Training camp: a chance to predict… nothing at all

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/06/2015 (3778 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The only absolute determination that can be made from training camp, is there is no absolute confirmation of anything to be made in training camp.

Training camp is much like the draft in many respects — everyone says they got what they wanted to get out of it, everyone thinks they did something different and exceptional, and most leave it feeling like they are now better positioned than their rivals.

If you were to look up the origins of the phrase, “false positive,” — in terms of its applicability in football — you would find a snippet of training camp beneath it.

While camp is useful for in-house evaluations and implementation, even if you’re certain your team has improved, it’s impossible to predict a league standing since you won’t know how you match up to your competitors. As individual performances go, there is not even a guaranteed or strong correlation between an outstanding camp demonstration, and one in the regular season. Some players are built for practice, others for games, and often times they are independent of each other. While training camp helps re-acclimate players to the rigours of football, and for introducing and polishing new concepts, it is near impossible to know what kind of team you have on your hands merely based on in-house competition and a couple of pre-season games with unequal rotations.

So what makes optimism, hopefulness and hype in Bomberland different this year from any other? It’s the simple fact this football club tends to go to Grey Cups in Year 2 of new regimes. Not every regime, of course, but more often than not, over the last decade or so, new factions leading this football team acquire champion-contending pedigrees in their second year of doing business.

The last time this team was in a Grey Cup was 2011, which was Paul Lapolice’s second year as head coach. Before that, was a Grey Cup berth in 2007, which was also Doug Berry’s second year of doing business. And going back to 2001, the Grey Cup game was visited in Dave Ritchie’s third year at the helm — not quite two seasons, but close enough. So is this just a stretch to make something out of the relative nothing that training camp puts forth every year, or is there actually something to this phenomenon?

Inherited

In many respects, such a trend makes sense. When a new coaching staff takes control of a team for the first time, they don’t know what they have. It can easily take a season for a staff to evaluate the assets they inherited and to determine their suitability for the type of football they want to play. Once these determinations are made, swapping out those pieces and parts and replacing them with preferred models takes time. To that point, even assembling the coaching staff you want, and not just picking from what is available, can also be a multiple-year project. So by Year 2, most of these regimes have more of the players and coaches they want involved in their systems.

The second argument is one of personal development. The last two Bomber coaches that went to championship games in their second seasons were also rookies at the top job, as is Mike O’Shea. After getting their sea legs and making their share of mistakes in Year 1, by Year 2 they are no longer naive to the enormity of the position, nor overwhelmed by the responsibilities.

In season two, coaches are naturally more confident and competent than they’ve ever been, and still buoyed by the exuberance of youth. Additionally, the buy-in from the players has not yet begun to wane. Players often tend to tune out concepts and doctrines that haven’t been successful by the third year, and become less passionate about the messaging if there has been little reward.

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You also cannot discount the motivation that stems from a previous losing football season. All three previous Grey Cup appearances by Winnipeg came directly after losing seasons. Coaching staffs respond to pressure and stresses just as well as most players do. Losing two seasons in succession is a shortcut on the road to termination, so coaching staffs are highly motivated to extract a degree of success to counteract year one, and they are also fresh enough not to be weighed down and damaged by what happened during their inaugural years.

Indeed, the most promising realization and definitive thing you can conclude about this year’s training camp, is that it’s year two of this regime, and that has recently been a very good thing for this football club. Just don’t ask me what usually happens in year three.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97