Eagles-Kansas City, hometown memories and The Wherewithal to commit | GRUFF Vol. 11.

How the Super Bowl relates to one touchdown play in a Canadian university game that The Tragically Hip might have witnessed, and lost art of folklore.

— Ohhhhh. This isn’t gonna be about Kingston, is it? — All things are about Kingston.

i. Super Sunday

At its most elemental, football is about running behind the big boy. You know it — your best back behind your best lineman.

By now, on the eve of the eve of the big game, Reader, the strong points of the Super Bowl contestants are well-established.

Two-time champion Kansas City does mental warfare, with an almost eerie presence in tight one-score games. Building a resolute defence while having Patrick Mahomes behind centre will take a team a long way.

One tale of the tape favored the Philadelphia Eagles in 5-of-6 position groups, each one except quarterback, while rating the edge to Kansas City in coaching and special teams. Eventually, even Mahomes can only overcome so much. And, of course, he will have no hand in Kansas City trying to keep contain while the Eagles’ big boys are blocking for the 2,000-yard man Saquon Barkley.

The Super Bowl is an artificial world; you don’t need that pointed out by now. The assembled media should want to go Big Narrative since this is the only thing people still watch together. Inside those white lines, though, the Al Pacino Any Given Sunday speech about fighting for that inch rings true. The critical path comes in feet and inches, until it gushes wide open.

I watch all kinds of football, both sides of the border, from the summer solstice till midwinter. So I might be the only one whose muse is obscure offensive-line alumni trivia.

Both Super Bowl franchises have had a starting guard not only from a Canadian school from each half of what was once the oldest football rivalry in North America. The first is relatively recent: Dr. Laurent Duvernay-Tardif (McGill), who earned a Super Bowl ring with 2019 Kansas City before moving on to medicine. The other is Mike Schad (Queen’s Golden Gaels), who played on the Eagles O-line in the Randall Cunningham days from 1989 to ’93.

If you play Immaculate Grid, Duvernay-Tardif is your guy for someone who played for Kansas City and the New York Jets. Schad is your guy for someone who played for the Rams and Eagles. He is also the first, only, and last player from a Canadian university team drafted in the first round of the NFL Draft, which seems unfathomable and somehow overlooked.

I have been itching to share a fascination with a bit of football of Mike Schad at Queen’s, when his coaches just might have decided to troll their corner of the football world by reminding them that the running game still mattered.

No, it doesn’t have anything to do with the Super Bowl. But it’s about brilliant coaches departed you should know, Doug Hargreaves and Bill Miklas, and how they used a niche offence to show the pro scouts that his big boy could run. And there is a non-zero chance that members of The Tragically Hip, including Gord Downie, saw it unfold, and might have been amused by it. Why? It was fun, it was a touchdown for their Big Yellow Guys and one of the band was raised by a teacher-coach, Tic Langlois, whose life’s work featured making sports fun.

I was too young to be there, but this is about Kingston folklore, and it’s about folklorin’ time that someone pulled the pieces together.

First, though, I read something reassuring about that Eagles offensive line that blocks for Barkley, quarterback Jalen Hurts, and change-up back Kenneth Gainwell.

ii. Stoutland, Pa.

We have more stats and predictive models they can throw at you like so much pocket sand. Stats are outcomes, ah-duh, and outcome-based thinking is unhealthful. What we want is to know why to buy in, why to follow someone.

A first principle in football followship is that lines win championships. Another, gleaned from the modern bible of NFL life by former Broncos tight end, Nate Jackson, Slow Getting Up: the position coaches have more effect on the players’ buy-in than the one in charge. They carry the message. They have more time with each group of players in meetings and practices. Their style affects who grasps the system, and who drifts.

Hot take: this is why position coaches and coordinators should be eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame for what they did in those capacities. If they can induct a kicker…

The eternal carrot used to get the big boys to grunt it out on the offensive line, or OL, is that it’s a thinking person’s side of the ball. The malice aforethought is installed, and re-installed, for days on end. Brawn buttressed by brains.

