Before the game, it felt like the good old days.
The parking lots around McMahon Stadium were packed with tailgaters. The F-18s that flew above the city were as exhilarating as always. There were 28,467 fans in the stands.
It was the Labour Day Classic. You can’t beat it.
Unfortunately, once the game started, it was still 2024.
And the 2024 Stampeders are not a throwback to the great teams of the 2010s or the 1990s.
No, this Stampeders (4-7) team has lost four of their last five games after putting in a completely uninspired performance against their Alberta rivals and falling 35-20.
The Elks (4-8), it should be noted, are the last-place team in the CFL’s West Division. They’re the only team below the Stampeders in the standings, but that’s a little deceiving.
The Elks are surging. They’ve won four-of-five, with their only loss coming to the best-in-class Montreal Alouettes.
Let’s call a spade a spade here. The Elks are a better team than the Stampeders and fully deserved their win in the Labour Day Classic. This was not an underdog beating a favourite. The better team won.
The real question is whether you could confidently say the Stamps are better than anyone in the CFL right now.
Maybe you’d say the Hamilton Tiger-Cats are worse, but at least the East Division’s bottom dwellers won their own Labour Day contest, knocking off the Toronto Argonauts earlier in the day.
The Stamps, meanwhile, seem to be regressing.
Quarterback Jake Maier looked completely out-of-sorts on Monday, throwing four interceptions. To the blind eye, they all appeared to be into double-coverage.
You simply will never win professional football games turning the ball over that many times. The cheers from Stamps fans that greeted backup Logan Bonner’s entrance into the game with a minute left were no surprise.
Calgary football fans are frustrated.
“There’s no way to positively paint four interceptions, there’s really not,” Maier said. “And we got what we deserved because of it.”
The offence’s continued inability to stay on the field and put together four quarters is a feature, not a bug, and the reality is that they date back to 2023 and arguably even 2022.
It wasn’t just Maier, although you have to wonder whether a change at quarterback is coming. There were mental errors by receivers, including on the second offensive play of the game for the Stampeders, and the team rushed for a grand total of 18 yards.
“The first two offensive plays we had mental errors and I don’t understand it. We went over it and they even knew the calls,” said Stampeders GM/head coach Dave Dickenson. “It’s mind-boggling to me and we just weren’t playing hard enough. They physically out-did us and ran harder and effort’s just not enough. It won’t ever be enough. We’ve got to clean it up and will probably have to make some changes.”
This team’s issues go well beyond the quarterback and the offence, though.
The Stamps defence allowing more rushing yards per-game than any team in the league.
The Elks didn’t need to run the ball much on Monday, though. They were perfectly content to throw the ball again and again. And why wouldn’t they have been?
Quarterback McLeod Bethel-Thompson picked apart the Stampeders at-will, completing 25-of-36 passes for 486 yards and three touchdowns.
The Stampeders played their part in making him look good. They put the Elks QB under little-to-no pressure for long stretches and their DBs got repeatedly beat.
“It’s embarrassing,” Dickenson said when he was asked about how his team was picked apart through the air. “That’s all I can say. It’s embarrassing.”
It was embarrassing, and the Stamps now face a situation where they are going to have to fight for their playoff lives the rest of the way. They’ve got a return date against the Elks on Saturday and that’s absolutely a must-win game.
So was the Labour Day Classic, though, and that sense of urgency didn’t bring out the best in the group.
So far, nothing has.
And right now, it feels like this season is getting away from the Stampeders. The playoffs are still a possibility, but they won’t be if the team doesn’t find a way to be a lot better than they were on Monday afternoon.
If they don’t, there will surely be wholesale changes this off-season.
“I am very frustrated,” said Stamps linebacker Cam Judge. “There’s still time to correct it, of course, so I’ve got to channel that frustration the right way and try to get on the guys as much as I can.
“Are you at home watching film? I don’t know. Are you working on the things you need to work on? I don’t know. Pro football, you’ve got to have the maturity and hopefully guys are doing it.”
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