Laurier looks like a Laval slayer in the Vanier Cup, but remember, it's Laval.

It is Ontario vs. Québec. It is the Golden Hawks on a heater with a superb quarterback against the Rouge et Or powerhouse tied to cold realities of the uneven playing field in Canadian football.

When Laurier keeps Taylor Elgersma upright and performs certain other football tasks, they resemble other Ontario football teams that have taken down Laval with style, over the years.

The Vanier Cup got the anticipated Ontario-Québec matchup, and it is in Kingston, Ont., a rough midpoint between the two competing schools. We will see whether Laurier’s touchdown thresher is built to slay Laval.

As it stands, the Golden Hawks get tenuous-favorite status: 3½-point favorite, the industry standard for the team that looks the part but has not done it yet.

In one corner, the Laurier Golden Hawks and their decorated quarterback, Elgersma, are coming off successive half-a-hundred heaters, and aim for their first national championship in 18 seasons. The Laval Rouge et Or, habitual winners, represent the cold, grim realities of the playing field’s unevenness in Canadian sports. Eleven Vanier Cup titles in 24 seasons? Maybe try another league? The rivalry with Montréal is massive, but it must be boring beating those other three teams twice a season, even McGill.

Should be a good one on Saturday (1 p.m. ET, CBC platforms, TVA Sports). It’s not my job to sell it. Obvious pop-culture motif may seem obvious. Laval could slide into being the Dark Side. Laurier would be the Jedi, but remember, the Jedi don’t play football. They play Manuku. 

If you favor high-scoring, creative, throttle-down football, the Michael Faulds-coached Golden Hawks are your horse in this race. When their earth-movers dig in —  i.e., the offensive line of centre Kodi Blackshaw, guards Lambert Pomerleau and Josh Rietveld, and tackles Cooper Hamilton and Spencer Walsh — then Elgersma and his offensive ensemble roll up points and yards like a stock ticker. They did it to Western and Queen’s twice apiece. In the Yates Cup against Western, they scored 50-plus points in under 50 minutes.

Laval has two wide-bodied interior D-linemen, Yoann Maingué (6-5, 310, age 26) and Zaac Leclerc (5-11, 298, age 23). They occupy an offensive line’s attention and open blitzing lanes for the likes of edge rusher Loïc Brodeur. And, hey, Bishop’s undersized front seven had four sacks against Laurier on Saturday.

Otherwise, Michael Faulds-coached Laurier’s national semifinal win against Bishop’s was just advertising. Elgersma passed for 447 of his 452 yards in the first three quarters, and wide receiver Ryan Hughes tallied 212 yards and three touchdowns in just 2½. And Laurier was missing injured all-Canadian receiver Raidan Thorne.¹

And, it feels kismet their chance is coming in Kingston, since Laurier has some unique history there.

An offensive battle is an appealing prospect. The total in 6 of the last 7 Vanier Cup contests involving Laval exceeded 50 points. When they have to, the Rouge et Or can go up and down the field and riddle an opponent with a run-pass mix.

Of course, unless you eat the coaches’ tape professionally or as a serious hobby, it is always an open question of how an Ontario University Athletics (OUA) team will stack up against Laval or the Montréal Carabins. Across their 11-0 run, Laurier has looked like a wrecking crew. Historically, les mastodontes du Québec, Laval and Montréal, have won 9 of their last 12 late-November showdowns against OUA teams.

That comes back to investment and a sports model that brings more finished players to the Rouge et Or. Their rookies are 20 or 21 years old, not 18.

Québec has a better approach to supporting football players. More focus on grassroots, a strong feeder system with CEGEP, and bigger budgets create older, more experienced rosters. The problem is that such a fecund football hotbed is far too concentrated on two teams in a five-team league. If it fed up to an eight-team conference, with a Big Four and Little Four, sure, that would be great.

How does that show up on the field for Laval? By being huge and imposing on both lines and quick-closing on opposing ball carriers, as one would expect when 23- and 24-year-olds are lining up against athletes two or three years younger.