Duvernay-Tardif is not even the only OL of recent vintage who has “Dr.” ahead of his name. There was also mathematician Dr. John Urschel, who played three seasons for the Ravens, who are perennially one of the best rushing teams.

A simple search turned up an article about “secrets behind decade of Eagles’ offensive line dominance.” The current crew is centre Cam Jurgens, guards Landon Dickerson and Mekti Becton, and tackles Jordan Mailata and Lane Johnson. Mailata is Australian, so sure, we can talk about Canadians who have played on the line in the NFL.

The writer, Ryan Dunleavy, drew people into how the Eagles and offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland thought about how to teach their athletes. Rather than just spouting ‘you’re expected to know this’ bromides, they got to brass tacks with how people learn, absorb, and play with agency and autonomy, instead of just doing what they interpret someone else wants of them.

I’ll blockquote out a long part of it:

Sometime early in Jeff Stoutland’s tenure as an offensive line coach — long before he was considered the NFL’s best position coach — the Eagles brought in a Philadelphia-based elementary school teacher to share some best practices for learning. This is the origin point for the “cold-calling” method that Stoutland uses to keep his 300-pounders on their toes during meetings.

The premise is that asking a question and then calling on a random student keeps the entire audience engaged, whereas asking a question to one person allows others to tune out.

… Stoutland, now in his 12th season, starts every offensive line meeting with his “dirty dozen” list of 12 pop-quiz questions.

“Now everyone is on the hook,” Stoutland said. “If you take every question you ask throughout the week and stack it up, and times it by the number of guys in the room, bingo! You just got so much more done.”

For example, if the Eagles call this play to the right side against this defensive alignment, what technique do you use, Jordan Mailata?

“It’s something they use in law schools,” the left tackle Mailata laughed. “Do we look like we’re in law school?” (New York Post, Feb. 6)

Sports writing, on the regular, should just give one piece of the puzzle. It’s not always possible with limited access, or the way consumers have become galaxy-brained transactional. But I still want to know why one group of carefully selected pro athletes function better wholly than another who have essentially the same physical specs.

To what extent can they neutralize Kansas City’s big defensive lineman, Chris Jones? I have no idea. The answer comes on Sunday.

iii. Just mad about Saquon

You could probably stump many football likers by asking who has rushed for the most yards in a Super Bowl in the past quarter century. Given the brilliance of Barkley, it’s not a bad piece of trivia to bring to a Super Bowl party.

Michael Pittman tallied 124 yards for the Buccaneers against the Raiders in the 2002 climax game. No one has gone past the 150-yard mark since Terrell Davis did so with the Broncos five seasons earlier, and I have a semi-amusing where-was-I tale about what I was doing in Kingston. File that away, since it will come back around in the end.

Barkley, in order, has gained 119, 205, and 118 yards in the Eagles’ roughshodding through the playoff bracket. Keep that in mind.

Will it surprise you that Barkley had fewer than 10 rush attempts in each of his only two playoff games with the New York Giants? Or that one of those was a win against my Minnesota Vikings? No, and probably no.

iv. The Father, The Son, and the Holy Gord

I still have to watch The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, the four-hour docuseries directed by Mike Downie, older brother of the late great frontman. It is getting to ‘this is like the time I could have met Mr. T at the mall’ range.

Depression causes procrastination. Another staple play of depression is it makes you think of questions that can never be satisfactorily answered. The past is haven; it can only improve as you selectively edit.

The same month The Hip doc premièred at TIFF, I had a medical issue that made it nearly impossible to sleep soundly. All that rumination brought up thoughts about Kingston, what makes that place tick, and slightly different from other similar-sized Canadian cities. Why it was the place to produce “Canada’s band,” and to wonder what Gord Downie saw that made him pursue art and have a certain worldview. Why the values, why what was valued, was maybe farther along the curve than it is elsewhere within Canada.

There is no knowing. But you can pull threads and weave them together to help understand the present. Gord Downie, born in 1964, straddled generations and consciousnesses that might have honed his sensitivity about how people are affected by war. He was in the generation raised by those who had grown up with the Second World War. He lived in a border city, with a military base and a university, when Canada and the United States had tension about participation in the Vietnam War, and resisters resettled in Kingston. Hell, my troop leader when I was in Beavers in 1984 was a draft dodger.

