The last time McMaster head coach Stef Ptaszek looked as despondent walking off a field as he did Saturday afternoon might’ve been after his side’s crushing 2014 Vanier Cup loss in Montreal.
With reason. A week after winning a game by 71 points, his Marauders lost 21-13 to a hardly terrifying Guelph team that was coming off back-to-back blowout losses.
“We knew it was a very important, pivotal game,” Ptaszek says. “We had a great week and (were) primed to play some of our best football. And we did not.”
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No, they didn’t.
They had one punt blocked, muffed another one, had two passes picked off at key times, dropped passes, struggled in the Red Zone, and made numerous other mistakes. Oh, and they took a crushing penalty that erased a 115-missed-field-goal-return for a touchdown.
It was messy and it was flat. Whatever comes to mind when you think McMaster football over the past decade or two, this wasn’t it. And whatever momentum you might’ve thought they would’ve carried out of last weekend’s obliteration of York, it wasn’t evident.
“Our defence, our offence and our special teams has to play better if we’re legitimately going to contend for anything,” Ptaszek says, adding himself to that list of things that have to improve. “Including just making the playoffs.”
This coming Saturday, the Marauders travel to Waterloo to take on the 4-0 Laurier Golden Hawks. An obviously very good team that just happened to thump these Gryphons (who just beat McMaster) by 39 points a couple weeks ago. Mac will be an enormous underdog.
It’s a frightening scenario. Not just this one game, either. It’s been six years since a team made the Ontario university playoffs with fewer than four wins. Lose to Laurier and they’d have to run the table just to finish at that number.
The good news is, two of those games are against 1-3 Waterloo and winless Toronto. That helps.
But considering the Marauders can’t seem to win close games — they’re 0-6 in games decided by one score in the past two seasons — it’s no sure thing. Factor in the reality that it’s now been two years since Mac beat a team at Ron Joyce Stadium (other than the perpetually horrible York Lions who followed last weekend’s 71-0 evisceration to Mac with a 52-0 loss to Carleton on Saturday) and they don’t even have home-field advantage to fall back upon.
There’s almost no margin for error for this team to avoid the disaster of missing the playoffs for the third-straight season. Which seems unfathomable for a squad that’s consistently been one of the powerhouses in national football for a couple decades.
Yet that’s the reality after this one.
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“The rest of the world thinks we’re about the same as last year,” Ptaszek says. “I’m going to respectfully disagree and we’ll see if the back end of the schedule proves me right or if the rest of the world is right.”
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