U Sports Football Report (Week 5)
As September begins to wind down the weeks are getting short for the U Sports teams as they attempt to gain the points they need to play in November.
Time will quickly run out for every team with only a handful of games left and now is the time to make that statement to find their way.
As the final month approaches each conference is seeing their own interesting races but one is particularly interesting.
The AUS has always been a conference that has been somewhat forgotten on the national stage.
They have had teams in the past that have made a run at the Vanier Cup and taken the Vanier Cup.
It was the little conference that could for a number of years as the Saint Mary’s Huskies were a dominant team coming out of the smallest conference.
That changed and the Atlantic conference became an easy out for most teams making them a bit of a forgotten conference.
The battle inside the conference has been pretty good over the last few years but the winner of the conference can’t get their way much further than just the conference.
Every team in the conference is always looking to change things and this year they were hoping they had enough to do that.
So far nobody really knows whether or not a team from the AUS has the ability to make a big impression on the national stage but the conference fight has been an interesting one.
It was always going to be different this year as the conference added a fifth team with the introduction of the Bishop’s Gaiters into the conference.
They were going to add a new team and one that had been competing with the best in the country in the RSEQ.
If the Gaiters could compete in the AUS it could certainly make things interesting for the rest of the conference.
After all, the conference had seen a few teams rule the conference for a while with the X-Men being the latest after winning two straight conference titles.
They took over form the Mount Allison Mounties who put together a very good run in the Atlantic conference.
Over the years the AUS constantly saw one team rule over the entire conference but the pattern seemed to be ready to change.
Nobody really knew how much it would change though and the start of the season changed everything.
It has been a bit of an up and down year with teams looking great one week and then terrible the next.
The Mounties were great in their first week easily getting by the Axemen but that has been their only win of the season.
After an easy win to start things off they have been unable to find another win coming close including this week when they lost by one point.
The Huskies are leading the entire division with games sometimes going easy and other games looking like a struggle.
They easily got past the Gaiters and the X-Men yet barely beat the Mounties and only took their game against the Axemen by seven points.
Meanwhile, the Axemen looked like they were going to be in for a rough year when they were routed by the Mounties only to come back and count that as their only loss of the year.
The X-Men have been up and down all year winning some games and losing others but never really being too far off of the other result.
They haven’t been convincingly great but they also haven’t been convincingly bad throughout the year.
The newest team seemed like they were in for a struggle in their first year until they got their first win against the Mounties.
It hasn’t been exactly what they wanted but they are still in it with more than enough time to come back.
That might be the story as September ends and the final month of the season peeks over the horizon.
There is still time and from the first half of the season in the AUS there may not be a solution to this conference anytime soon.
No team has really solidified their spot at the top despite the strong years from Acadia and Saint Mary’s.
Both have seen some less than perfect moments and that alone can change some things as the season winds down.
These teams will battle it out until the season is officially over and that could be good or bad.
It will be great for the conference as they get great football down the stretch but heading into the national playoffs it might not be the greatest.
It will either make them the battle-tested team or will take so much out of them that they will not have anything left to compete.
That remains to be seen but with such a short season for everyone in U Sports, the playoff race is just starting with great races all over the country.
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