Damnit, I should have asked people who were around then. That’s that history-from-below piece it is incumbent on us to know.

Hockey, of course, was played big in The Hip catalog — “Fifty Mission Cap,” “The Lonely End Of The Rink,” and “Fireworks.” Come to think of that, that opening verse from the latter, we all squeezed the stick and we all pulled the trigger, is a cloaked reminder of how war and imperialism co-opt all of us. This is why one rejects war and delights in replacing it with games.

Someone who got that is a Kingston legend I appreciated through word-of-mouth reputation. I cannot state authoritatively, but one bio detail with The Hip is that guitarist Paul Langlois was the son of an aforementioned high school coach, at the downtown high school that used to be across the street from Queen’s. All five members of The Hip met at that school, KCVI, or Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute; Downie was the transfer from Ernestown S.S., my old school.

That coach is, as far as this is concerned, the father in this piece. Joseph Adrien Auger Langlois (1938-2024), known as Tic, presents as someone who got school sports. The right reason to do it was to equip you for life.

Just as he went by a three-letter name, Langlois was about “fun” — read his obituary. There are details and hints to form the basis for a well-drawn character. Here was a Franco-Ontarian who came into the world in a family with the same number of children, 12, as there are players on a Canadian football team. You wouldn’t dare make that up. He leveled up through sports and higher education. His obit mentions he arrived at Queen’s when it was known as “a poor man’s university.” Today, the university is a corporate behemoth like everything else, and it would prefer you forget that a certain Space Nazi was enrolled there.

I am cribbing from other people who knew Tic Langlois. Damnit, should have asked; mais c'est la vie des introvertis. Well into the 21st century and his pensioner years, Tic would still coach the KCVI Blues football team, and had them running the wing-T offence.

The wing-T is a misdirection-based scheme that is a last resort for teams without a manpower advantage along the offensive line. Drawn up, it looks like this.

It requires those big behemoth linemen to be nimble and move, to run in space. And, promise, when whatever this is gets there, you will see Mike Schad run, and understand the football minds that set it up, practically to get over a rival on national television when Canadian university football on national television regularly was a thing.

Of course, the trickster has to know the nuances better than the people who play it straight. And Tic had credentials.

In “Fifty Mission Cap,” of course, Downie acknowledges he is dealing in lore — “I stole this from a hockey card.”

In the spirit of that, I have internalized a lot of details about the Queen’s Golden Gaels through other sources. The year I enrolled there, fortuitously enough, professor and football alumnus (linebacker) Merv Daub published a social history of the team.¹ And Kingston was so lucky to be blessed with a great hometown sportswriter, Claude Scilley, in The Whig-Standard.

A trickster must know the nuances even colder than those playing it straight. An anecdote from Claude’s reportage shows Tic knew what he was doing.

In the 1978 football season, when Queen’s had a perfect season and won the Vanier Cup, Claude had the school sports beat. That fall, he consulted with the high school coaches to choose a county all-star team. His article relating this is from is no longer online, but the setup, like a good base running play could vary. Either the consensus had two different players 1A or 1B. Or it was zeroed in one player.

Only Tic Langlois, and Claude Scilley, thought the best high school quarterback in the county was Tic’s quarterback at KCVI: Bob Wright. The same Wright would become a five-season starter for the Gaels under Hargreaves, gracing three conference-champion teams.

If you are reading this, and know Claude Scilley, ask him about Bob Wright. That is his part to tell.

This Mike Schad play happened in the same calendar year The Hip formed. Another fun fact is that the same month — same month, Ronnie! — that Mike Schad was drafted in the first round, April 1986, Downie, Rob Baker, and Gord Sinclair all completed their coursework to graduate from Queen’s.

Who knows if any members The Hip are in the stands for this play, which happens right in front of the student section. It was a Saturday in a party town. They might have had a gig that night.

v. 69, dude.

