The football team’s season lost some statistical prestige during Saturday’s game against the Laurier Golden Hawks. The Gaels are no longer the only undefeated team in Canada and quarterback Danny Brannagan is no longer the Canadian all-time passing leader.
The 25-13 loss was the Gaels’ first regular-season defeat since Oct. 6, 2007 against the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees and the first time Brannagan’s pass-yardage total was shadowed by the Western Mustangs quarterback Michael Faulds in the race for the record.
Before the game, Brannagan was 124 yards ahead of Faulds and 31 yards shy of the existing CIS record set by McGill’s Matt Connell last season.
Brannagan’s time as the record holder was short-lived. An announcement by Laurier Athletics said Brannagan had surpassed Connell with a 23-yard pass to Scott Valberg early in the second quarter.
But Brannagan’s 279 yards on the day wasn’t sufficient to extinguish Faulds’ campaign, who passed for 550 yards against the University of Toronto on Saturday to claim the title.
Brannagan said he’s happy the record has been set.
“I’m very glad the regular season’s over so that people can concentrate back on football,” he said.
Despite media attention surrounding the game and its record-rewriting potential, Brannagan said it wasn’t on his mind.
“You prepare for it the same way,” he said. “Some seem to have more meaning than others but I can’t change the way I approach a game.”
Brannagan and the Gaels’ offence never had a lead against the Golden Hawks established a one-point lead in the opening seconds when the opening kickoff bounced past Gaels’ returner Jimmy Allin for a rouge.
The game’s outcome doesn’t affect the Gaels’ possession of first place in the OUA or their playoff spot, but Gaels’ centre Dan Bederman said there wasn’t a lack of motivation.
“When we’re losing, we see the score and we see our name under some other teams, and we’re upset,” he said. “We realized we’re not invincible.”
By half-time Queen’s was trailing Laurier 18-6, after a Gaels touch-down attempt was intercepted by Laurier’s Scott McCahill on the goal line. McCahill ran it back for a 110-yard touchdown.
Head coach Pat Sheahan said the interception was a defining moment in the game.
“If you want to think of one play as the TSN turning point, it was the interception.”
The interception was one of three on the day for Brannagan, who also endured seven breakups on attempted passes.
Sheahan said the offensive indiscretions affected the team’s attitude.
“We got a little frustrated,” he said. “Those things can be disruptive and Any time you have an offence that gets disrupted, bad things will happen.”
The wind added another element, intensifying in the second half to pit Gaels against it in the third quarter and with it in the forth. Sheahan said he kept Brannagan in for the full game to win the game, not to achieve the all-time CIS passing record.
“Greatness usually comes when you’re trying to do something else,” he said. “To go out there and pass for records, you’re going to get hurt.”
The scores in Saturday’s games throughout the OUA could have played out in 17 different ways. The scenario that occurred means Queen’s will play the Guelph Gryphons, the McMaster Marauders, or Ottawa in the OUA semi-finals.
Sheahan said Saturday’s game in Laurier was a sobering prelude to the playoffs.
“We’re not that much better than anyone else that we can afford to go out and have an 80 per cent effort,” he said. “We won two games by a single point. We won another one by a field goal. A few bounces and it could have been a 4-4 season.”
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