Scott Milanovich walked slowly across the field, his head looking downwards, his spirit seemingly broken.
Broken by his own lack of belief. Broken by an unwillingness to gamble in any way — or give his Hamilton Tiger-Cats a chance to move on to the Grey Cup.
And broken by one decision really that prevented his Ticats from playing in the signature game of the Canadian Football League.
Hamilton will not win the Grey Cup again this season — it hasn’t since 1999 — and this time some of the way in which the Ticats lost the Eastern final, 19-16 to the visiting Montreal Alouettes, was brought on by a head coach who should know better.
A very good head coach playing not to lose instead of playing to win.
This is the CFL. This is a league built on going for it. Milanovich has the legendary Bo Levi Mitchell as his quarterback and he needed just one more completion to have a chance to win the Eastern final Saturday afternoon at home. Mitchell had, after all, already completed 29 of 36 passes in a game with not much offence.
The decision was this for the coach: It was third down and three yards to go at the Als’ 15-yard line. Just about two minutes to play. The Tiger-Cats were down three points and in perfect field goal position.
A kick would tie the game — and it did. Going for it on third down, which they didn’t, basically turned the game and clock over the now Grey Cup-bound Alouettes.
All Milanovich needed was one short completion for the very accurate Mitchell. One short pass. One short run. Something to get a first down, put yourself in position to score, and while doing so, eat up some of the final 100 seconds on the clock.
You know what’s happened since the Ticats last won the Grey Cup? The Argos have won five times, including one coached by Milanovich. Montreal has won four times and so has Calgary. Edmonton and B.C. have taken home three titles apiece and Saskatchewan and Winnipeg have two. Ottawa has one.
The entire league has lapped the Ticats for a quarter of a century.
You have to be thinking about that, big picture, in some way when, in a tight football game, you are suddenly in position to win. The Ticats never led once in the game. The Eastern final was tied 0-0 at the end of the first quarter and the Als led 6-3 at the half.
The game was there to be taken at the end.
Montreal went ahead 13-3 but the Ticats kept coming back. It was 13-10. Then 16-10. And two field goals later it was 16-16.
It might have been 20-16 Hamilton had Milanovich made a different choice on third down late.
The Alouettes are a rather remarkable team in a strange kind of way. Their semi-injured quarterback, Davis Alexander, has never lost a CFL start. He played on Saturday with a hamstring that he grabbed after almost every play and took advantage of broken plays and the kind of plays you would draw up in a sandlot to find a way to win.
Alexander was born for the CFL. Without Matt Dunigan’s arm, he plays Dunigan’s game. Bold, brave and occasionally reckless and full of all kinds of snot and vinegar.
If he played in the NFL, with all his histrionics, he’d be penalized regularly for taunting. But his taunting is charming in a CFL forever in search of stars and the two biggest plays he made late came as much out of instinct as anything else.
He somehow avoided a sack and threw a pass to Charleston Rambo late, who should have been stopped short of a first down, but a Hamilton linebacker over-committed on the play. Somehow a first down was attained on a quick juke and a miss on the way to Jose Maltos Diaz kicking the winning field goal.
A game-changing play not exactly drawn up on a chalk board.
On the touchdown pass Alexander threw earlier to the Canadian Tyler Snead, he rolled out, avoided a sack, and found an open Snead deep in the end zone.
Those kind of plays aren’t gambles as much as they’re created on the field in the moment. They’re school yard plays and Alexander is a school yard quarterback. But he’s 13-0 now in the schoolyard that is the CFL.
And I wouldn’t have given the ball back late, the way Milanovich did on Saturday. You don’t give a Davis Alexander one extra chance. You don’t give him 100 extra seconds. You try and win with your team doing your thing, with your ancient all-star quarterback doing what he does best.
Once upon a time in football, there wasn’t much gambling on third down in the CFL or fourth down in the NFL. Coaches were too conservative, too caught up in their ways to try something different.
But all of that changed in recent years. Pretty much everybody gambles now, everybody tries on short-yardage situations.
The Ticats chose to play for the tie and aren’t going to the Grey Cup because of it.
ssimmons@postmedia.com
X: @simmonssteve