Toronto Life magazine ran a feature about the early years of The Hip in the wake of No Dress Rehearsal’s première.

There is a group photo, from 1989, when the band signed with MCA Records. Paul Langlois is on the right, wearing his KCVI Blues football jacket.

His jersey number is on the sleeve: 69.

Of course. That’s an offensive lineman’s number that also means something else.

It’s fun to think of one of The Hip being Shoresy some 3½ decades before Jared Keeso created the character. Only in a different town and in a different sport.

Who else wears No. 69? Landon Dickerson, the Eagles’ left guard. Whoa.

vi. Water, Americans, rock, prison

On Live Between Us (1997), the cover is Gord Downie, shot from the back, and it stands in for some of what the small city feels any time it goes against the big city.

Of course, almost everyone thinks they are the small city of that metaphor. Kansas City’s across-the-ocean-of-asphalt neighbour, the Royals, are a small-market baseball team. The NWSL’s Courage don’t have to compete for local ad dollars with the NBA or NHL, since Kansas City lost teams in those leagues decades ago.

And Philadelphia, well, it’s used to being in between cultural / economic powerhouse New York and seat of government, the District of Columbia. Holly Anderson and Spencer Hall wrote about this week in their Channel 6 newsletter

You know what works, despite its own best efforts? Philadelphia, now chugging along in its 343rd year of operation. Become unkillable and do whatever they’re doing.

How does it work? Not even God knows. We're not the kind of imaginary television station who will tell you what the SOUL OF A CITY is about. We have only correlations, so that is what we deal in.

We know that part of that complex of survival behaviors is a dedication to a healthy amount of anarchy, and also caring about a sports team to the point where you have to destroy property or drive a jeep up the steps of an art museum. You can’t and shouldn’t fear that, since a healthy dash of anarchy isn’t an indicator of trouble. Philly's people care enough to climb poles when they shouldn’t, or perhaps fashion pools out of city dumpsters. (Channel 6, Feb. 6; paywall)

What does that have to do with Gord Downie having his back to the camera? I might struggle to voice this. We are so disconnected from the natural world that we think little about how physical geography shapes places. But, LEMME TELL YOU, being truly Kingston in one sense was feeling like your back was to the wall.

Kingston is on the traditional territories of the Anishinabek, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat. It is at the base of where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence River. That made it, holy topicality, a key military outpost when there was well-founded fear the Americans would invade by water or land.

So, you grow up boxed in by the lake and the United States to the south, the granite of the Canadian Shield to the north, and an inflow of people from the major cities. And they put the prisons there for that reason.

Water. Americans. Rock. Prisons. That puts a wrap on how the place could warp someone. It also meant you had a leg up in understanding that equality of opportunity is not shared and shared alike. It raised the bile to quote a first-gen CanRock band, dig in your heels and raise a little hell of your own, even if you generally had a pretty comfortable middle-class lifestyle in Kingston or Amherstview.

Water. Americans. Rock. Prisons. All force multipliers on top of what Thoreau said about wretched desperation.

Would Gord Downie have telegraphed all that? No. Artists give you a metaphor and ask you to do your best to understand. They, after all, make art since they care about people and want them to feel more feels, outside of themselves.

I worry I am not making much sense today.

Greater minds have plumbed Downie’s lyricism, and the mere coincidence I grew up in their corner of the world as their music gained critical-mass popularity by no way validates my opinion. Thinking back though, that cry of “lemmmmmme out!” near the end of “Locked In The Trunk Of A Car” comes across the same way a hockey mum’s “get it out!” bounced off the cinder-block walls of the arena when your team was running around in their zone.

It can’t be obvious, and it can’t be needlessly complicated for its sake.

Artists, like play callers in football, know you have to disguise it, and it better have a rhythm, which is what Paul Langlois, the son of a coach wearing No. 69, provided for the sound of The Hip.

vii. The gap

The great writer Nora Loreto wrote an essay this week you should read. It cuts to the quick about a yawning gap in our identity exposed by the exhaust fumes from all the toxicity spewing from an orifice in the Oval Office.

