Bombers saved their best for last

It may not have been a performance you would wait 29 years for, but it was definitely as good as any of us could have imagined.

In Sunday's Grey Cup victory that ended a near three-decade-long championship drought, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers did everything they usually do when they win — only this time, they did it even better.

The quarterbacks passed the ball for 222 yards and no interceptions. They ran the ball like they usually do with Chris Streveler, but they also had him catch a pass too, just because they could.

The Bombers ran a very balanced attack, like they always do, rushing for only 36 yards fewer than passing. For a good stretch of the game, running back Andrew Harris was averaging nearly 10 yards a carry, instead of his season average of just over six. Of course, none of this happens without the involvement of the offensive line, which has been one of the best all season, but with only one sack allowed in the Grey Cup — against a terrific Hamilton Ticats front four — and Harris not seeing contact until five plus yards down the field, this performance may also have been its best.

Some sage Grey Cup advice from a couple of multiple-time losers

On their way to the 107th Grey Cup game in Calgary, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are going to need all the help they can get. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats were a league-best 15-3 this regular season and are the only team in the CFL the Bombers have not beaten this year. Yet.

So with that being understood, local entrepreneur Obby Khan and myself have decided to form a partnership — with the intent of helping the 2019 squad take home the silver chalice and finally put an end to this ridiculous drought.

With a combined six Grey Cup losses under our collective belts, including one that Obby had in Calgary, we have decided to offer our services as consultants to the team. Call us the 6L Grey Cup Consultants, if you will.

It hasn’t been easy for us, entering the marketplace. The initial response has been, if the Bombers wished to benefit from the experiences of former players in the Grey Cup, why wouldn't they consult with one of the many players in this province who have WON multiple championships?

At a crucial moment, Bombers go back to the basics

The Winnipeg Football Club couldn’t have picked a better time to return to the characteristics and fundamentals that made it successful over the past few seasons.

In the statement win over the Calgary Stampeders on Sunday — in a place where Blue Bomber teams have most frequently gone to die — this team got back in touch with its identity, and the key elements that used to be automatic indications for its success.

There used to be few things more consistent on this team than the fact that they would win the turnover battle. In their last four losses of the year, they were minus three, or they turned the ball over three more times than they took it away.

The number of times this team has won games where they’ve coughed up the football more than they’ve robbed it are few and far between. For multiple years, this squad was renowned for how frequently they stole the football, and how well they protected it. In the semifinal playoff, they didn’t turn the ball over a single time and took it away four times. That was what this team used to pride itself on, and made an absolute priority. The last four losses of the year, this team had been intercepted seven times.

Collaros passes durability test, easily makes Bombers better

What a difference a day can make. On Friday night against Calgary, many of us weren't sure if this would be the last professional game of Zach Collaros’s career, as he was seemingly one hit away from having everything ended for him. But by the end of the day, and with two days of running the starting offence under his belt, he not only took down the defending Grey Cup champions — who had everything to play for — but he brought a pedigree and polish to the offensive attack that gave hope to an entire province of Bombers fans.

It’s fair to say that Collaros was running out of opportunities when he landed in Winnipeg. Once the most highly prized and sought-after pivot in the CFL, he re-signed in Saskatchewan this season only after they failed to land Bo-Levi Mitchell, and he was quickly traded away to Toronto once he sustained yet another concussion in Week 1.

Being traded twice in one season is an ominous sign for any player, especially when you’re about to become a free agent and playing out a one-year deal.

It wasn’t just the seemingly increasing susceptibility to concussions that made us wonder about his longevity, it was also his declining performance during the 13 games he played in Saskatchewan in 2018. Even though he was the author of 10 wins last season, his touchdown to interception ratio wasn’t good; let’s face it, didn’t make anybody long for his skill set.

Streveler needs to take a knee

Sometimes, you have to rely on fluke circumstances to force your hand, when you otherwise would not pull the trigger, or make a move. In the case of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, it appears the only way either one of the pocket passers on the depth chart are going to actually see any meaningful reps this season — before the playoffs — is if Chris Streveler is too banged up to play on Friday, and I fully expect that he is.

No one ever wants to see anyone miss a game due to injury, especially not someone like Streveler, who seems to be the epitome of everything you’d want in a perfect teammate. This guy would literally sacrifice an appendage for the betterment of his football team, and do it with a smile on his face. But let’s face the facts here. Stuff happens in pro-football, and Mike O’Shea is too stubborn to give any of his backups any live-fire experience with this offence, unless Streveler is actually too compromised to play.

In the game on Saturday against Calgary, Streveler was caught in a pinball machine of battery and abuse. He had four more carries than Andrew Harris —15 in total, which is a whole other column unto itself — and he delivered, received, and was caught up in a cornucopia of violence. On one play his throwing hand was used as a landing pad for a Stampeder helmet that came crashing down, unforgivingly, into the turf. On several other plays he was a bumper car gone awry, caught in a corner on a concrete rink at the local fair grounds, as two or three of the Stampeder school yard bullies teed off on him from all directions. He slowly limped back to the huddle, he took a knee, he held his ribs, he grabbed at his ankle, and he eventually missed a total of two whole plays. In any other context you would write Chris Streveler a heartfelt letter, insisting he leave such an abusive relationship, but this is a gladiator sport, and punishment loves good company.

It says here that the best thing that could happen to Streveler, and this football team — after what we witnessed on Saturday — is that he takes a seat for the final regular-season game, and takes the next three weeks to recharge his hulk smash mentality, for the seemingly inevitable, Western semi-final on the road. We know full well what this physical dynamo brings to the table, and he will need to be at 100 per cent for this team to have a legitimate chance to move on to the final. And from what I saw at McMahon stadium, playing six days later, even for Superman Streveler, would be a near impossible feat.

