It’s the iconic play that will forever go down as one of the greatest in Ottawa history.
Like The Catch in San Francisco from Montana to Clark, the Burris-to-Ellingson 93-yard touchdown prayer may be stamped in memory as Second and 25.
But would you believe the play call radioed in to Henry Burris wasn’t what the quarterback called last Sunday in the RedBlacks’ huddle?
In lengthy conversations with the three men that made the play happen, Burris, Greg Ellingson and Ottawa offensive coordinator Jason Maas revealed to Sportsnet that when Henry barked “Spread right Yaz, 765 Delta,” it was actually Burris deciding to change the formation from the instructions Maas had barked to him in his helmet.
Ellingson was never supposed to be on the right side of the field on the original play call. But Burris freelanced, unbeknownst to anyone, until the team broke out of the huddle, and Maas spotted it as the players walked to the line.
“On the sidelines, I’m pissed,” the first-year coordinator said.
“We have a comfort and the trust,” Burris grinned. “But if it doesn’t work, it’s my ass.”
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Maas is decisive in running his offence. A former quarterback with Edmonton, Hamilton and Montreal, the now 40-year-old doesn’t waste much time. He radios calls into Burris’ helmet early in the 20-second play clock.
With 1:28 remaining in regulation, on second down and 25 yards to go in the tied game of the 2015 CFL East Division Final, there were few options left to go with.
“There aren’t a lot of calls in your offence there, backed up against the wind,” Maas shrugged.
While the officials were marching the ball back following the dead ball foul on first down – a first down in which every Hamilton fan will tell you Arnaud Gascon-Nadon dropped a sure-interception that could have clinched a third straight Grey Cup appearance for the Tiger-Cats – Ottawa head coach Rick Campbell gave one message to his offensive coordinator: Be aggressive.
“So I thought, ‘get a shot, find the best guy to get a 50/50 ball to,’” Maas said.
And without looking at his play sheet, the call came into his 40-year-old quarterback, who had been waiting a few weeks to hear it.
Nearly a month prior, before the home-and-away set with the Ticats to end the regular season, Burris continued to see a Hamilton defensive tendency on film in second-and-long situations. While his kids were gearing up for Halloween, a look their dad kept seeing on tape was nagging him. So Burris kept going back to study it.
He made a couple of mental notes to himself in case the RedBlacks found themselves needing a long completion to move the chains against his old team:
- Give Ellingson more room to work with.
- If it’s the match-up on the field corner we want, know Ellingson can get in his blind spot.
Burris knew what the Tiger-Cats were trying to take away from him, so that late October week he mulled about how he’d find space for his receiver on second-and-long. He decided then, three weeks before the East Final, that the best way to do it was if Maas called Spread right Yaz, 765 Delta he’d actually change the formation in the huddle. That he’d add a back-side x-under to it.
Yaz puts Ellingson, who normally plays the Y spot (slot closest to the QB to the call side), outside at the Z receiver (normally played by Maurice Price), but they’d go Yaz on the jump ball because Ellingson, as Burris says, is their “go-up-and-get-it” guy.
He didn’t tell anyone about it, and as his children went trick-or-treating back in Ottawa with his wife, Nicole, Burris settled into his hotel room in Hamilton to watch more film en route to beating the Tiger-Cats in back-to-back games to ensure the East Division Final would be played in the nation’s capital.
“In my mind, I knew I could complete it to the boundary with the extra space,” he later said.
“It’s one of the few plays designed to go down the field on longer conversions,” Ellingson admitted.
Maas watched his offence come out of the huddle, and felt hopeless. He’s been coaching since 2012, but once a quarterback, always a quarterback, and there’s nothing you can do as a coach when things don’t go your way.
Fifty yards away, Burris knew his coordinator would be hot that the formation wasn’t the one Maas had called. The two go out of their way publicly to elaborate on the healthy respect they have for one another. So Burris immediately made eye contact with the RedBlacks sideline and motioned his hands up and down to his play-caller.
“Once he gave me the ‘I got it,’ I felt a lot better,” Maas said. “But really, at that point, I can’t say [expletive] to him.”
He couldn’t, and so it was over to Burris, whose gaze went from the bench to his big target on the right.
Ed Gainey, who wasn’t a regular starter all season, was the defensive back lined up on Ellingson, and when the receiver looked up to see the coverage it hit him: “This is the play. This ball is probably coming to me.”
The Delta concept means that you’re essentially calling a one-on-one go route, and the only way the quarterback doesn’t throw it is if the receiver given the Delta route (Ellingson, in this case) gets double covered or bracketed. If he does, Burris would probably have to work to the back-side X under coming into his vision, which really would not be a viable option on second and 25, since it would fall short of a first down.