English Canadians desperately lack culture. In the past four decades, Canada declared itself open for business, obliterating its own cultural production and creating living conditions that are very hard to create in.

Local, vernacular sports are part of culture. Those are often hurting units these days. People are more and more reluctant to go outside and watch people from their walk of life play a game.

The Schad play comes before free trade. It comes on national television too. There were just a few years in Canada where both were possible.

viii. A rivalry whose seed lays dormant

The play comes in a conference playoff game between McGill and Queen’s. Canadian university football is already niche, and hearing that will sound foreign to anyone under 35.

McGill, where Duvernay-Tardif played football and trained to be a doctor, is in Montréal, the largest city in the distinct region of Québec. And Queen’s is in Kingston, Ont., neither Southern Ontario (read: Toronto) nor Eastern Ontario (read: Ottawa).

Throughout the 20th century, excepting wartime pauses, they played each other in football, usually at least twice a season. And in 2000, they just stopped. Queen’s moved to the Ontario conference for all sports.

McGill is the oldest college/university football team in North America. Those Scottish Canadians showed their rules to Harvard men in 1874, and the Americans have done quite a bit with college football in the succeeding sesquicentenary. By 2014, they even had a halfway legitimate playoff system.

Other Scottish Canadians at Queen’s organized a football team just under a decade later. And so a rivalry was born, and sold with ulterior motives when allowable at a university.

The world ain’t like that anymore, and that is fine. That means seeing those who did not get the same opportunity.

Nevertheless, the die was cast. Small school against the big city universities, McGill, and Toronto.

And, however intentionally, one sunny mid-autumn afternoon, Doug Hargreaves and Bill Miklas, if not explicitly, free up their big boy, Mike Schad, to run and show his knee can stand up to the rigours of pro football.

ix. Dr. LDT

Give Duvernay-Tardif, or LDT, all his flowers. The doctor with the Super Bowl ring is a living testament to a Canadian sports system that still allows for someone to become an all-rounder.

In 2020, during the pandemic, LDT opted out of the NFL season and worked as an orderly. He writes, by the way, about his experiences in his book Red Zone: From the Offensive Line to the Front Line of the Pandemic.

It is well worth picking up in order to help confirm how health care should have the patient at the centre. It stands in clear and present contrast to the commodification of care.

The other takeaway is that anyone with the specs for the O-line should stay active in a sport that involves running and lateral mobility. Duvernay-Tardif’s favorite sport in his early teens was badminton. He first played on the defensive line, only moving to offence in his rookie season at McGill.

It is never too late to pick up a new skill.

x. Schad the impaler

At last check, Mike Schad leads a pretty good life in the Philly-South New Jersey area, according to a where-are-they-now article written in 2020.

Some time earlier, I caught up with him about his Gaels days. What I took away from it was that he has eschewed the common tendency to Moneyball everything, even though going from Queen’s to the NFL was so remote. He reminded me, hey, this is a far cry from some FBS football factory; the coaches were teachers first, and the players were true student-athletes. (And, hey, that sport model is free to study for any NCAA member school that truly wants amateurism.)

He had huge praise for his O-line coaches, the Miklas and Randy Edgeworth, who had both been undersized guards in their respective days with the Gaels. Both were also educators.

Miklas was an associate dean in the business school when he wasn’t coaching. He has a field co-named after him at Queen’s. He had, ’twas related, that gentle way in teaching that could help along a player whose confidence faded in and out like a distant radio station. That mien just disappeared during games, where as teammate and teaching colleague Daub once described it, “a slow Slavic rage was just pour forth from him.”

Edgeworth was a public school principal. Guys with that skillset don’t seem to be around as much anymore.

This game in 1984 is at the end of Mike Schad’s first season on the offensive line, at right tackle in the wing-T.

xi. ‘Be flexible’: the Hargreaves way

Since, at this time, I’m a primary-grade-aged child, I don’t know the reasons why Hargreaves put in the wing-T in the early 1980s.

It was the heyday of option attacks south — Oklahoma and Alabama winning national titles with the wishbone; Nebraska blowing teams away with the triple option. It stands to reason that would make it over to Canada.