Winnipeg reaching Grey Cup means knocking out Calgary

While the chances of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers ending up first in the Western Division are stuck somewhere between remote and unlikely, they do control whether they will have a home playoff game, and they do have the opportunity to make sure it won’t be Calgary at the top of the heap, yet again.

The Calgary Stampeders have finished first in the Western Division five of the last six years. Subsequently, they’ve been to the Grey Cup four of the last five years. So it’s fair to say, over the last half decade, if the Stampeders won the West, 80 per cent of the time they were representing the West in the Grand National Drunk, and that has gotten old real fast. The last team to win the Grey Cup out of the West, without first winning the division in the regular season, were the Saskatchewan Roughriders in 2013. While it pains me to say, it will most likely be Saskatchewan with the first-round bye and home game in the Western final — it just needs to be someone other than Calgary. They’ve been on top for far too long, and it’s high time the Western Division pecking order is revamped.

Since Saskatchewan and Calgary both have a game in hand, and the Bombers have a final bye-week, the only thing Winnipeg can control is whether they get a home playoff game, but not whether that would come in the form of first or second place.

Saskatchewan has the easiest path to first place in the Western Division. They are at B.C. — with quarterback Mike Reilly done for the season, that’s win number 11 — then they are at Edmonton and then home against Edmonton. Edmonton has nothing to play for, other than making sure that their QB, Trevor Harris, is healthy for when they cross over to the East and play Montreal. Unless the Riders somehow lose two of these three remaining games and Winnipeg wins both games against Calgary, Winnipeg has zero chance at first place, since Saskatchewan owns the tiebreaker against the Bombers. Most likely, the Riders will beat B.C., and at worst, split with Edmonton. That leaves them with 12 wins on the season.

Defensive line key to Bombers’ fate on the field

At this point in the season, with four games remaining before the playoffs, and the Bombers on a two-game losing streak, it is more constructive to focus on what parts can be enhanced — as opposed to lamenting over what pieces may be irreparably broken.

A lot of the red ink on the grading pages of the last two games has been directed towards the play and coaching of the secondary. The “bending and breaking” comments have resurfaced, the play calling and scheme have been heavily scrutinized, and the missed assignments and coverage busts that we thought this defence had put behind them reared their ugly mugs yet again.

So what has happened to the defence that, at one point, was allowing the fewest points in the CFL — now fourth overall — and that is leading a team that is now third in the Western division, and fourth in the CFL overall? In these last two losses, against Montreal and Hamilton, the link between the defensive line and the secondary has been severed for extended periods of play.

It is nothing ground-breaking to discuss the connection between the pass rush of your defensive line, and the coverage of your secondary. The more effective and immediate your pass rush is, the better your secondary tends to play. And the longer your secondary can hold its coverage up, the easier it is for your pass rush to get home.

Bombers seem to quit when they’re ahead — then lose

The good news is that by the end of the Blue Bombers' game against the Montreal Alouettes, no one was talking about the Andrew Harris steroid fiasco anymore.

The bad news is that everyone was talking about the massive, record-breaking failure of the entire team instead.

You can learn a lot from a loss of this magnitude: surrendering a 24-point lead, and laying down for 21 points, late in the fourth quarter. It just comes down to whether you want to come to terms with the harsh realities it presents or not.

This team is much like a pro wrestling superstar without any finishing moves. No “people’s elbow,” no “sharp shooter,” and no “figure four leg lock,” to wrap up a match, and close out an opponent. The only “stone cold stunner” we tend to see are the looks on our faces when it all unravels in front of us. They have their opponent down on the mat, with their foot on their throat, and then all of a sudden have a crisis of conscience and offer them a Snapple and a cookie.

It’s time to meet Streveler where he’s at

If one thing became apparent after the Winnipeg Blue Bomber’s narrow defeat to the Saskatchewan Roughriders on Sunday, it is that this offence needs a new identity with Chris Streveler at the helm.

One of the first challenges we are faced with as infants is fitting the right-shaped block into the correct-shaped hole. The longer we bang on the square-shaped opening with a round-shaped block, the longer it takes us to complete the task and the more frustrated we get. Hoping and wishing that Streveler can fill in for — and become — Matt Nichols in this offence is essentially the same exercise in futility.

With Nichols at the helm, we knew what this offence was. A very balanced attack that led the league in average points per game, didn’t turn the ball over and gladly took what the defence offered up. Nichols was as comfortable in the pocket as a joey in the pouch of a kangaroo. He was warm and safe in there, protected by his offensive line, and the comfort of a small, secured space. On occasion, he would pop his head out and scramble outside of the pocket, but we all knew where he did his best work.

Continuing with animal-kingdom analogies, Streveler was born onto the harsh grasslands of the Savannah. He was brought into this world with mere moments to get to his feet, steady himself and start running with the herd. If he spent too long being immobile, he would be picked off by predators like Charleston Hughes and Micah Johnson. Streveler’s instincts tell him to bolt any time he senses danger. His strength will always be tied to his legs. Nichols knows he is safest — and most effective — when he stays within the confines of the pouch, or pocket. With these differences being understood, hoping Streveler learns to become like Nichols is contrary to their upbringings and natural abilities. This may be why, with limited work this season, Streveler has already thrown for as many interceptions as Nichols did in the first nine games. Nichols threw for 15 touchdowns and five picks when he was healthy, with a 107.2 quarterback-efficiency rating.

