A collective brain fart.
Head coach Doug Berry smiled Monday. "That's a word I could identify with," he said of his Winnipeg Blue Bombers giving up 31 second-quarter points in a 36-22 loss to the Edmonton Eskimos on Saturday,
Running back Fred Reid is slippery when wet, as would-be tacklers discovered during the Bombers’ workout in a Monday monsoon at Canad Inns Stadium.
Up 14-2 and seemingly in control, Berry's Bombers imploded. A fake punt led to a touchdown, then came a punt return touchdown and, well, 31 points later, it was a disaster for a 5-9 team that at the start of the year thought it might have been 9-5.
Berry called Saturday's meltdown a malaise. But the 2008 season, if you look at it, has made it clear this is a 2008 sickness, not just a bug that crept into this team on Saturday night.
Game 2 vs. Montreal? A 17-point Als' second quarter for a 31-7 lead en route to a 38-24 win. Game 3? The Blue gave up 21 points in the third for a 42-38 victory. The week after that? B.C. put up 16 in the final quarter for a come-from-behind 27-18 triumph.
More recently, of course, was the brutal 20 points in the final 11 minutes of a crushing 34-31 loss to Saskatchewan in the Banjo Bowl. The Bombers reeled off three straight wins after that until Saturday's 31-point Esks' explosion.
"They ran that fake punt and next thing you know, it was just a landslide," said linebacker Cam Hall, who looked up at the scoreboard at half-time and said to himself, "Oh, crap."
"We were kind of reeling from that play on and it took us a good 15-20 minutes to get out of it," Hall said Monday.
"It seems to be one big play or one big momentum swing that ends up kind of... in a landslide," he said of the Bombers' penchant for giving up points in big chunks. "Championship teams don't let stuff like that happen."
Hall thinks the Bombers have improved as the season has progressed in terms of keeping momentum and weathering storms. But monster quarters by the opposition have resulted in at least five of Winnipeg's nine losses. So what do you call Saturday's second 15 minutes?
"We (special teams) were one of three phases that contributed to a horrible second quarter," said Greg Bearman. "If you look over our last 12 quarters, how many bad quarters have we played? One... it just happened to be an onslaught. You've got to learn how to stop the bleeding."
Defensive back Stanford Samuels said the 31-point quarter was unacceptable, as was the loss.
"But it's life," he added. "Things happen. You don't get scarred by things that happened in the past, you learn a lesson from them. And the lesson that's in it is you move forward from it and you get stronger because of the lesson."
A Bomber victory would give Winnipeg the season series against the Argos and a four-point bulge. The only way Toronto could finish ahead of the Bombers would be if the Argos won all three of their remaining games and the Bombers lost all three of theirs.
chris.cariou@freepress.mb.ca
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