EDMONTON \u2013 The belief is still strong inside the Elks locker room.<\/p>\n
To a man, you won\u2019t find anyone on the Green and Gold who believes the team\u2019s 1-5 start was to be expected, but ask those same group of individuals and they are resolute in their ability to fight their way out of the hole they\u2019ve found themselves in.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis group is unshaken,\u201d said Elks recently anointed number one quarterback Cody Fajardo. \u201cWe have a lot of great human beings in that room and a lot of great football players.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe message was simple. It\u2019s one third of the season\u2019s over. There\u2019s nothing we can do about the past,\u201d he added, \u201cAll we have right now is two thirds of the season ahead of us, 12 games. We have to take it one week at a time, one win at a time, grind through it. And then at the end of the day, we\u2019re going to look up and see where we\u2019re at in the standings.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The faith inside the room was a point reiterated by Fajardo\u2019s teammate in Mark Korte.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s a very together group,\u201d Korte said. \u201cWe know we\u2019re a good team. The results haven\u2019t been there, but we know that we\u2019ve got good players, we\u2019ve got good coaches, and a good process. So It\u2019ll happen. There\u2019s a lot of faith. Guys are still together, locker room\u2019s in a really good spot. When you\u2019re 1-5, that\u2019s not always given, but that\u2019s what we got right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Elks are coming off a promising showing in Saskatchewan against the CFL\u2019s top-ranked Roughriders. The defence broke out with their strongest performance of the season, holding the CFL\u2019s most accurate passer to his second lowest yardage total of the season and second lowest yards-per-attempt of the season. In addition, the 21 points allowed were the fewest given up by the Double E this season by a large margin, and the cleaning up of a few pass interference penalties could have kept that number even lower.<\/p>\n
On offence, there was some good mixed in with the bad. Even with the limited practice reps, Fajardo was able to lead three drives of over 70 yards \u2014 due in part to his 26 of 33 passing performance for a season high 346 yards.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The biggest sign of improvement was in the possession battle. In 10 of the Roughriders 14 drives, the West Division leaders were held to one first down or fewer, and the time of possession was nearly split (29:56 Elks to 30:04 Roughriders). Where the Elks progress hit a stumbling block was when neither the offence and defence were on the field. Edmonton\u2019s special teams took five penalties for 58 yards, including two no-yards penalties that would end up costing the team possession. Those were a few of the issues identified by Head Coach Mark Kilam, who continues to preach the togetherness that the Elks have exhibited behind closed doors.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there was a lot of things to build on,\u201d The Elks coach said. \u201cIt\u2019s about cutting out that bad football so that we can take the next step as a football team.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next chance at redemption will be Saturday afternoon at Play Alberta Field. The Elks will be in tough with the East Division leading Hamilton Tiger-Cats coming to town. The Tabbies have followed a similar path to the Elks over the last two seasons, which the Elks hope to duplicate. Following a tough 2024 season that began with a winless start and ended with a late season resurgence, the Tiger-Cats started 2025 with a quick 0-2 start. Since then, the Steel City team have now followed it up with five consecutive victories.<\/p>\n
\ufeff<\/p>\n
Now the Green and Gold need to go on their own streak if they plan to stay relevant in the CFL playoff picture, but it all must start on Saturday against Hamilton.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s a path for us,\u201d Fajardo said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get hot obviously, but there\u2019s a path for us. By no means is this season over, and we\u2019re not thinking about that. No matter what the media says, we\u2019re not thinking about that in that locker room. We\u2019re thinking about how we can win the next football game and you\u2019ll see if we find a way to win a game, we\u2019ll catch some momentum.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EDMONTON \u2013 The belief is still strong inside the Elks locker room. To a man, you won\u2019t find…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34639,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[49,48,521,522,520,82],"class_list":["post-34638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cfl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canadian-football-league","tag-canadianfootballleague","tag-cfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}