Bombers running their way to wins

I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad is that it looks like it’s going to take starting pivot Chris Streveler more than a year to transition into the kind of throwing quarterback we all want and hope him to be. The good news is that it doesn’t appear to matter at the moment whether he rushes or throws for more yards in a game.

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers continued their romp through the CFL with an emphatic win Friday night, and are continuing to do it in unconventional ways. They are playing with a dominant defence, precision special teams, and an offence that rushes for more yards than it passes for. It’s not normal, it doesn’t necessarily make sense in the CFL, but it’s been working.

The surprising thing about the Edmonton game was that everyone knew what the Bombers were going to do: rely heavily on the run game. They had a relatively inexperienced quarterback coming into the game, who is much more comfortable running the football than throwing it, and they had the best back in the game in Andrew Harris, and a good offensive line.

So what did the Bombers do to catch the Eskimos off guard? Did they use the threat of the run to open up the passing game? Nope. Did they fake to Harris and go long over the top to Chris Matthews? Nope.

Streveler will have to play to more than his strengths

In his second go-round at the helm of the offence, Blue Bomber quarterback Chris Streveler’s first and only test will be whether he can make his opponents respect his arm.

Last year, when Streveler got thrust into the starting role, nobody had a book on him. We didn’t know whether he was going to be the next Matt Dunigan, or the next Michael Bishop. Heck, the Bombers probably weren't even sure themselves what they were going to get once the bright lights came on.

Not only did he exceed expectations, thrust into the starting role at the start of the 2018 season, he even managed to win a game in his first three starts as a rookie, and he kept the team in the hunt while they waited for Nichols to return from injury.

Now that Nichols is done for a while, and with nine games remaining, if Streveler is going to be the starter, and progress and transition out of his role as a situational quarterback, it will begin, and end, with what he can do slinging the rock.

Extended road trip could explain Blue’s latest loss

We will never know precisely why the Bombers lost the past two games, but I can tell you, in my humble opinion, spending an extra week out East didn’t help.

Bonding is always a noble pursuit of football teams. Teams that like each other tend to play well together and enjoy each other’s company. That is the end goal. Of course, teams that have segments of their roster that don’t like each other can also play well together — but that’s not the point of this story. The team stayed out East in Guelph, to bond, but inadvertently, and possibly related, they also lost the two games they played out there.

If you’re going to play in the Grey Cup one day, you better get used to being on the road. If this team gets its act turned around, they could easily be a part of that conversation. But the difference between that scenario, and what they chose to do out East, is that the Grand Drunk usually has two teams that are on the road, and subject to the same disadvantages — not just one, like the Bombers setting up shop in Guelph.

So what did I hate most about extended stay-cations on the road? Mostly about how it affected your performances, and not in a good way.

At the half it’s Bombers by a couple dozen… hey! Where’d everyone go?

We’ve all heard of the Los Angeles Rams' “greatest show on Turf,” circa 1999 in the NFL. Welcome to the 2019 Winnipeg Blue Bombers' “Fastest show on Turf.”

Speed? Yes, this team has got it for days, in all three phases, but they might be the quickest show on turf simply because they are extinguishing their opponents in 30 minutes or less.

This team is so efficient right now, they’ve effectively removed much of the suspense, drama and intrigue of their regular-season matchups by severely manhandling their opponents right out of the gate.

Part of the fun in attending a CFL game is not knowing the outcome, or how things will unfold. Will the team struggle early and have to mount a late-game comeback? Will it be a see-saw battle with multiple lead changes? Will they storm out of the gate and hold on for a nail-biting victory? Will Matt Nichols lead a drive — late in the fourth, as time is expiring — and have Justin Medlock kick a game-winning 57-yard field goal?

Taking foot off gas is natural when you’re winning by four TDs

You might think that no one could have a problem with the 4-0, and only undefeated team in the CFL, Winnipeg Football club, right now. Especially coming off a home game where the margin of victory was 27 points. You would be wrong.

While it’s true the Argonauts did win the second half of the game, 15-11, and had more total yards and more passing yards on the night, they were soundly beaten on Friday. Actually, that’s not entirely true. They were annihilated, outclassed and embarrassed on the football field. And this game was over before the first quarter was complete.

So why did we field a number of calls on the post game show, lamenting the second-half performance of the team, when they went into the half up 37 to 6? Why were people openly wondering why the team took their collective foot off the pedal, and were somewhat flat in the second half?

It may be that the general populace doesn’t realize how hard it is to play in a game when you are winning by more than four touchdowns, and there is still thirty minutes of football remaining. It’s like going to work the day after you win the Lotto Max. It might be understandable if you don’t get whatever reports you must prepare in on time. In fact, I would dare suggest, that if the team that is down by 31 doesn’t outscore their opponent in the remaining stanza, they should have their franchise revoked, and their corpse toe-tagged. Because there are no signs of life. But until the Grey Cup drought is taken care of, there will always be a problem perceived by a percentage of the observers, even when none really exists.

Break tendencies, just don’t break the quarterback

On an exceptional night from the offence, laden with masterful play calling and ball distribution to nearly every weapon in the arsenal — at least for three quarters — the only thing that may have curbed your enthusiasm in the Bombers' 29-14 win over the Ottawa Redblacks was franchise quarterback Matt Nichols leaving the game.

I’m a big fan of “tendency breaking” on offence, except when breaking those tendencies ends up breaking the quarterback.

OK, that’s a bit dramatic. He’s not broken by any stretch of the imagination, and by every indication, Nichols should be ready to play when the hapless Argonauts limp into town on Friday night. But the smash up derby that took place at the end of his quarterback-draw gallop was one of the few scenarios that could derail a promising season, for a team with great depth everywhere except, maybe, at the “pocket passing,” position.