The long tail of the 2020 COVID pause stretched out a lot of early lives. Perhaps it has helped Laurier somewhat close the gap in development time. However, they will be up against a team that reloads every spring; Laval’s X factor is that their rookies are more polished. They have already had ‘advanced placement’ football classes in CEGEP.

Most of the time, the Rouge et Or have won before the ball is snapped, unless they are playing the Carabins. As a student of history, one can appreciate the bit. A Québec university decides, hey, what if we funded and ran a football team in a made-in-Québec way, and start winning the Canadian university football title practically every other season? It is a way of getting even, for something.

That said, there is bound to be eye-glaze. It just looks like one team hoarding the resources; feel free to analogize. There are probably some subtleties to Laval’s schemes that are lost on me. For the most part, though, it looks like they played just a slightly souped-up version of the BiffBall that the Western Mustangs have been playing, with grudging adaptations, since forever.

Tired: Laval winning national titles in football. Wired: Laval winning a national title in men’s basketball, even with a losing record.

With Dave Smart’s Carleton Ravens basketball dynasty, you could see the intense genius on the sidelines. I see Dave glaring right now, even though he is 5,000 km away coaching the Pacific Tigers in NCAA D1.

Basketball players also are not hidden under helmets and pads, so you could appreciate that it was a new team every year, with Smart’s carefully chosen protégés progressing from followers to secondary leaders to primary leaders, redefining their fun, in the coach’s deathless phrase. And, over time, the women’s basketball Ravens, first through Taffe Charles and now through Dani Sinclair, crafted their parallel winning culture.

Laval probably has fun, too, but from the outside it looks boring and repetitive. Play a regular season that is essentially six scrimmages and a two-leg Dunsmore Cup prologue against Montréal. Who would not get tired of having the same conference final 11 seasons in a row? 

So, the fun only starts when someone pushes them, like the Regina Rams did in the Mitchell Bowl on Saturday. Laval escaped with a 17-14 win after Armand Desjardins and Isaac Gaillardetz hooked up for the winning touchdown with 1:19 left.² Anyone who watched knew the game balls and the accolades deserved to go to the underdog Rams, who almost became the first five-loss team to go to the Vanier Cup.

A shaky semifinal for Laval, in an unfamiliar stadium 3,000 km from home, doesn’t necessarily carry over to this week. Each game is a distinct entity, aside from injuries and other attrition.

That said, when an OUA team gets them, they usually have the same strong points.

A dynamic passing game with a generational quarterback

Laurier has Elgersma, the two-time conference MVP. Beating Laval requires a quarterback who is tough to read and has the arm strength to fit passes into slews of space in Laval’s preferred zone coverage. That kind of QB is traditionally a scarce commodity at this level, and post-Kurtis Rourke at Indiana, the U.S. colleges are going to spirit away a few.

The last three OUA quarterbacks to defeat Laval this late in the season stacked up similarly. 

Western is a running team, ad nauseam — i.e., BiffBall. In 2017, dual-threat QB Chris Merchant added the missing dimension. Western could play ground-and-pound, then Merchant could deliver via his arm or legs. What matters the most in the passing phase is not how often a team throws, but how fast and far it can go when it strikes. In that Vanier beatdown, Merchant averaged more than 11 yards a pop when his pass and rush attempts were combined, and he accounted for 4-of-5 Western touchdowns. The three-touchdown margin flattered Laval, since it had bookend scores in between the Mustangs blowing them out on both sides of the ball.

Six years prior, McMaster had Kyle Quinlan for their scorefest win against Laval on a Friday night in Vancouver, complemented by a good mix of speed (Mike DiCroce) and sizable receivers (Brad Fochesato, Robert Babic). Quinlan ended up with 482 passing yards; on runs, he scissor-kicked over potential tacklers. McMaster, save for one quarter, moved the ball well for the entire game. They had Laval guessing as they first built a 23-0 lead by dicing up the pass defense. They rallied in the fourth quarter, and had the answers in overtime.

