Riders season over, so now what?

The Saskatchewan Roughriders, coming off their best regular season in a decade, unravelled in their own stadium.

The first playoff game inside two-year-old Mosaic Stadium came to a chilly conclusion Sunday night with a 23-18 loss to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the CFL West semifinal.

Their 12-6 record matched the record of the 2008 Roughriders, a team which also met their demise in the west semi-final inside their own friendly confines.

Interestingly enough, neither team boasted an offence that frightened the opposition, yet both managed to win without. 

That is, until the season was on the line.

You could say the 2018 Riders season came to an end two weeks ago, the night Zach Collaros was torpedoed by the helmet of Odell Willis.

"We lost Zach, that was huge, he is our guy," said Thaddeus Coleman, the Riders hulking left tackle who looked to be on the verge of tears moments after their official elimination.

Collaros was said to have recovered from the Willis hit during their bye-week, passing concussion protocols and all that.

Perhaps it was the flight back to Regina, or the return to practice. Collaros' concussion symptoms returned and the Riders' quarterback pretty much pulled himself from the lineup.

It was ultimately Chris Jones' decision, but once the head coach heard Collaros admit to not feeling right, the ball was in Brandon Bridge's hands.

With most of the pages seemingly ripped out of the playbook for when Bridge plays, did the Riders really have a chance against the heavily armed Bombers?

Yet somehow they were still in it with under three minutes to play in the fourth quarter.

Until Bridge was flattened with a helmet-to-helmet hit, a hit that like the Collaros play went unnoticed by the on-field officials.

How could this happen again?

Just two weeks after publicly scolding his officials for blowing a call and allowing a clearly in-distress quarterback to continue to play, a different crew misses another one.

"We need to do more than admit an error. We need to search for a solution." stated an obviously red-faced commissioner in a news release shortly after Sunday night's game.

Too little, too late for the Roughriders.

But as Thaddeus Coleman put it. "We can't let it come down to the last two plays, that's not on the referee."

Coleman is not a fan of field goals which he saw far too many of this season.

The Riders threw a grand total of eleven touchdowns this season.

The Riders defence scored just as many.

But with the hope the defence would somehow save the day even with Collaros out, it was not to be.

The Bombers had an answer for them too.

His name was Andrew Harris who ran for 153 yards, most coming in the second half to lead Winnipeg to the win.

Jones was quick to put all the blame on his defence for its inability to tackle and how he needs to be better coaching them.

The head coach needs to be as tough on his offence as he is on himself as the defensive co-ordinator, but he's loyal to a fault to his coaches.

Offensive coordinator Stephen McAdoo was a popular name on the post-game phone-in shows and not in a good way.

Fingers need to point that way during the off-season and a quarterbacking overhaul while they're at it.

Despite coming off one of his most gut-wrenching losses, Jones sounds optimistic for the future.

"We had 12 rookies out there tonight, we had seven more second-year players." said Jones.

"I love them, we're certainly not perfect, we do a lot of things wrong but they play hard, they show up to work everyday."

"It makes it really easy spending 18-19 hours a day down here because you know you've got a good group standing behind you."

Players in the locker room however felt this was their best chance wasted.

They included Naaman Roosevelt to Ed Gainey to Samuel Eguavoen who all felt this team was too good not to win.

And now they head into another off-season of uncertainty.

With the league headed into another labour war, and a rival league starting up in the United States, who knows what 2019 will bring?