In what was easily their most prolific display of the season, with 453 yards of offence and nearly 40 minutes of possession, this talent-stuffed group was having a statistical feeding frenzy of a game. Six different receivers, and two backs caught footballs in the passing game, and four runners contributed to 149 yards on the ground.

Unselfish play on display in victory over Edmonton

Unselfish play will always be a key factor in the success of any football team. When you have a special player such as Lucky Whitehead, it becomes even more important.

When you talk about “unselfish play” in football, you are referring to those moments where players sacrifice themselves for the betterment and achievement of another or the group, for little to no personal gain. It is most commonly on display with the offensive line. They have to spend countless hours in the gym and on the field, honing their craft, just so a player such as Andrew Harris can win a rushing title, or so a quarterback such as Matt Nichols can stay upright in the pocket and has time to make good decisions. They don’t really have any statistics they can hang their hats on other than the success of those around them and the overall production of the offence. When Harris rushes for more than 100 yards, and Nichols doesn’t get sacked, that is about as good as it gets for the offensive line.

While it is inherent in the job description of offensive linemen to help protect and spring the weapons on their team, trust me when I tell you, if they don’t like or feel appreciated by the people they are shelling out for, they aren’t as eager to put it all on the line. It is why you commonly see running backs and quarterbacks — especially the insanely rich ones — lavishing their offensive linemen with gifts and perks. It doesn’t matter how talented a pivot or tailback may be, if your offensive line isn’t convinced you fully appreciate them and are fully aware of their efforts, you don’t stand a chance back there.

Unselfish play can be found in other areas on the football field, too. On the defensive line, you could take up two blockers so the linebacker behind you can flow freely to the football. You can occupy a blocker during a blitz so a defensive back can come free off the edge. And if one defensive lineman is winning all his one-on-one battles, you can run stunts and make concessions to keep him isolated on that matchup.

Sometimes it’s good to take things personally

There is a theory that the more players on your football team who feel like they have something to prove, and who are affected by the “noise” off the field, the better your team will generally be.

In case you missed it, last week Winnipeg Blue Bombers quarterback Matt Nichols showed up to a press conference wearing a hat with “Game Manager” on it, a gift from his wife. They were poking fun at the label that some have bestowed upon his starting-QB talents. Allow me to be the first to say that if this label was even part of the inspiration and motivation for the three-touchdown, zero-interception, 354 yards of offence, 35 minutes of possession and 33 points, I hope he gets “Game Manager” tattooed prominently across his chest.

Over the years, you tend to hear the same remarks from athletes to the media when times are tough. They claim they don’t read the papers, they don’t watch the news or hear the noise outside of the locker room, and they don’t care what anyone else thinks. They are oblivious to it all, they claim. It plays back like a broken record.

It’s the athletes' way of fighting back against whatever narrative the media happens to be pushing that day. The best way to refute or dismiss an opinion is to suggest it doesn’t exist, you haven’t heard it and you couldn’t care less about it. The truth does sometimes hurt, so if you don’t acknowledge it, it doesn’t sting as much. Often, the closer a media member is to the crux of the matter, the more defensive and upset a player or coach can get. Some players really don’t care what others say about them — outside of their peers and teammates — but some really do.

A Hecht of a good deal

The challenge of staring down a fourth, consecutive, winning season — for any football team — will always be figuring out how to do more with less.

And with the performances by the offensive line, and Jeff Hecht at safety in week one of the regular season, it sure looks like Winnipeg made the right decisions in the off-season.

When you win 33 games over three years, costs are going to go up. It’s as certain as death, taxes, and Milt Stegall being thin in the waist and pretty in the face. Players who are contributing parts of a successful, playoff football team want to be paid in kind, and when their services are sought-after, pay hikes are inevitable.

So what happens when the salary cap goes up by approximately $50,000 every year, and you’ve already spent more than that amount, signing all-stars like Willie Jefferson, Chris Matthews, and Adam Bighill? You have to decide where that money is going to come from, and who has priced themselves out of the market.

Speedy Whitehead gives Bombers long-missing offensive weapon

When was the last time the Winnipeg Blue Bombers had an offensive weapon that was a threat to score from anywhere on the football field?

Not a touchdown great who could get in behind the secondary and adjust his route to take advantage of coverages, but a player who could hit a proverbial home run from anywhere on the field? If this question brings about an uncomfortable silence, you aren’t alone. When it comes to harbouring a true speed freak or drag-strip vertical threat on the roster, it has been more than a while, but with the addition of Lucky Whitehead to the team, those days may soon be over.

The Bombers have plenty of fast guys on the 2019 roster, and have had them in the past. Brandon Alexander has wheels, and Winston Rose and Charles Nelson easily round out the top four when it comes to players that can flat-out run on this squad. But if you’re looking for the best combination of top speed, acceleration and elusiveness, this is where Whitehead separates himself from this pack.

According to the Dallas News, in a piece written in January 2016 Whitehead was a Cowboy, “When working out for NFL teams, his 40-yard dash times ranged anywhere from a 4.29 to a 4.41. He'd also reach speeds of up to 21.7 m.p.h. on kickoff returns." That is as top-end as it gets when it comes to burners you can find on the football field, in any league.

Bombers betting on balanced budget, team

This may be the first season in some time in the CFL where paying less for your quarterback ends up meaning more.

Days away from the first pre-season game of 2019, it is clear that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers plan to separate themselves from the rest of the West Division by being the most balanced and least QB-centric team.

