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Mike Reilly will be allowed to run again, but why was he playing in a limited role Saturday?
It's an odd day in the CFL when one of the top news stories involves a quarterback who played last weekend saying he'll be set to play this weekend too, but actually allowed to do more. That's what's happened with Mike Reilly and the Edmonton Eskimos, though. After Reilly suffered a concussion Sept. 29, the team elected to play himat the last minute Saturday despite waves of external criticism, but they limited him to a very basic package of one-read throws and said he couldn't take off running. Tuesday, though, Reilly told reporters he's set to start again Saturday against Saskatchewan, and this time he'll be fully unleashed. From Dean Bennett of The Canadian Press:
"One Steamboat" Reilly is no more. The quarterback confirmed from here on out the plan will be for him to roam, scramble and improvise.
Football doesn't work any other way, he said.
"If we're going to design plays around the possibility of me getting hurt, I may as well just not play anymore," he said.
"Every time you set foot on that field you understand you're at risk from an injury. But if you're playing with that in mind, you aren't going to be effective in this league."
Reilly's quite right there, and that raises the question of why the Eskimos decided to play him so soon after a concussion while limiting his offensive options instead of turning to backup Jonathan Crompton from the beginning. If Reilly was fully recovered (questionable, considering how long concussion recovery often takes), the Eskimos should have let him go full-bore, the way they're planning to now. If he wasn't fully recovered, he shouldn't have played at all. Chris O'Leary of The Edmonton Journal makes that case well:
The Eskimos had an entire week to do the smart thing and bench Mike Reilly. Doing so when they announced his concussion last Sunday would have not only taken the week-long uproar around the team out of the picture, it would have provided clarity for the team as it got ready for a still very important game against the Alouettes. Jonathan Crompton could have taken all of the reps he needed to last week in practice, instead of the 50 per cent he got last Tuesday, then a third on Wednesday and Thursday. Maybe Reed didn’t want to go along with that, but there are people who outrank him — general manager Ed Hervey and team president and CEO Len Rhodes — that had ample opportunity to step in and provide that much-needed clarity. ...
I see Ed Hervey on the field at Eskimos practice every day, patrolling the sidelines, talking with players, mingling with his coaches. You can’t convince me that he didn’t know that his team’s game plan for its star QB was to not allow him to leave the pocket and rush, or take more than a read off of a snap. I’d ask him myself but on my last direct interview request (after their loss to Toronto on Sept. 28), I got the GM’s back and a resounding, “No!”
Kavis Reed is at fault for going ahead with this terrible (and risky) game plan, but there were many weak links in the chain along the way that allowed Saturday’s embarrassment of a showing to happen, through the Eskimos higher-ups and to a larger extent to the league as well. When you coach a team to three wins — and that may well be all they get this season, considering the Eskimos’ final four opponents — change is likely to come.
But this fiasco with Mike Reilly? This is something the entire Eskimos organization wears.
Others have soundly blasted the Eskimos' flawed strategy, including Vicki Hall and Matt Dunigan, and deservedly so. A massive part of Reilly's remarkable success this year has come from his ability to pick up big gains with his legs; he's shown that over and over again, including in Week 12 where his 113 rushing yards on nine carries led all CFL players. That ability to run forces defences to focus on spying and containing him, and that opens up passing options for him on plays where he rolls outside the pocket. Taking that away from Reilly reduces what he can do offensively. Moreover, restricting your quarterback to a single read is incredibly flawed: essentially, the first guy he looks at must be open, or he's asked to throw the ball away.
This becomes even more of a problem once the other team catches on. On Saturday, the Alouettes smartly figured out what Edmonton was doing and started dialing back the blitzes and dropping more guys into coverage, making those first reads even less available and creating turnovers. The best way to beat DB-heavy coverage schemes like that is a quarterback rolling outside the pocket and throwing when a defender leaves a receiver to come after him. A mobile quarterback like Reilly forces defenders to think about him rushing as an option, which reduces how many guys they can commit to downfield coverage. If your own offence is going to take that out of the playbook, though, that's just a recipe for disaster.
It seems the Eskimos have figured out the problems with that plan of attack now, but coming after they lost perhaps most the most crucial game of their season, it's a bit too late. The playoff dreams are all but dead in Edmonton, and the team's attempt to have it both ways by playing Reilly but limiting him likely worked out worse than either sitting him completely or letting him play freely would have. There should be plenty of questions asked about the Eskimos' handling of this situation in the weeks ahead, and in a town where there already have been prominent calls for the firing of head coach Kavis Reed, that could very well lead to consequences.