Hargreaves was, though, fond of saying, “Be flexible — and have a sense of humour.” The wing-T, an ancestor to the modern RPO, or run-pass-option that every team uses, has flexibility built in. And the humour can come from confusing the hell out of opponents if they don’t make the right reads.

And there is also going to be some hilarity, promise, from seeing Mike Schad, who was six-foot-five and 290 pounds when he played in the NFL, beat his own running back to the end zone.

By the early 1980s, the transformation of football from a rushing game to a passing game was accelerating. With the NFL bringing in a suite of rule changes, teams at all levels were starting to sling the ball to all points of the field. The Toronto Argonauts won the Grey Cup in 1983 operating a version of the run-and-shoot offence that would later make it into the NFL and be adapted into every team’s offence.

It was once said of Doug Hargreaves, “when they built the old school, they tore down his school.” That does not mean someone is a stick in the mud, or that they refuse to change. He was a cardigan-rocking coach who hired women, Rita Sue Bolton and Melody Torcolacci, as strength and conditioning coaches. In a span of four seasons, he had a run-based scheme where Schad blocked for the national player of the year-winning fullback, Larry Mohr, then switched to a pro-set so Jock Climie could set a national receiving record.

Again, coincidentally, Hargreaves’s last days were in 2016, around the time The Hip were on that final tour. He went out at 83, a good prime number for the Gaels.

xii. The Quiet Con

Interlude: you have your favorite Hip lyrics. One of mine is The Wherewithal, off (1993).

I always loved that guy / and he’s not on TV anymore.

The guy is “Richard.” Downie was known to introduce the song by saying it was “about Richard Nixon or Richard Dawson, take your pick.”

Is that a misdirection? It is perfectly Gord Downie to say it’s about either an American president or a British-born host of an American game show. It might not be anyone. He might have dropped a bilingual hint. And that’s not anyone is a comment on that lack-of-culture piece Loreto called out this week.

It is also a quiet con. Being in a prison town, such as Kingston, you learn the quiet con. Harmlessly BSing someone to get by. No one is harmed. It is an Eastern Ontario thing. The Hip does it. Norm Macdonald did it. And, by golly, you should do it.

I suspect it’s not meant to refer to anyone in particular. Old-souled Gord Downie would have written that around the time he was 28. It might be about how time comes for everyone, especially since television is so ephemeral and presentist. It’s just a guy who aged out of the television of your imagination.

Of course, this is a post about football, and time is running out to talk about a play from more than 40 years ago.

xiii. 83

Knock yourself out, elsewhere, if you want to read up on the wing-T. This is probably not the truth, but as fiction, it works. The Queen’s coaches of this narrative semi-fiction have set this all up to humble their rival with the bigger enrolment and budget on national television. They also want Mike Schad to have tape showing he’s a big man who can move in pads, and not just when he’s timed in the 40.

This hearkens back to the previous season, 1983. Queen’s had a bit of a Cinderella run to a Vanier Cup berth. It lost both its best back, Mohr, and middle linebacker, Schad, to serious injuries during a one-loss, two-ties regular season. Both star players appeared, with casts, crutches, and a wheelchair, on the sideline during the national championship game against Calgary.

Hargreaves had a healthful skepticism about all of that, expressed in Canada’s national newspaper. Trent Frayne, the great The Globe & Mail sportswriter, wrote a piece since the University of Toronto and Queen’s met in the national semifinal. Hargreaves had a funny line about being “so far out of date I still think the run belongs in football.”

Then his team’s defence went out and shut down Toronto and quarterback Dan Feraday, who had set a conference record for passing yards in the regular season. They scored one touchdown on a snowy field. Any Toronto receiver who ran a route down the sideline in front of that student section got a pew-pew-pew of snowballs. There’s your healthy amount of anarchy!

