For some players, more than a playoff spot on the line

Five days from now, your Winnipeg Blue Bombers will either begin the process of hosting the first round of the Eastern division playoffs, or they will be handing out Glad garbage bags to one another as they clean out their lockers to signify the end of the 2009 season.

As much pressure as a win-or-go-home scenario presents to a football club, players are playing for much more than just a playoff berth and the continuation of the 2009 year when the regular season wraps up at home this Sunday afternoon against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

We have all heard the saying in football that "you are only as good as your last game," which makes most of us not very good football players right now after our performance in Montreal. But in the bigger picture, this game, win lose or draw, could very well be the final imprint the athletes on this team get to leave in the mind of the fans, the coaches, the managers and executives across the CFL.

Of course if you win, you live to play another day and demonstrate and showcase your skills and worth to the purveyors on a week-by-week survival basis. But if things don't work out, what you display on the field this Sunday can be the last impression you leave in the minds of the decision makers over the next seven months.

They say that first impressions are all that many people use these days to judge and determine the futures of individuals. Well, in professional football, the first impression for this team and its players came in the first regular-season game on July 2 in Edmonton. Like it or not, the chances of that game being referenced or mentioned when discussions inevitably begin in the off-season about the roster composition are somewhere between slim and none -- it's the last impression that sears the block of memory in everyone's minds.

At this point, no one cares how you played in the first contest or first home game or first half of the year (well they do -- but to a lesser a extent). It's all about whether you have evolved, persisted or improved as the season went on and the games became more and more meaningful, and the obstacles like injuries and adversity piled up. Whereas games earlier in the year can obviously impact the standings and your playoff chances and pad your stats for the long haul, nothing was ever won in professional football in the first two thirds of the season.

It has been my experience that coaches want players on their teams that can overcome everything that the marathon CFL season can throw at them. They don't want players whose production tails off as they wear down and the games get more and more meaningful to the franchise. Because at this point after 17 regular season games, two pre-season contests, training camp and an intrasquad scrimmage, we all either become the guy that is beaten up and hanging on by the thread of our medications, or the one who fights through it and takes advantage of those who are less resilient and less physically prepared than they are.

At this point in the year, if you have been playing consistently, there is something wrong with you physically. It may be tendonitis, or "a bruise on top of a bruise on top of a bruise," to quote Glenn January, or something completely out of your control like a torn knee.

If you are at 100 per cent in Week 18 you have not been playing football for the past 17. Injuries are out of the control of athletes in terms of timing and severity, but if you are well enough to play and be captured on film, be sure that no one -- save for yourself -- will remember under what duress or impediments you were operating when it is reviewed.

Whether Sunday proves to be the last game of the year is a variable that needs to motivate this team exponentially more than the group that is traveling here that has already made it to the post-season. But just as important, recognizing that your performance on this day may be the final reference on the resume of your continuing football career should incite all of us to even higher and more desperate levels. Playing under the weight of these realities and pressures at this time of the year is what makes football fun. Often, when someone threatens to take everything away from you, only then do you realize just how much you love it.

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 3, 2009 C3