Toronto game will show Blue’s true colours

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/09/2010 (5537 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When you have more than twice as many losses on the season than wins, can you still consider yourself a good football team?

After defeating the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the third-best team in the CFL with one of the most prolific offences, 31-2 on the back end of an away-and-home matchup, can a good team be buried at the bottom of the Eastern Division under a collusion of unfortunate circumstances and inopportune luck, or is one big win and one decisive game simply just that: one game?

Prior to the Banjo Bowl, sitting at the halfway point of the season at 2-7, I remember thinking to myself, while this may be the worst record I have ever had in 10 years with Winnipeg at the halfway point of the season, we were not even close to being one of the worst teams I had played on.

The toughest season I have been a part of, record-wise at least, was a 5-13 debacle under Jim Daley that started eerily similar to this year with a kickoff return for a touchdown on the first play of the first game. If memory serves me, however, two if not three of our wins that season came against the Roughriders, which prompted Elfrid Peyton, our defensive end at the time, to comment, “We would be 18-0 if we could just play Saskatchewan every single game,” but that has more to do with how teams match up than records that potentially disguise ability.

Over the course of an 18-game season it seems you always have around four or five games that you either deserved to win but lost, or deserved to lose but won. And how you do in this handful of games is usually the determinant between a 10-8 season or a 6-12 record. We have certainly filled our quota of games we were competing in and out-performed our opponent but lost, but have come up empty on the other end of those close games that you weren’t necessarily firing on all cylinders but still found a way to come out on top at the end.

Late in the fourth quarter and in between snaps, Dan Goodspeed, offensive tackle for Saskatchewan and I were talking, and he mentioned something along the lines of, “If you guys played like this all the time, you would not be 3-7.” Poignant words that pretty much sum up the frustration of the year thus far, as we have not yet come to understand how to play consistent football week in and week out.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

Paul Samyn | Editor's Note

Wednesdays

A weekly dispatch from the head of the Free Press newsroom.

Sign up for Paul Samyn | Editor's Note

Sign Up

I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

The running joke over the years behind the scenes in the football community in Winnipeg was always that if you can’t compete for the Grey Cup and end the 20-year championship drought, then the least you can do is beat the Roughriders to placate the masses. While we only split with the Riders this year and ended our six-game losing streak against them, the difference in your immediate environment is pronounced. While bike-walking my dog yesterday afternoon I actually had one car stop in the middle of a four-way intersection, unroll his window and congratulate our team on the win. These interactions and experiences go a long way in conditioning new players into understanding just how receptive and special an environment Winnipeg can be when you make the sacrifices necessary to be successful on the football field.

The thing about long seasons and schedules and being part of a young and inexperienced team, is that you need to recognize as individuals and as a unit, the marked difference in preparation and processes that leads to winning games and losing games, and then make a definitive choice. The week leading up to the Banjo Bowl was one of the most intense and urgent storms we had worked through as a team thus far, and the results speak for themselves. Whether the players understand and are willing to expend the same efforts on a week in and week out basis should be easily discerned after the Toronto game, and then we will have a better inclination as to whether this is a team that is better than what it’s record says, or one that is simply worthy of it.

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