Article content continued

“Well, we needed two scores, there were two minutes to go in the game, so to me you’re wasting time, particularly when you want to have an opportunity to pin a team deep with a defence that you know can get a stop,” Maas said at Commonwealth Stadium following Sunday’s practice.

“You give yourself a better opportunity (to score the tying touchdown) on offence if you have more time and better field position. So that’s what we’d decided to do and it worked. We just didn’t finish on offence to make it to where we could get a win out of it, but obviously you can see that the strategy does work. It’s just a matter of calling it and believing in it.

“As a person that’s making tough decisions, you have to believe in what you call, and when you do that, you’ve got to own it. That’s what we do.”

Of course, he opened the door to such criticism back in the 2017 West Division final, when a field-goal decision didn’t turn out nearly as well.

Trailing 32-25 to the Calgary Stampeders with two minutes left, Maas made the curious call to kick a 20-yard field goal on third-and-four. The Eskimos never got the ball back for a chance at the go-ahead touchdown, instead losing by those remaining four points.

This time, it was a different story. While you can’t get to seven by threes, 10 points is 10 points whether you score the field goal or the touchdown first.

“Two scores is two scores, it doesn’t matter when you get them or how you get them,” Maas said. “There’s different ways of doing it, obviously, but you can’t say that you can’t do it that way and have it work.”