And, a year later, afforded a national platform again, Hargreaves is going to drive home that a well-coached running game with well-taught players is just as exciting as an offence where a quarterback can pass for 400 yards.

xiv. What is old is new again

Since they have that Cadillac offensive line in front of Saquon Barkley, the Eagles need not overcomplicate it. “Outside zone” is one of their go-tos. Picturing it, Saquon Barkley is the lone running back, either next to Hurts in the shotgun set alignment, or behind him for the pistol alignment. On the snap, the linemen will move brutally and laterally, like they learned how to shuffle in a badminton class. They try to seal off the defenders. Barkley makes one cut and thunder-sprints toward the end zone for a touchdown.

The defence also has to honour Hurts pulling the ball to rush the other way, or pass.

They are historically good at doing this. The Eagles are among a handful of teams that have cleared 3,000 rushing yards in a season.

The hell of it is, it’s not like it’s a new play. It’s just basically like an old-school power sweep, or the Student Body Right, or Left. Just massing blockers and hoping the defence gets bored or tired, do not dig out, and then the running back is off to the races.

xv. Live on TSN

A gap in my own knowledge is not knowing how much reach, or carriage, TSN had in its first months on the air.

The sports network launched on Sept. 1, 1984. Exactly nine weeks later, viewers across Canada would have seen these graphics:

The entire broadcast is on YouTube. The Gaels and their wing-T exhaust McGill. The final tally is 65-29 with the Big Yellow Guys probably tallying 500-plus rushing yards.

The knee injury in ’83, per Daub’s book, hastened Mike Schad moving from middle linebacker to offensive right tackle. Better to be the chop-blocker.

Midway through the third quarter, it happens. It’s well-executed and astounding all at once. Go to 1:56:58 in the YouTube-age. You will not be sorry.

Schad is the backside tackle as the rusher, Dean Wilcox, goes left, behind pulling guard and soon-to-be Rhodes Scholarship winner Charlie Galunic.

Within 1.5 seconds of the snap, half the McGill defensive front are already out of the play. They can’t get there before this trolling gets a-rolling.

So, Mike Schad is free to run downfield, joining the escort of Big Yellow Guys out front of Wilcox. Four blockers are 25 yards downfield to block the safety. This in a playoff game with enough heat to raise the interest of a national broadcaster.

And since it’s to the left side, with Queen’s moving toward the south end zone of Richardson Stadium, it’s in front of the student section. Just imagine Rob Baker (then known as Bobby), Gord Downie, Gord Sinclair, Paul Langlois, and Johnny Fay enjoying that.

Mike Schad runs 25 yards before Wilcox, a medium-sized running back, catches up to him. And, sixty-five yards from where the play started, Schad brushes a defensive back just enough to make him miss the tackler. He gets to the end zone before Wilcox falls over for the 75-yard score.

An O-lineman running 75 yards. Now that is a long time running. Hope this payoff was well worth the wait.

xvi. Finale

Watch the Super Bowl. Or do not. It is, sorry/not sorry to The Rock, the last watchable football for over four months, and you have the right to enjoy it as you see fit.

In Canada, that means only getting a handful of the overpromising and underwhelming commercials. Personally, it means muting the half-hour-plus halftime show and listening to music I like. Steely Dan and Bob Seger for all!!

Remember the mention of Terrell Davis being the last back to tally more than 150 yards in the Super Bowl?

That takes me back to being young and possessed of confidence. During that 1997-98 NFL competition, this athletics supporter was a wannabe student sportswriter.

There is a multi-season trend toward tighter margins in the Super Bowl. That was not the case in 1998, when the Packers were 11-point favorites and defending champions against the Broncos, who were responsible for three of the 13 consecutive defeats by the AFC representative.

I predicted the Broncos to take’r 27-24 in the pages of our campus broadsheet. You might remember Denver won 31-24, and that, with the score tied and their will and stock of timeouts depleted, the Packers conceded Davis’s go-ahead touchdown.

So close, and yet so far.

So let’s close out on that. The Eagles win 27-24.

Friendly reminder

I post about current affairs in Notes and on Bluesky (n8sager). Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.

Feb. 5-7, 2025
Hamilton and Kingston, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Anishinabek, Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.

1. Gael Force: A Century of Football at Queen’s (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996).