SIMMONS: No repeat Grey Cup for inept and embarrassing Argonauts

Chad Kelly looked like he was about to cry. Perhaps he should have.

His eyes were staring towards the floor. His expression was nearly blank, more blank than usual.

“This loss is on me,” the quarterback said in barely audible tones.

Indeed it was.

The greatest regular season Argos team in history came apart Saturday afternoon, piece by Double Blue piece, mistake by mistake, Kelly turnover after Kelly turnovers in a one-sided, nearly ridiculous 38-17 demolition by the Montreal Alouettes in the Eastern final. This was the kind of Toronto loss that seems to happen only to Toronto.

The 16-2 Argos went down without a fight. The Blue Jays went down in the playoffs with barely a hit or a run scored. The Maple Leafs go down, post-season after post-season, with nothing to explain their annual exodus.

But this one seemed worse because of the team’s record, because of how easily they won throughout the season. This for an Argos team that showed everything in the best season in club history, then nothing when it mattered most.

Kelly picked the worst possible day to play the worst he’s ever played as a CFL quarterback: An epic season ending in epic collapse in front of a record-breaking crowd of 26,620, and that’s Toronto sports acting so Toronto on an occasion that, frankly, deserved better.

Was it the worst game he’s ever played?

“You tell me,” he answered. But really he had no answer during the game or after it.

Kelly needed to be better. Coach Ryan Dinwiddie needed to be better. The special teams needed to be better. The Argos were out-schemed, out-smarted, out-coached, out-played, in the trouncing by the Als. Toronto turned the ball over nine times, which is what they would normally do in about half a season.

It’s hard to believe — nine turnovers.

Kelly threw four interceptions, two of them returned for touchdowns. He lost the ball on a fumble another time, lacking pocket awareness. Three times the Argos gambled on third down, twice on quarterback sneaks in which Kelly — not the usual sneak man Cameron Dukes — came up short.

And this Thursday, Kelly will travel to a casino in Niagara Falls where he will almost certainly be named Most Outstanding Player in the CFL and Dinwiddie will be probably be with him and be named Coach of the Year. And by then they couldn’t possibly have gotten over the magnitude of this stunning defeat.

How could they in just a matter of days?

How could any Argo, knowing this team had the most wins in CFL history, knowing what happened to the 16-2 Edmonton Eskimos of 1989, knowing that a spot in next Sunday’s Grey Cup in Hamilton was on the line, accept this terrible thrashing? It was that one-sided, that complete by the Als, that inept by the Argos, who clinched a spot in the playoffs several weeks ago and on Saturday paid a heavy price for not playing their regular lineup throughout most of the second half of the season.

Dinwiddie needs to do a deep study on what he left behind here and how he mismanaged the team into this playoff game. Kelly needs to comprehend what it was that made him so great during the season and so clueless on Saturday. He threw an early pick-six, an inaccurate sidearm toss, and frankly, never seemed to recover from it.

Missing from this game was his usual field awareness, his boldness, his moxy, his gambling style, his ability to turn nothing into something big, all that made him a finalist for MOP. The Argos were defending Grey Cup champions but this team was supposed to be better: Their victory last season was more than a shock.

Their defeat Saturday was beyond stunning.

And by the time the third quarter rolled around, the Argos were somehow still in the game — the beauty of the CFL, it’s hard to be out of any game — the players turned the area around Kelly on the bench into something a football reception line.

One by one, the veteran players came by to talk him while his defence was on the field, to try and calm him down, to try and make him understand that he didn’t have to do everything himself, which was self- and team-defeating against Montreal. But Kelly never found his footing, his passing accuracy, his way of rolling out and taking off.

He couldn’t do any of that from start to finish. The only major scores on offence came in the fourth quarter after the Alouettes softened to let clock run on defence.

Nine turnovers in a championship game, in front of a record crowd, with a team that didn’t lose at home season, is beyond explanation. There may be no equivalent to compare it with.  Said Dinwiddie of his quarterback: “He’s hurting. We’re all hurting.”

He called the loss “embarrassing.”

Embarrassing was being nice. This was as bad any game could be,  any defeat. The quarterbacking. The coaching. Just about everything. The Argos sacked Cody Fajardo seven times and lost. That’s probably never happened before in a playoff game.

No Argo team had ever been 16-2 in the East before. No team in the East has ever finished 16-3 before. This was historic, yesterday, for all the wrong reasons.

ssimmons@postmedia.comtwitter.com/simmonssteve