A good test to determine if your team is top heavy at the pivot position, and therefore full of holes elsewhere on the roster, is to ask yourself who the second-, third- and fourth-highest paid players on the team are, after the quarterback. If you're a half-million dollars away from being able to contemplate this answer — as several teams in the West are, with $700,000 QBs — it’s fair to say your team has gone all in on one position and one player.

If anyone tells you that Winnipeg doesn’t have the most balanced and complete football team in the CFL right now, it’s fair to assume they haven’t been paying close attention. After Matt Nichols at the top of the team’s salary heap, you’ve got layers upon layers of upper-echelon players that are at or near the top of their position, making in the $200,000-plus range.

No one saw Bombers’ offensive failure coming

If the ongoing championship drought of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers is beyond all statistical probabilities and common sense, it probably then surprises few people the end of the club's 2018 campaign came about because of the performance of the one phase of the game that largely carried it for the past three seasons.

Indeed, just when you thought you’d gone over all the possible ways this team could lose this football game, not scoring a single touchdown was the most unpleasant surprise. In fact, in all of the scenarios discussed on the pre-game show in Calgary, of the possible ways things could go right and wrong for Winnipeg, the thought of the No. 1 offence — statistically — in the league not scoring a major never came up. Not once.

But when you’ve been on the short end of the stick as many times as this franchise has over nearly three decades, you can lose a game in agonizing ways you didn’t even think were possible.

On Oct. 26, just over three weeks ago, the Bombers played the Calgary Stampeders at home and put up 29 points and more than 500 yards of offence. Less than a month later, in the biggest game this franchise has played since 2011, that same offence was full value for four field goals and 245 yards of net offence. That's a decline of more than 50 per cent in both scoring and yardage accumulation.

Blue and Gold playing some dominant, offensive ball

The most compelling thing about the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ victory over the Saskatchewan Roughriders on Sunday afternoon was the visitors were able to execute their offence against a defence that knew exactly what was coming.

Years ago, I played on a team that had to contend with an opposing squad able to figure out what plays we were going to run. In fact, at the end of the game, there were testimonials from the offensive linemen that defenders were calling out the exact play they were going to run, before they ran it.

Half of the advantage an offence has is the element of surprise. They feed us — defenders — keys that make a pass look like a run, and a run look like a pass. They use misdirection to obscure their true intentions, and most plays are filled with fakes and deception. As a defender, you really have to stay dialed in to your “keys” or you start chasing your tail.

So, when multiple members of your offensive line share with you how the opposing defence is calling out their plays before they run them, you aren’t exactly surprised that they got shut down. Or annihilated. Or demoralized.

Bombers need to play patient game to beat Roughriders

In the Western semifinal on Sunday, you will see the team with the second-best record in the CFL, versus the team with the fourth.

If we look at the league statistics up to week 20, one of these teams is first in points scored in the CFL and second in fewest points allowed. The other team is sixth in points scored, and fourth in points allowed. One of these teams has scored 50 offensive touchdowns — the best in the league. The other has scored 25 offensive touchdowns — second to last.

One of these teams is number one in the turnover ratio with plus-14 takeaways. The other is at plus-6, which is good for third. One of these teams is the least penalized in the league, and the other is one of the most penalized. One is fifth overall in pass completions, the other is ninth, or dead last. And at the most important position on the field, one has a QB rating of 78.9 — good for third in the league. The other has a rating of 54.5 — second to worst.

So, how is a team on the short end of all these measuring sticks the one that's 12 and 6 on the season, hosting the western semi-final, and has beaten the Bombers two out of three times? Well, in many instances, statistics don’t tell the whole story. And while the Saskatchewan Roughriders may not be very good at a lot of things, they are very, very good at a few things.

Sometimes coach needs to let team do the job

Everyone appreciates a head coach who goes for it, puts it on the line, and is uber-aggressive. It's a reflection of his belief in his team and players, of confidence in their ability to perform in the face of adversity.

What many of us are less certain about, however, is the value of being overly aggressive and rolling the dice when it isn’t called for.

With a final, meaningless, regular season game to go, it is time to take stock of the work that General Manager Kyle Walters and Head Coach Mike O’Shea have done. With their third consecutive winning season in a row, and third consecutive playoff opportunity, they have accomplished what no other pairing has done since Brendan Taman and Dave Ritchie in 2001, 2002, and 2003.

After a couple of seasons reshaping the roster into what they wanted, they have now created a consistent winner capable of beating any opponent, at any time. Considering the number of unsatisfactory years and seasons in between these streaks, it is a notable accomplishment for this franchise.

Bombers’ prowess on the field matters more than record

There are times when teams are better than their record indicates. Other times, a team’s record is superior to what they really are. Look no further than the Blue Bombers' blowout victory on Saturday against the Saskatchewan Roughriders for evidence of both.

As should be apparent after that 31-0 debacle, the Riders are a straw house whose foundation is built on unsustainable football, and the big bad wolf just blew down their front door. Sure, they have an excellent defence and special teams, but their offence is substandard and it's the reason they are not as good as their record suggests.

These days, the Zach Collaros experiment appears to be petering out. While his win/loss record is impressive, his skillset is not what it used to be. While it appears he is still processing at a high level, and knows where to go with the football and when, he looks frail in the pocket and doesn’t appear to have the arm strength, velocity, or confidence to make all of the throws required of a tier one pivot.

The running backs in Saskatchewan are good, but their offensive line is average and their receivers scare no one. Outside of the B.C. Lions, they are the only winning team that has given up more points than they’ve scored. They rely on contributions and scores from their special teams and big plays from the defence, because they cannot effectively sustain drives and produce offence with any regularity.

