s no failure in sports. You know, there’s good days, bad days. Some days you are able to be successful, some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. And that’s what sports is about. You don’t always win; some other team’s gonna win. And this year, somebody else is gonna win. Simple as that.
“We’re gonna come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits, try to play better, not have a 10-day stretch with play bad basketball. You know, and hopefully we can win a championship. So 50 years from 1971 to 2021 that we didn’t win a championship, it was 50 years of failure? No, it was not. It was steps to it. You know, and we were able to win one. Hopefully we can win another one.”
Allen, who was named Most Outstanding Offensive Lineman on Thursday, takes issue with a key part of that argument.
“I understand what he’s saying but there is failure. And what we did Saturday was failure. We failed to succeed,” he said.
The word heartbreak gets thrown around often in sport. Allen made it clear that in this case it wasn’t hyperbole.
“It definitely feels like heartbreak. It’s devastating,” he said.
“Because I mean, everybody and their mother knows we’re supposed to be in that game. It’s definitely heartbreak.”
“Through every experience, there’s always something positive that you can take from it, if you want to look at, if you’re looking for something positive,” said Winnipeg Blue Bombers defensive coordinator Richie Hall. He and the Bombers left the 109th Grey Cup in Regina last year under a cloud similar to what the Argos are under right now. Over an almost 30-year career as a coach in the CFL, which came after a nine-year career as a player — he was on that Saskatchewan team that toppled Ambrosie and his Edmonton squad — Hall has seen a lifetime of the highs and lows that the game can throw at you.
“I do believe that a lot of times when we experience disappointment that it’s a learning tool for us. I don’t know what we’re supposed to always learn from it,” he said, “but there’s something to learn from it.”
Through Allen’s temporary despair, he doesn’t doubt that he and the Argos will be back next year to make amends on this lost season. But he’s still clearly processing those feelings.
“It’s going to be a while before I fully recover from that catastrophe,” he said, noting that he’ll need surgery on a pinky finger that’s given him trouble through the season.
“It’s gonna be very hard to look at the good. We went 16-2 but it all becomes nothing once you don’t want a championship. So, to me, it feels like we did it all for nothing, to be honest. All I can do now is get back home, start my workout plan and get ready for next year.”
Like Hall, Alouettes’ head coach Jason Maas has played in or coached in games where he’s won and lost the Grey Cup, or opportunities at it.
“I don’t know if you ever truly get over them,” he said of the tough losses from his playing career. “I think when you think back on them, I think they always hurt. Obviously, time heals everything. I think if you don’t learn from them, they hurt more.
“I think if there’s something you can learn from a game like that and ultimately down the road you win because of it, I think it makes that loss a little bit better to deal with.”
Andrew Lahodynskyj/CFL.ca
When Calvillo lost out on that shot at the Grey Cup in 2004, his internal examination led him to make some significant change.
“I either could stay status quo in terms of, ‘OK, I’m not really going to change anything up, or how can I challenge myself?'” he said.
That led to him seeing a sports psychologist. He completely changed his workout habits and hired a new team of trainers to push him so that he could physically improve. He changed his diet and ate healthier, which led to faster recovery and longevity. He credits those changes as the key to letting him play 20 seasons in the CFL.
Ambrosie was haunted by the 1989 Western Final loss. He said his level of focus in the 1993 Grey Cup game was at a level he’d never experienced before, thanks in large part to championship game disappointments of the past. He and his Edmonton teammates finally got to hoist that Cup together four years after that historic disappointment.
The shock of Saturday’s loss still with them, Kelly and Allen both believe their team will be playing this time next year in Vancouver, at the 111th Grey Cup.
“I think there’s obviously a lot to look forward to,” Kelly said. “There’s a lot of positives to come out of this season. A friend of mine said after the game, ‘Look, man, you had a fantastic season. You made it out of the season healthy.’ That’s the No. 1 thing, you’ve got to be healthy to be available and to be available you’ve got to be healthy. That’s kind of the name of the game.”
On the podium with media on Thursday night, Allen was all smiles, his spirits lightened. Asked if this provided an unexpected lift, the smile fell and he said he still felt devastated.
“The joyous moments are just all the wins, hanging out with the guys,” Allen said on Wednesday night. “To me, this lights my fire. We did it before, we can do it again.”
