Courtesy Calgary Herald:

Take it with the appropriate grains of salt.

It was the pre-season opener.

The Edmonton Eskimos left seven bona fide starters at home.

Those same Eskimos are coming off a 5-12-1 season and enter the 2008 Canadian Football League season with all sorts of question marks.

So maybe the 39-14 victory the Calgary Stampeders rolled up on a breezy Friday night at McMahon Stadium shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

And yet, it was the way the Stamps rolled up the victory that sent 20,219 fans home encouraged about what lays ahead this season.

In a superb first half that featured most of the projected starters for the June 26 regular season lid-lifter against the B.C. Lions, the Stamps played disciplined, a departure from a flag-filled 2007 season.

They ran the football behind a new-look offensive line that has produced the most question marks of training camp.

The Stamps’ defence made life miserable for Edmonton’s first-half quarterback Stefan LeFors, limiting the Esks to just 94 yards of offence in 30 minutes, and didn’t surrender an offensive touchdown until the final minute of the game.

Least surprising of all, Calgary’s first-half quarterbacking tandem of Henry Burris and Dave Dickenson shredded Edmonton’s defence for 190 yards, completing 11 of 12 passes (Burris, for the record, had the lone incompletion).

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