Veteran leaders can carry Bombers into playoffs

This time of the year, you start to create arguments for why one team or another is a viable candidate for the post-season, and due to the play of Adam Bighill, Weston Dressler, and Matt Nichols of late, the Blue Bombers have entered into this discussion.

During this three-game winning streak, we’ve seen Nichols return to his traits of being safe and smart with the football; accurate, but not compelling. Against Ottawa, in overtime, he was as clutch and timely as it gets. After watching the lead he built up evaporate, and all the momentum the team had dissipate, he simply took the offence on a touchdown drive and completed a two-point conversion at a time when anything else wouldn’t have been enough. He finished the day a very Nichols-like 27 of 36 for 265 yards and three touchdowns with zero turnovers. Last week, the defence did all the heavy lifting; this week, it was the offence that dominated.

When you try to figure out the erratic play of Nichols and the offence, it’s been a curious study, and it took the suggestion of a keen football observer to point me in the right direction. “You know why the Bombers have won their past three games, don’t you?” he asked, with utmost confidence. “No, I most certainly don’t,” I replied, incredulously. “It’s the return of Weston Dressler,” he asserted.

If you want to talk about the straw that stirs the offensive drink of this football team, it truly might be Dressler. While his numbers may not suggest it, his mere presence on the football field appears to change things for this team. Big picture, if you look at the past seven games, the team lost all the ones he wasn’t playing in and won all the ones he did play in. Against Ottawa this past Friday, he was the team’s second-leading receiver with five catches for 61 yards, but more importantly, he also contributed two touchdowns.

Bombers’ defensive play driving their success

Have you ever had someone over, and when you opened the door for them, told them “come on in, and make yourself at home?”

Well, the Bombers went into the house of the Edmonton Eskimos on Saturday, and they didn’t take their shoes off. They tracked mud all over the carpet, threw their coat on the floor, spent an inappropriate amount of time in the master bathroom, and walked to the fridge and drank the last beer. And they didn’t blink. They then turned to their accommodating hosts and asked them to make them a sandwich.

The “brick” hasn’t been a tough place for the Bombers to play of late, and even when they lost virtually every measurable offensive statistic on this night, they still managed to win walking away, because of the elite play of their defence. And when you’re this good on one phase of the football team, you can be mediocre in others without consequence.

Edmonton had more first downs, more rushing yards, more passing yards, and more net offence on the night, but because the defence took the ball away seven times, Winnipeg won the game, with authority.

Manziel a marvel in mayhem, but that doesn’t lead back to NFL

So at this point, you’d have to surmise that Johnny Manziel — quarterback, saviour and ratings overlord of the Canadian Football League and Montreal Alouettes — has figured out that just maybe the CFL isn’t going to be quite the walk in the park he and his entourage figured it to be.

The thing that maligned players from the NFL, who come to the CFL to relaunch, resurrect and reboot their American football careers don’t often realize is that as much as an opportunity north of the border can help their careers, it can also expose their shortcomings. While three starts isn’t what you would call a representative sample of work to pass indictments on, it has shown many of us what we feel are Manziel’s shortcomings as a pivot passer.

First and foremost, it should be noted that Manziel is a first-round athlete. Let me rephrase; he is a spectacular athlete. His uncanny level of elusiveness, his footwork, his acceleration, his creativity and his scrappiness are all attributes highly prized in the game of pro football. But I would dare say, especially after watching a full four quarters of his work in the 31-14 loss against the Bombers on Friday night, that he is not a first-round quarterback talent.

The strength of Manziel’s game, and the most impressive thing he does on the field is how he can put a defence in a bind. When he is flushed or escapes from the pocket and dances around or near the line of scrimmage, he forces defenders to make decisions that can be costly; if they stay in coverage then he can gash you and scramble for more yards than most any pivot on the ground. If they come off their coverage because they think he is committed to running the football, well then, he has the ability to hit the open man. This is an effective skill set for any pivot, but it is really the only thing that separates him from his peers.

Friday’s game a make-or-break night for Bombers

Every team has a game that defines their season — a crossroads, so to speak.

For the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, this moment will unequivocally be Friday night against the Montreal Alouettes. They will either take their first, tentative step back onto the path of winning, or they will completely eradicate any remaining confidence.

There is no sugar-coating it: this football team went into the bye week reeling. Having lost four games in a row, and back-to-back against their prairie rivals, this team has gone from a high of being ranked as the second-best team in the CFL, to a low of having their record proclaim they are last in the West and seventh-best in a league of nine teams.

When you’re not playing well, your playoff games come earlier in the year. And while you can be certain the words “must win,” will not enter the publicized vernacular of the football club, it’s hard to imagine a game of more consequence.

Blue outmaneuvered, outsmarted, outcoached when game on the line

We’ve all had a moment where we’ve stumbled across a picture of ourselves, from several years prior, and been surprised by how much younger we looked, or, more truthfully, how much older we look now. If the Winnipeg Football Club saw a picture of themselves from two years ago—or even last year—they currently may have a hard time recognizing themselves.

When groups of players and coaches stay together for a while on the same team, they create defining characteristics, or an identity of the offence, defence, and special teams. Over the previous two years, where they won 23 games and only lost 13, they were as regular and predictable as summer construction delays.

Offensively, first and foremost, they protected the football. They didn’t force the ball downfield, and they didn’t make bad decisions with it. They were methodical in their approach, took what the defence gave them, and didn’t shoot themselves in the foot. They played complementary football with the defence and when there were quick changes or turnovers, and they got opportunities to move the football and score in critical games, you could almost always count on them.

