Largest crowd of the season for Redblacks-Alouettes showdown

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The Ottawa Redblacks are like the most famous line from the old Field of Dreams classic: If you build it, he will come.

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The ‘it’ in this case, is a legitimate Grey Cup contender.

Despite last Saturday’s loss in Hamilton, Fanduel has the Redblacks with the fourth-shortest odds (+750) to win the coveted, 115-year old championship mug.

With a 14-54 record in their previous four Canadian Football League seasons, they entered the 2024 campaign tied with Calgary and Edmonton as the longest longshots at +2000.

It’s no coincidence that, for Saturday’s titanic matinee showdown with the first-place Montreal Alouettes, the Redblacks (8-4-1) had sold approximately 21,000 tickets as of Thursday afternoon.

That means they will have their largest crowd since 2019.

“We’ve got about 3,000 left right now,” Redbacks president Adrian Sciarra said while taking in practice from the sidelines. “But many of the lowest prices are sold out.”

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If capacity isn’t reached, it’s likely because folks backed away from the top-priced tickets in the $140 range.

“The velocity has not slowed down,” Sciarra said of sales. “When we ran out of 25 (dollar tickets), it kept going. We ran out of 30, it kept going. Ran out of 40, it’s kept going. We’re just watching to see if all of a sudden we get to a threshold where people go, ‘OK, I’m a casual fan, now I’m priced out.’”

Recognized factors that have kept the crowd down since the Redblacks played in the 2018 Grey Cup game include a slow return from COVID-19, bad weather and even worse football.

But now the Redblacks are among the elite, thanks largely to a 6-0-1 home record that’s the best in the CFL.

It’s a surprise, in fact, that, on Sept. 21, week 16 of the schedule, their largest crowd to date is the 20,000 that attended the Canada Day-eve game against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

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“Ticket sales were climbing,” Sciarra said. “And the setback, attendance-wise was the (Sept. 7) Toronto game, and I attribute that to the weather because we were trending to have a much bigger game that would have been the best of the season year to date. But then the weather just really hurt us.”

Still, with a capacity of 24,000 and an unbeaten home record, shouldn’t we have witnessed a sell-out or two by now?

“I don’t take it as a negative,” Sciarra said. “We’re going to sell more casual tickets for this game, this weekend, than we’ve ever sold in our history. The reality is we have a smaller season-seat base. So, when you rely on casual tickets, there’s still only so many people who will buy a ticket for one game on a game day, right?

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“When I look at that, you know what encourages me right now? I expect our renewal rates on our season seats will be strong in this offseason. Hopefully we’ll start to rebuild the season-seat base, and then you become less reliant on casual tickets, which weather has such a big impact on. So, I see lots of reasons for optimism. We are seeing things moving in the right direction, absolutely.”

NEXT MAN UP: For the hottest ticket in town, Bennett Williams has earned himself a not-so-uncomfortable hot seat.

After bouncing back and forth from the practice roster to a halfback spot in the Redblacks’ defensive secondary for most of the season, the 25-year old rookie from Campbell, Calif., will line up at the strongside linebacker spot as Ottawa hosts the Alouettes in the titanic clash at TD Place on Saturday afternoon.

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That role had belonged to Adarius Pickett, the heartbeat of the Redblacks defence and the team’s emotional leader, before he suffered a season-ending ruptured Achilles last weekend in Hamilton.

“We’re more than comfortable with the guys who are playing,” head coach Bob Dyce said Thursday when asked about the rash of injuries that has hit the Redblacks down the home stretch of the regular-season schedule.  “We just got to make sure all 12 of us are on the same page. That’s our strength.

“We obviously feel very good. When you look a guy like Bennett Williams, he’s come in and had to play halfback, so it’s not like he’s jumping in and playing real defence for the first time. Now he’s just sliding into SAM, which was his natural position. So you’re comfortable in that area.”

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Even if he’s about to play his first game as a pro at the linebacker spot, against a team that’s regarded as the best in the league.

“They’re definitely a good team. We know what they want to do,” Williams said of the 10-2-1 Alouettes. “Losing Pickett is a huge, just the way he played. There’s nobody like him. And I’m not coming in trying to do what he does exactly. I’m not going to be able to replace him. I’ve got to play my own game and fit into the system. You know how that goes, and how that works.

“Obviously, I’m watching some tape on what he was doing, to try and pick up some stuff, and how he likes to play things, and get a jump on some stuff. But it’s going to be a whole collective effort as a defence. We’ve got to pick it up. All of us have got to communicate and talk so that we’re all on the same page. We can all play fast.”

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Interesting fact about Williams: He was teammates with Redblacks quarterback Dru Brown on a Pop Warner football team. Williams was nine and Brown was 11 in their first of three seasons together.

“We started as the Campbell Wolverines, and then we switched to the Campbell Bears,” Williams recalled. “And we ended up going to the Super Bowl in Florida our last year, playing together. We were successful, for sure.”

Why go from Wolverines to Bears?

“We were purple and white … Our uniforms were horrible,” Bennett said with a laugh. “We had to make the switch.”

THE BIG CATCH: Ottawa receiver Justin Hardy is having a better season than many people likely recognize.

Yeah, he sits second in CFL receiving yards with 1,013 in 13 games, which is 156 fewer yards than league-leader Justin McInnes has in 14 games.

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Last season, Hardy reached the 1,000-yard mark in the last game of the season. This year he hit the triple-digit milestone in the sixth-last game.

That means with five games left, Hardy needs just 447 yards to break Greg Ellingson’s all-time Redblacks record of 1,459 yards (in 2017), and 459 yards to break former Rough Rider Gerald Alphin’s Ottawa pro record of 1,471 receiving yards.

Jason Armstead holds the record (1,307 in 2005) for the short-lived Renegades.

“It definitely means something to me,” the 32-year old Hardy said of back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons. “Offseason work is coming to show, coming to life, during the season. I hang my hat on that, having a great offseason and just coming in and try to be better than I was last season.”

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As for surpassing McInnes, as well as Ellingson and Alpin, Hardy said: “I come out every day and want to put my best foot forward. If those stats come, they come. If they don’t, I’m not going to say I had a bad season, but I’m not really thinking about that. I just want to do whatever I can do to make team win.”

SIGN OF THE TIMES: The Redblacks have inked starting left guard Drew Desjarlais to a contract extension running through the 2026 season. The 27-year-old native of Belle River, Ont., has been with Redblacks for the past two seasons after spending the first two seasons of his career winning Grey Cups with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. “Since Drew arrived in Ottawa, he has demonstrated the leadership qualities and high-end ability that have made him one of the top offensive linemen in the CFL,” Dyce said in a statement. Said Desjarlais: “I’m grateful for the opportunity to stay in Ottawa and continue to build on the success we’ve had this year.”

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