Down by seven points inside the final three minutes in their week seven game against the Montreal Alouettes, the Ottawa Redblacks were driving down the field and looked poised to tie the game. After taking the snap from Montreal’s 19-yard line, Caleb Evans found Darvin Adams wide open in the endzone, and hit him right in the hands with a pass. Adams bobbled the ball before it fell to the ground incomplete. Ottawa went on to lose, dropping a game Evans thought they had just tied.
“Yes,” Evans said when asked if he thought the Redblacks had tied the game during his post-game interview.
“As bad as everybody else wanted me to catch it, I wanted to catch it more,” Adams said, written by Postmedia’s Tim Baines. “I let a lot of people down — myself, my teammates, the coaches, the fans.”
After the game, Redblacks head coach Paul LaPolice made it clear that Adams’s drop alone wasn’t the reason the Redblacks lost the game 40-33. Outside of the drop, Adams had a big night, hauling in nine passes for 118 yards and a touchdown, scoring his first major as a member of the Redblacks.
“I told the players, it’s not one play that wins or loses the game, we dropped a ball in the endzone early in the game too,” LaPolice said. “We’re all in this together with the win or the loss. Sometimes [a drop] will happen to guys.”
Evans, in just his second season in the Canadian Football League, has been forced into game action thanks to Jeremiah Masoli’s injury. Against Montreal, Evans turned in arguably his best performance to date, completing 25 of his 40 passes for 297 yards and a touchdown, while rushing for 52 yards and two touchdowns. For a quarterback who is just 23 years old, it would be easy to lose a little bit of trust in Adams after the drop, but Evans is putting it out of his mind, and still holds complete faith that Adams is going to catch every ball he throws his way.
“I never have distrust with any of the receivers because they make so many plays for me,” Evans admitted. “They are veteran guys, and they pick me up when I’m down. It’s my job to pick them up when they are down. That’s our relationship, and it never falters as far as how I feel about throwing them the ball.”
In his career, Adams has scored 41 touchdowns, but his thoughts this week were about the one he didn’t score. Evans, however, isn’t worried about that anymore and has already turned the page. He says that he enjoys throwing to Adams, and you can expect a whole lot more of it this week in Toronto.
“He makes it easy,” Evans said of his second-leading receiver when it comes to yards. “He gets open a lot, and he’s a big target, so it’s not hard throwing it to him. He knows how to find a way to get open, and he has that veteran leadership. He’s just a good guy.”
“This game, [Adams] is going to be getting a lot of targets and he’s going to make a lot of catches, just like he did last game,” Evans said.
Week seven didn’t go as the Redblacks would have hoped, as evident by their 0-6 record to date, but there were signs of life in the offence. They amassed 482 yards of offence and scored three touchdowns, offering a foundation for them to build on. Still, there are things to clean up, and Evans says his team is focusing on them ahead of their trip to Toronto.
“It’s the same thing I make of it every week,” Evans said. “There were good things and bad things, and I’m always trying to get better. I can look at the good things, but I always want to look at the bad things so I can get better.”
“The positives were that we moved the ball, we were scoring. We didn’t finish in the red zone as much as we wanted to, but we were moving the ball pretty well. We just have to finish.”
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