REGINA — While the Saskatchewan Roughriders and Calgary Stampeders were going through the waiting game last Friday evening, defensive back Jaxon Ford had a single goal — stay ready, no matter how long the wait might be.
As it turns out, the Regina product not only kept his focus throughout the evening, he managed to take it to another level some 15 hours later when the Canadian Football League contest actually took place at Mosaic Stadium.
Ford would end up as the CFL’s top special team player for Week 6, grading out at 84.6 on the Pro Football Focus scale, which uses metrics to analyze players and assign a score from 0 to 100.
“I didn’t even know that,” Ford said. “I come in day in, day out and do my job to the best of my ability, but I'm happy with the performance. I thought I played well, but we didn't get the W, so lots to work on from everyone.”
With everything that was going on with air quality concerns in the lead-up to Friday’s postponement, Ford said the team did what they could to be ready for when the time came to play — even when that ended up being over half a day later.
“We were staying locked in, being ready for the potential chance to come out and put on a show for the fans and play,” he said.
Interestingly enough, Ford put together his performance despite wearing a cast on his right hand one final game as he recovers from a bone bruise on his knuckle. It’s another piece of bad luck on the injury front for the former Regina Rams standout, but one he was happy to be able to play through this time around. That dedication to the cause didn’t go unnoticed by head coach Corey Mace and his teammates.
“We want to champion those efforts,” Mace said. “It’s not easy to execute your job if you’re playing with a club but the value he brings to this team, having him out there, we saw the value.
“He’s been playing pretty damn good even with it,” he added. “You expect when the thing comes off he’s going to be an even better version of himself.”
As well as things went for Ford on a personal level, the defence as a whole had a rough afternoon, giving up 548 yards of total offence, more than half of that in the opening 30 minutes. As one might except, fixing some of the issues that caused that to happen will be a focus in the lead-up to their contest against the B.C. Lions on Saturday in Vancouver.
“We got to clean up the little things,” Ford said. “When it comes down to playing defence, it's the little things. So we got to pay attention to those little details and work as a unit… watch lots of film and clean up those [missed assignments] that we had last game."
Game time for Saturday’s contest at B.C. Place is 5 p.m. Teagan Witko, Justin Dunk and Wes Cates have the pre-game show at 2 p.m. Dave Thomas and Luc Mullinder have the game call at 5 p.m. You can hear everything on the 620 CKRM Co-operators Rider Broadcast Network.
– with files from Riderville.com