Though the Queen’s football season is only starting to take shape, the home opening game against the University of Waterloo Warriors on Saturday afternoon will almost certainly be the most emotional contest on the Gaels’ schedule.
Memories of last year’s contest between the teams are fresh and for the Warriors, no doubt, a sore point.
Queen’s rolled Waterloo 58-18 in the Warriors’ homecoming game on Sept. 20, but it wasn’t the notion of the visitors running up a score that most angered the losing team that day. Rather, it was Gaels linebacker Justin Pace’s hit on Waterloo quarterback Nick Orr that inflamed the home side and supporters.
Orr had to be lifted off the field by stretcher and rushed in an ambulance for emergency surgery for a neck injury. The officials tossed Pace from the game, ostensibly for what they judged a gratuitous hit and celebration over the fallen pivot.
A riot threatened to break out at the venue, causing legitimate fear for the safety of the linebacker if he lingered on the sidelines. It was to the credit of officials, Waterloo coaches, and ultimately the Warriors that the situation didn’t boil over.
U Sports executives suspended Pace for an indefinite term, one that ran the balance of the regular season. Pace did return for the playoffs, however, and was named the MVP in the Gaels victory over Laurier in the Yates Cup final.
Pace has moved on and has landed with the Edmonton Elks, but Orr, who missed the rest of the 2025 campaign, is back with Waterloo for his fifth season.
Orr completed 46 of 80 pass attempts, good for two touchdowns without an interception in his first two games back in the lineup. A two-way threat, he led the Warriors in rushing, picking up more than 70 yards per game on the ground at almost eight yards per carry, scoring two touchdowns.
The Warriors come to Richardson Stadium with a 1-1 record, having lost to the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees 38-28 in Waterloo in Week One and then beating the Carleton University Ravens in the capital 31-26 last weekend.
While Pace’s hit on Orr last season was but a single play in a suspense-free game, it had implications that extended far beyond the day and the principals in the moment. And it might have even carried over to the Gaels’ 2026 season opening 28-12 win over the University of Toronto at Varsity Stadium on Aug. 30.
In that game, officials hit Queen’s with 12 penalties that show up in the boxscore as a loss of 140 yards. That statistic only captures a fraction of the true impact of the calls that day — the gains negated by penalty calls and the losses of downs don’t show up in the accounting. In the mix were at least a pair of penalties for unnecessary roughness that negated big plays for drive-sustaining first downs.
One call before halftime against the Varsity Blues killed an opportunity for at least a Tyler Mullin field goal if not a couple of shots at the end zone. On multiple reviews of the putative infraction, the perpetrator and the nature of the foul couldn’t even be guessed at.
The lighting at Varsity was short of hi-def broadcast quality and maybe a lineman snuck a joke-shop hand-buzzer into the huddle, but on the play, there wasn’t a scrap of evidence of anything beyond the normal run of contact. You have to suppose an official can flag unnecessary roughness on any given play — because in this case one of them did just that.
Queen’s coach Steve Snyder addressed the issue of penalties and discipline when he spoke to the media Thursday.
“Penalty avoidance is something we’ve got to get better at,” Snyder said. “We’ve done a really good job on that the last couple of years. (Last week’s game) wasn’t our best performance in penalty avoidance. That was a major issue to address.”
It was a generic observation, but one that should be teased out. Beyond the balance of the Waterloo game last September, officials working OUA games seemed to give Queen’s little slack on calls in the category of unnecessary roughness and the like. If the Gaels felt they were being held to one standard and others granted leeway, they could build a reasonable case with just the phantom calls in their season opener.
Snyder seemed only somewhat satisfied with his team’s performance against the Blues in Week One.
“At times, we looked like a good football team and at other times, we looked like a team that wasn’t ready to execute,” Snyder said.
That qualified endorsement didn’t ring the way you might expect for a Queen’s team that sat at No. 4 in U Sport’s most recent national rankings, behind top-ranked Montreal, No. 2 Laval and No. 3 Western.