These days their touchdown to interception ratio is way out of whack. They don’t automatically win the turnover battle anymore, and they are as likely to throw a game-ending interception as they are a touchdown in critical moments. The passing game is in disarray and inconsistent. In fact, the only thing that reminds you that this is the same offence from the previous two, is Andrew Harris and the running game.

Bombers just not in same class as Stampeders

When all was said and done, Saturday’s game was the football equivalent of trying to successfully court a partner several levels out of your league. In football speak, this is referred to as “outkicking your coverage.”

The Blue and Gold faked it, they postured, they bluffed, they were valiant in their attempts for more than half the game, but in the end they got exposed for who they really were: ambitious and eager, but lacking in the most desired fundamentals. And then Calgary went looking elsewhere for a true peer equivalent.

So why don’t the Blue Bombers measure up to the Calgary Stampeders? Why would people stare and snicker and make hushed remarks about this oddball pairing if they saw them together in public? It’s not as complicated as you might think.

At the beginning, like most doomed relationships, it looked like it had potential. You could tell they had spent some time coming up with a strategy to woo the Stampeders that was both creative and effective in the early going. Making the move that they did on second and short — a true throwaway down — got the Stampeders' attention and had to have had them wondering if they had truly met their match. But like any relationship with partners on different levels, when the smoke and mirrors run out, and the trick bag is empty, all you can rely on is the fundamentals you bring to the table, and the Blue and Gold came up short.

Blue have golden opportunity to silence critics with win in Calgary

One of the best things about professional football is a chance to prove people wrong — or right — on a weekly basis. After going off the rails against Ottawa Friday night, the opportunity to prove people wrong doesn’t get any bigger than Saturday’s match in Calgary.

After a solid performance the previous week against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats — a team thought to be better than its record and one that dismantled the Blue Bombers in Week 3 — Winnipeg pushed a lot of hot buttons and lanced multiple sore spots by following it up with a one-sided loss to the Ottawa Redblacks. It was the equivalent of laying down a welcome mat to those that haven’t bought in to the potential of this 2018 football team.

The first issue that reappeared after the Redblack beatdown was that in spite of its winning record and successes at the halfway point of the season, the team still hadn’t beaten anybody with a winning record. When 5-3 met 5-3 at Investors Group Field Friday, and the home team got bullied and run roughshod over in its own building, this assertion only rang truer.

In addition, the suggestion that as much as things have changed defensively, "nothing has changed defensively" also picked up some steam after the worst defensive performance of the season against Ottawa. When you surrender 500 yards of total offence — and more than 100 of that is on the ground — it’s hard to continue to sing the praises of a group that had looked like it was turning over a new leaf.

Bombers’ emerging defence a paradigm shift for team

The more and varied ways you can win a football game, the more football games you can win.

On Friday night, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers predominantly relied on a different recipe for success in their game against Hamilton, namely the efforts of their special teams, and particularly their defence, to win their third consecutive game.

It is well known there are three phases that compete in every football contest. If you win all three — offence, defence and special teams — you undoubtedly win the game.

If you win two of those three phases (unless you turn the ball over a ridiculous amount) you also win the game.

Bombers resoundingly refute notion of being a one-trick pony

Last Friday night, the Toronto Argonauts were more successful shutting down Winnipeg Blue Bomber star running back Andrew Harris than any other team in the CFL. And it didn't matter one damn bit.

Now you can’t fault them for the game plan they came up with. After being drubbed at home the previous week, and having a single player out-gain their entire team, they decided they’d had enough of that. While none of us was given the Argonaut game plan for round two, after watching them load up the tackle box and go hell bent for Harris, it’s obvious they were not going to lose the same way again. So instead, they lost another way. And this time by more points.

Going into this game, Harris was averaging 6.65 yards per carry on the season, with an average of more than a hundred yards —102 if you round up — a game. His biggest rushing total had come the previous week in Toronto when he ran for 161, and caught a couple passes for 16 yards, and, as mentioned, out-produced the entire Argos team with a total of 177 yards. So since Harris, by himself, accounted for slightly more than 41 per cent of the Bomber offence in Game 1, the Argos must have figured that if they just took him out of the equation, and limited his production in Game 2, the Bombers might run like a normal offence.

Like teetotalers to the Rum hut, they swarmed Harris, they smacked him, and they gave him zero room to breathe. On ten carries, he only managed 28 yards, and that 2.8 yards-per-carry average, and rushing total, were by far the least amount of production he’d had against any team this year. So what did they get for all their strategizing and efforts? They lost by 26 this time around, instead of 18. I think this kind of scenario is where the saying, “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” originates from.

Bombers’ game-day coaching reflects sober second thought

Broken clocks are right twice a day. So it shouldn't be that unusual that many of the corrections and suggestions volunteered by fans and pundits on a weekly basis occasionally hit the bullseye.

Last week — after the excruciating loss to the B.C. Lions — a number of these hindsight observations actually appeared to be heeded, and implemented, by the game managers of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, in their dominating win against the Toronto Argonauts. Players learn from their mistakes continually throughout the course of a season; apparently, the coaching staff can too.

While it is rarer than a white rhinoceros for a coach to agree with the suggestion box after a game, and especially after a loss, you cannot deny what you see on the field. Either this game against the Argonauts had the highest degree of coincidental change known to sport, or a large degree of the football population in Winnipeg actually knew what they were talking about.