And, of course, when Queen’s beat Laval in the 2009 semifinal, they had Danny Brannagan operating behind a near-impenetrable pass-protection group. That Queen’s group, I was told later, never changed their snap count for the entire season. And Brannagan was unfazed by any throw that confronted him as Queen’s picked off Western (twice), Laval, and Calgary to complete their Vanier quest. Laval found him inscrutable, and his receivers — Scott Valberg, Devan Sheahan, Chris Ioannides, Mark Surya, and Blaise Morrison — all performed with a certain inspired confidence that a team gets when it knows it has The QB.

The beauty in Canadian football is the extra element of geometry because of the bigger field. A peak offense stretches out pass defenders horizontally and vertically in unfair ways; there’s no using the sideline or the endline as an extra defender. 

Vertically, it means throwing corner and deep out routes with a high arc. Horizontally, a crossing-route receiver has extra space to turn upfield for an impromptu track meet. It’s aesthetically better football, when the quarterback and receivers are synced.

Laval, traditionally, counters that by playing zone and counting on their pass rush and their ranginess on the back end. There were cracks against Regina, a team that averaged just over 20 points per game in Canada West competition. Quarterback Noah Pelletier was 28-of-44 for 356 yards, all while playing in evident pain due to a left shoulder injury in the previous game seven days earlier.

One goal most defences set is no plays longer than 25 yards, and the Rouge et Or allowed four of 30-plus. Two were pass receptions when Laval got burned by trying to play press-man coverage, where defenders try to re-route receivers immediately.

It is also easier to shut down a team with one or two dangerous receivers. Those 2017 Western, 2011 McMaster and 2009 Queen’s teams were a legit five- or six-deep in receiving and rushing threats. 

And Elgersma and Laurier have projected that, at least for hopeful prognosticators. One receiver, Ethan Jordan, topped 1,000 yards during the eight-game regseason. Thorne is a reigning all-Canadian. Hughes is a deep threat. Instead of being too-reliant on one bell-cow feature back, they rotate Tayshaun Jackson and Tanner Nelmes so that neither takes too many hits. The Golden Hawks also use the H-back beautifully to double-team block and get the details right in the passing phase.

So what does a Laval slayer do defensively?

Add pressure, not coverage

The template for how an OUA team contains Laval was written in 2009 by Pat Tracey and performed primarily by Shomari Williams as part of an ensemble. Presently, those two are the defensive coordinator and football recruiting coordinator-special teams coordinator of the UBC Thunderbirds.

Tracey was in the same role and Williams was playing rush end when Queen’s defeated Laval in the Mitchell Bowl.³ Tracey had his defensive outfit playing confidently and resiliently. Williams racked up 3½ of the Gaels’ eight sacks. The last one was a strip-sack by rookie Frank Pankiewicz — Faulds would remember him — in the last minute that Queen’s Osie Ukwuoma recovered to end the game.

I make no claim to sophistication in understanding what defences do at any level of football. I just simplify that the art is in picking your spot, i.e., when to dial up a blitz, or when to call a defensive-line stunt. The team that causes more disruptions — sacks and interceptions — probably wins. In three-down football, a sack effectively ends a drive.

Longtime Golden Hawks defensive coordinator Ron VanMoerkerke and his coaches will have to get playmakers such as Matteo Laquintana into the right spots to cause havoc.

The version of the Rouge et Or that materialized against Regina looked gettable. They had the ball for fewer than nine minutes during the first half. One slippery slotback, Olivier Cool, who accounted for almost 40 percent of their offence on the day. Desjardins threw a very bad interception in the end zone, and Laval, adding in a red-zone fumble and a goalpost-doinking field goal try, left about 17 points on the field in the second half before course-correcting over the final minutes.

VanMoerkerke has been with Laurier for a long time. Try to picture a defensive mind getting ready to deliver his opus.

The same traits could be read into Western defensive coordinator Paul Gleason in ’17 and then-McMaster defensive coordinator Greg Knox in 2011. The way their groups played suggested they had that pied-piper effect. Good teams, of course, all play the same defence: the good kind.

