As the Varsity Blues football team marched onto the York Stadium field on Oct. 3 to take on the Lions, they passed two mascots, a drum ensemble, a paid hype-woman, and a male dance troupe that dwarfed U of T’s entire cheerleading squad. A raucous crowd of 1,155, mostly dressed in Lions red, jeered as the Blues took their place for the opening kickoff. On the opposite end of the bleachers, a small but equally strident contingent of Blues fans—led, of course, by the engineers—blared their horns and, between plays, chanted, “If you can’t go to college, go to York.” The Lions took their place on the field after the coin-toss, signaling the start of the grudge match between the cross-town rivals. The stage was set. The game was on. The fans roared.
If you closed your eyes for a moment, you’d almost swear they were cheering for good teams.
They weren’t, of course. The 45-27 win is U of T’s only victory so far this year, as the Blues (1-5) suffered a crushing defeat against the McMaster Marauders the following Thursday. Coming into the game against York, the team was 0-4 on the season, a record that includes a couple of anemic offensive showings against Windsor and Wilfrid Laurier. And while the victory over the Lions—who went winless last season—offered some consolation, it did little to reassure, as the Blues repeated many of the same mistakes that saw them spend the better part of the last two seasons as bottom-feeders.
“There’s still a lot of things that we’re doing that we need to correct,” said Blues head coach Greg DeLaval. “We really need to clean up the mental errors. Other teams would chew us up.”
Quarterback Jansen Shrubb, a Queen’s University graduate and U of T MBA student, made his first start of the season in the York game. He threw for 321 yards on 20-for-31 passing, a particularly impressive feat considering he sat in favour of rookie Jordan Scheltgen for much of the fourth quarter.
Shrubb got the call again later in the week against McMaster, throwing an impressive 250 yards in a losing effort. So far in the season, Shrubb has completed 77 passes, good enough for fifth amongst the OUA’s most accurate passers. Third-year Andrew Gillis, the Blues’ starting pivot for the first half of the season, did not dress for either game.
In both matches, U of T’s rushing game was notable for its absence. Without an effective running back, the team has had to rely primarily on the passing game, which only blossomed with Shrubb’s play as of late. The team’s leading rusher for the first six games of the year, despite competing in just four of them, is quarterback Andrew Gillis.
The Blues host the Waterloo Warriors this Saturday, in their final home tilt of the season. It was a victory over Waterloo that saw the Varsity Blues snap their 49-game winless drought last season. Both teams will enter the match with identical 1-5 records, with Waterloo coming off a 43-21 trouncing at the hands of the first-place Queen’s Golden Gaels.
