Trouble for Bombers before plays called

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/10/2015 (3727 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When you aren’t confident or experienced at what you do, it doesn’t take much to throw you off your game. We’ve all been in work scenarios where the smallest of wrinkles can set off a butterfly-effect type catastrophe, simply because we didn’t have a solid base of information and/or tenure to work from.

Case in point, when the minimally experienced and far-from-confident Winnipeg offence squared off against Ottawa last Saturday night, they were expecting man coverage in the secondary. They got zone coverage instead, and by the time they reacted and responded to it, the game was out of reach.

When Matt Nichols joined us on the radio post-game show, we were going through our usual horrific-loss question-and-answer routine, when the starting pivot served up the following explanation for why the offence had only 63 net yards in the first half and were on the field for an inexcusable eight minutes. In a 30-minute half.

“They had a good game plan for us. They are usually a high-percentage man team, and they came out and played 100 per cent zone the entire game. We kind of had to switch around some calls and get more of a zone mindset rather than man, and it’s a credit to them.”

You don’t have to have co-authored The Art of War to know that a good strategy in any competition is to do the opposite of what your opponent expects. The best football teams watch their own film as much as they watch their opponent. So in the most basic acknowledgement of strategies I, too, like Nichols, applaud the Redblacks for changing up their tendencies. But should switching your coverage from man to zone really result in one team having five times as much offence throughout the first 30 minutes of the game?

Since I spent as much time running routes in my career as I did throwing post patterns, I opted to call the best receiver in the history of the CFL to ask him how much his route-running would be affected when he was expecting and preparing to play against man coverage but ended up facing a zone instead. “Not one bit,” Milt Stegall told me. “It’s built-in. You sit in zone, you continue to run in man. It’s not really that difficult a situation; you learn to adjust to that in high school.”

When you’ve beaten every defensive coverage known to man, like Milt has, what is second-nature to him is probably easier said than done for anyone else. But when pressed for detail, he didn’t make it sound as though adjusting from one concept to the next was the football equivalent of splitting atoms.

“Say you’re running an in-route (or dig route),” he said. “If it’s man-to-man coverage, you run the full route. If it’s zone you find the open zone and sit in it. You don’t continue running (if it’s zone) because you’ll just run into the next cover defender. The quarterback and receivers should know how to adjust to this.”

Should know, could know or would know…

Suffice to say, it seems that some fundamental principles of offensive football have eluded one or more of the components within this group and, surprisingly, the play-calling is not even the main culprit.

When Nichols said, “We kind of had to switch around some calls and get more of a zone mindset than man,” the explanation Milt offered tells you it shouldn’t matter, because route-running trees have contingencies for zone or man built into them. When Milt said, “It’s built in,” he means that the adjustments for zone or man coverage is a part of each play call.

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So it shouldn’t matter what’s called, or what “the mindset is.” Either the quarterback on this team can’t recognize coverage and anticipate that his receivers are going to break off routes and sit in soft spots, or a number of his receivers aren’t recognizing and/or responding accordingly.

As someone who at stood on the other side of the post-game microphone for a long time, I’d be the first to acknowledge that lost-contest confessionals aren’t always loaded with accuracy, and are often delivered to placate the masses and diffuse the blame. In this instance, I really hope that Nichols, the intern starting quarterback, was blowing a lot of smoke about what ails this offence, because if he wasn’t, the problem is even worse, and more fundamental than we imagined.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97