Essentially, the Delta concept means if the Tiger-Cats were giving one-on-one coverage, even if the defender is off and deep, you let it fly.
Ellingson’s deeper responsibilities on Spread right Yaz, 765 Delta (with a back-side x-under) were clear: Widen out the man-defender, then get behind him into his blind spot so Gainey wouldn’t quite feel where he was.
It wasn’t long, once the play began, that Ellingson was widening out and, just as it was supposed to happen, he landed in the blind spot and turned to look back toward the line of scrimmage.
While Ellingson was in the early part of his route, he missed the near-fatal moment. Jon Gott snapped the ball high to Burris in the shotgun, and the quarterback had to reach high just to haul it in. In that split-second, the air nearly came out of a stadium that had been deafening all afternoon.
“At that point, I’m thinking all bets may be off,” Maas remembered. “All I thought was ‘don’t get sacked.’”
Sacked? Burris regained both control of the football, and his composure and made no hesitation where to go. He’d waited almost a full calendar month for this from that pre-Halloween film study.
From his pre-snap read, Burris saw the matchup he wanted. That’s why he changed the formation in the huddle. That’s why he’d pleaded to RedBlacks GM Marcel Desjardins last winter to sign the big-target Ellingson, his former Hamilton teammate he’d been to a Grey Cup with.
Burris saw that the safety help wouldn’t be there in time. He stepped into the pocket, then he heaved it.
“I was behind Gainey, when I first saw the ball, and it was already on its way coming down,” Ellingson said.
Then instinct took over.
This wasn’t Ellingson’s first rodeo. In college, five years ago in the Little Caesars Bowl, he caught a 20-yard pass with eight seconds left, setting up the game-winning field goal for Florida International’s first bowl game win ever. Now 26, Ellingson understood the moment.
Instincts told him to cut back toward the football, and jump in front, trying to high-point the football. He didn’t know where the defender was when he went up.
Maas, meanwhile, didn’t immediately look at Ellingson after Burris got his feet back, following the high snap. His eyes were fixated on the quarterback. When he saw Burris sling it, his immediate thought was “that’s got to be good enough.”
“Then when the ball was in flight, and I saw one-on-one, that was all I needed to know,” the offensive coordinator said.
Ellingson, of course, caught it and when he came back to his feet he sensed nobody around him.
“I felt he was down and too far away,” he said of Gainey.
And he was.
Only Emanuel Davis was in his way, and Ellingson gave him a stutter step, then bounced right and took off down the sideline. When he turned the corner, he put his head down and “dug deep” for a couple of strides. Twice he looked behind, over his left shoulder, and saw Erik Harris trailing him by about eight yards.
He got into the endzone, and felt an overwhelming feeling of relief.
Then his teammates jumped on him.
Spread right Yaz, 765 Delta (with a back-side x-under).
Maas called the play, Burris modified it, Ellingson caught it, and the RedBlacks are playing for the 103rd Grey Cup.
When he crossed the goal line, and the adrenaline and rush of emotions got to him, Ellingson didn’t speak for more than two minutes. Not when “people were dappin’ me up and pattin’ me down.”
Not when he got to the bench, still clutching onto the football, while TD Place shook. Not even when his teammate, Jerrell Gavins, lay a wet kiss on his cheek.
“I just sat there for a while, soaking the moment in. I could feel the energy in the place,” Ellingson said. “It took a while to regain myself and get the crowd excited.”
He did when the final gun went off, running the perimeter of the field, to high-five fans, and jogged into the tunnel beneath the stadium and sat at his locker for nearly half-an-hour to process what had happened.
“To actually do it at a clutch time,” Ellingson reflected this week. “Man. I mean, I just don’t know.”
And Maas?
“Look, I know there was more than a minute left, and you should be thinking about the potential of overtime and what to do if we get the ball back and the scenarios,” he said. “But I’m a fan of football. I’m a fan of our team. I just became a fan on the sidelines. I wanted to watch us win.”
He did, and when it all ended, 2015’s most outstanding player, who made the pivotal formation change on Spread right Yaz, 765 Delta (with a back-side x-under), stood on the field, surrounded by a few dozen, then a couple hundred, then about three thousand fans in the glory of victory.
At last, Bytown was back in the big dance, on a play that will be the signature moment in modern-day Ottawa football lore.
Second and 25 is Ottawa’s David Tyree. Eli Manning didn’t change his in the huddle, but Henry did.