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“No question, we’re as healthy as we’ve been all year righ now, so that’s what you’d like to be this time of year,” said head coach Jason Maas. “I don’t know how rare it is, I’ve only been here one year coaching it, but I feel really good where our team is right now.

“The more bodies you can get out here practising, the better, and particularly the calibre of guys that are here right now practising. To have most of us out here at the end of the year is something special and hopefully that means we’re going to win.”

It was a concerted effort by the Eskimos to play whatever post-season hand they were dealt once there was no longer any chance of hosting a home playoff game.

And while the goal was always to beat the Toronto Argonauts and finish the regular season with a winning record – which they did – the focus shifted to getting players as healthy as possible for a strong playoff push.

“If it was a game where you were going for second place or going to be able to seed yourself a little bit differently, we don’t look at it (like that),” Maas said ahead of Saturday’s 41-17 win. “We were either playing the semifinal out west or the semifinal out east. We’ve beaten Hamilton, we’ve beaten B.C. We’ve lost to Hamilton, we’ve lost to B.C.”

No one who has played through an entire regular season of football is 100% healthy come playoffs. But for Watkins, there wasn’t a point during the season where he ever wasn’t hurt.

A knee injury in training camp forced him to spend his entire season playing through pain, right up until he couldn’t anymore and had to sit out the last two weeks.