Team of destiny.
It’s a characterization often thrown around in sports commentary. It’s the cliché that creeps up during championship season. If you ask every championship winner if they’re a "team of destiny," someone in the winning dressing room would chime in and say yes.
Yet, for once, whoever wins the 50th Vanier Cup will probably have an accurate claim to that moniker. I’ve never seen a Vanier Cup with two teams — the McMaster Marauders and Montreal Carabins — who have overcome more adversity to get to this stage. Despite their dual 10-1 records, neither team was widely expected to win their conference; yet here they are, one win away from winning the 50th Vanier Cup, in front of an expected sell-out crowd at Percival Molson Memorial Stadium.
One team will be commemorated with championship memorabilia on Saturday and make history. For the Carabins, it will be their first national championship in program history. McMaster could convert their third Vanier Cup trip in four years into their second Vanier ring, making the team the only OUA team in the last 20 years with more than one Vanier. The losing team will be remembered as a footnote in the 50th Vanier story.
Both teams have great depth and will be in positions to defend the crown next year, but whichever team wins it all on Saturday, it will be on the backs of defence.
Both teams are led by accurate, veteran passers who do a great job of dissecting pre-snap information in order to get the ball out of their hands quickly.
Both teams have followed the same formula to gain entry into the big dance, thus their formulas for success on Saturday are the same.
Keeping McMaster’s Marshall Ferguson and Montreal’s Gabriel Cousineau clean is the chief concern for both offensive staffs. To do that, they’ll have to combat the relentless blitz pressure both defences have been reliant on in their playoff runs. The first order of business is identifying and blocking the two best stand-up defensive players in the country. The CIS linebackers who have shot up CFL draft boards in their senior season: RSEQ defensive MVP Byron Archambault and the OUA defensive MVP Nick Shorthill. Knowing that they wear number 41 and 1, respectively, is not just the centre’s job but every offensive lineman’s responsibility pre-snap.
Archambault does his damage in the A and B gaps. No. 41 is a mauler of a linebacker equally adept at sumo wrestling with an offensive lineman on his way to the throwing spot as he is making him miss in tight space. Shorthill is more effective in space as he loves to rush off the edge either by alignment pre-snap or via stunts, timing his rush up with the snap of the ball from depth. He’s fast enough to run down the line of scrimmage and disrupt the run game as well as get out to the flats and help bolster the coverage on screens and check releases. Look for these defenders if you are interested in a preview of star CFL players or the game’s MVP.
In what could be a defensive struggle, the most explosive plays might be second-level defenders using their next-level talent to change the tide of the game. Unlike most, I expect the game to be close, as the scoreboard will be an accurate reflection of the sacks and completion percentage numbers of both teams.