The bronze Rams

The other team competitions in U Sports give gold, silver, and bronze medals. Would that the Regina Rams could be flown to Kingston, Ont., to pick up some hardware after how they competed against No. 1-ranked Laval.

The Rouge et Or did not get anything off the Rams except by having better physical material.

Regina won Canada West after a 3-5 regular season by playing good defence and what is called complementary football, and almost pulled the audacious upset. After beating Manitoba and Saskatchewan, they looked like giant killers, and one had to love how their cover guys — all-name team candidates such as Chopper Hippe, Brandon Wong, and Jackson Sombach — kept flying in to smash their shoulders into Laval’s rushers, receivers, and returners. Defensive halfback Michael Jourdan ball-hawked two red-zone takeaways, including falling on a fumble forced by Jacob Tkachuk.

It was inspiring, especially since Pelletier was playing through pain and Regina only had three starting offensive linemen for most of the fray. They outgained Laval 424-369, controlled the ball for 36-plus minutes, and were more disciplined, drawing fewer penalties. They played a great game. The crux was beating Laval often requires playing a near-perfect one without leaving points on the field. Regina had three scoring opportunities in the first half, and those resulted in seven points (two field goals, one single) instead of 17 or 21 points.

And, luck and the clock affect football games quite a bit. Regina delivered their beautiful haymaker maybe 90 seconds too early. Speedster Marshall Erichsen ripped through some suspect Laval tackling for a 36-yard rushing touchdown that put Regina ahead with 3:45 left. That represents an eternity in the contemporary game, even in characteristic Saskatchewan weather, and Desjardins had a slew of time to conduct the decisive 11-play, 85-yard drive.

The Rams won the Hardy Cup, so they have something to show for their season. Still, nothing is more Canadian than the bronze medal. Giving one to the semifinalist who had the best or grittiest performance would be a nice gesture, just saying. Hold a ceremony at halftime of the Vanier Cup. It would be especially hilarious if the bronze medallist was the team hosting the game after they lost in the national semifinal the week prior, like Western in 2022.

The copper Gaiters

No one seriously anticipated that the Bishop’s Gaiters were going to end the Atlantic University Sport (AUS) drought in the national semifinals. It now stands at 16 seasons, with an average losing margin of 32.69 points, after the inevitable Laurier win.

Everyone has made their suggestions for realignments and reforms. I have mine, and like everyone else making them, I have neither the capital, connections, or political savvy to make ’em so. There are also only 27 teams spread across nearly 6,000 km at a level of football that has no TV money, so yeah, I’ll take the OVER on stasis.

Until the right wand is waved to change that, the semifinal with the AUS team cannot be covered as a serious game. Use it as a promotional opportunity, sprinkle in colour and human interest, and explain that it is a miracle that a 2,500-student university such as Bishop’s plays football. Help the audience understand that they had a special season. They went 10-0 against Atlantic competition, and their crafty lefthanded quarterback, Justin Quirion, saw their way clear through several white-knuckle contests, including a triple-overtime Loney Bowl. They beat a very game Saint Mary’s Huskies team three times.

The 48-24 scoreline was predictable. It tied for the fourth-closest margin AUS has had at this stage since the last win in 2007. It was also the most points an AUS team has scored at this stage since ’03, when Blake Nill was still coaching Saint Mary’s and they beat Simon Fraser 60-9 in the inaugural Uteck Bowl.

Which, once again, proves Simon Fraser University’s theory: they are too good to play football in Canada. At least Bishop’s scored three touchdowns for auld lang syne, with two receiving from Charles-Edouard Bizier and one when a player named Mason McGriskin blocked a punt and recovered it to score.

That is more than enough for now. It is Grey Cup Sunday, and there were American college football games this weekend, and that will get a post tomorrow.

Please stay safe, and be kind, especially to yourself.

Nov. 16-17, 2024
Hamilton, Ont. : upon traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.

1. The score was 48-24, but it was not that close. Sourced: usports.ca.

2. Sourced: usports.ca.

3. The 2009 Mitchell Bowl is on YouTube. Amazingly, TSN has not copyright-claimed it, perhaps out of shame that they ignore Canadian sports.