After the B.C. loss, there were criticisms about the overly cute, short yardage play calling, along with frustrations about points being left on the board. There were suggestions that with only 13 touches and over a 10-yard average that Andrew Harris should have been used more generously throughout the game and in critical “must have” scenarios. More generally, there were the observations about how this offence ran aground in the second half.

Auxiliary players not a proper replacement

We all appreciate the athlete that is multi-faceted, the player that can do his job and also dabble in the realm of another position. While it is a luxury to have such a player on a football team, we should never confuse or task a player with auxiliary skills with the responsibilities and abilities of a positional player.

For instance, let’s look at the comparable skill sets of running back Andrew Harris and quarterback Chris Streveler. Both are fast and seem to handle the physical challenges of the game with ease and even eagerness. That’s about where the comparison stops. One has reached the pinnacle of this game carrying the football, reading, anticipating and following the blocking schemes that unfold in front of him, avoiding and powering through would-be tacklers.

The other one — Streveler — has spent most of his time in collegiate football working on all the mechanics and nuances of throwing the football and reading and understanding defensive coverages and pictures. He knows how to run the rock, for sure, but mainly in two scenarios. One, when the pocket around him breaks down and he has to scramble for his life, and two, on the few designed plays — such as a quarterback draw, sneak or a zone-read option — where he tries to catch a defence off-guard by using his legs as a weapon and not an escape mechanism.

So while Streveler is very adept at running the football for a quarterback and in quarterbacking scenarios, as a running back, he wouldn’t make it out of training camp. Which brings us to the crux of the discussion: why is Streveler sometimes tasked with carrying and running the football in critical scenarios that would otherwise be best left to the one who has built his entire career doing it?

Nichols back from shop, but rental was nice

We’ve all had to take our vehicle to the shop for a major repair or service. If it’s serious, and they have to order parts or do some body work, they usually give you a loaner.

This is essentially what happened when Blue Bombers starting quarterback Matt Nichols went down and we took backup Chris Streveler for a spin; only this rental we may end up wanting to keep.

When your car — or starting quarterback — breaks down, it’s rarely at a convenient time. You’re either on your way to work or in the middle of training camp.

The first thing that crosses your mind is usually whether the repairs will be covered by the warranty. While the M-Series Nichols is not an older model, he definitely has some miles on him, and the team knew the bumper-to-bumper coverage had expired and it was going to cost them, one way or another.

Relax, it could have been much worse for the Bombers

In the spectrum of what can happen to a football team when its starting quarterback goes down for a third of the season, I have zero issues with the team sitting with a record of 1-2, staring down a back-to-back set with the B.C. Lions.

If the Winnipeg Blue Bombers split the next two games against a team that seems to be of lower caliber than both Edmonton and Hamilton, and then gets QB Matt Nichols back at 2-3, that’s a perfectly acceptable and recoverable position to be in, and a highly successful navigation to what was once a disastrous proposition.

Regardless of your thoughts on how the team performed in Hamilton on Friday night, things could always be so much worse — and often are that much worse — when the most important player on the field goes missing for a third of the year.

There are very few teams in the CFL that would not miss a beat if their undisputed No.1 went down. There are even fewer teams that could start a rookie quarterback who had never played a snap of pro football and win a single game, let alone only lose by three points in the season-opener and be handed only a single lopsided loss.

Streveler is good, but he’s not alone

It is the eternal question among football fans: what came first, the good quarterback or the good supporting cast?

Is it possible the Winnipeg Blue Bombers haven’t been able to develop their own pivot — seemingly for a millennium — because the host environment was never this nurturing?

Chris Streveler has an opportunity with this football franchise that few other green QB’s passing through town ever had.

So far, after two games, it appears he is making the most of it.

Inside information can make all the difference on the field

The best, and easiest, game plans to put together are the ones against teams with key players who used to play for you.

In the case of the upcoming game against the Montreal Alouettes on Friday, the Blue Bombers will be facing three critical components they should know how to attack better than most.

On defence, both Jamaal Westerman and Henoc Muamba are central figures for the Alouettes who have recent histories with the Bombers.

Muamba, of course, got his start in Winnipeg, and, though he flirted with the idea of returning as recently as this off-season, has never made it back to the club. Westerman, on the other hand, surprisingly chose to leave in free agency this year, possibly for the opportunity to play next to his brother, Jabar, on the defensive line.

Big Blue’s defence key to early success

It’s time to square off with the cold, hard truth: no matter who starts under centre on Thursday night for the Blue Bombers, it’s not going to be optimal, or ideal; yet this team may have the talent and ability to adjust and still win football games, even while it waits for its franchise quarterback to mend.

Whether it’s Alex Ross (currently my vote), Chris Streveler (my vote last week) or Bryan Bennett (probably going to be my vote next week), who starts off the 2018 CFL season, this offence isn’t going to run like it should, or used to.

It’s going to be similar to when you put low-octane fuel into a high-performance car: there is going to be pinging, some knocking, less horsepower and generally less overall performance.

It’s not what the engine wants, but it doesn’t mean the car won’t work and can’t get you from A to B. You just have to ask different things of it. No more drag racing from light to light with Mike Reilly; it’s time to start thinking more along the lines of carpooling, driving responsibly and economically, and most importantly, driving defensively.

Splashy debut for Bombers’ first-year players

The good news is that with the way the pre-season falls this year for the Blue Bombers, the games and competition only gradually get harder — which is an easier adjustment for those vying for jobs. The bad news is that, well, it does only get harder from here.

It’s not often the pre-season aligns like this, but the team has gone from training camp battles against one another — the easiest — to a home pre-season game against backups — only marginally more difficult — to a bigger test in B.C. this Friday — with the most starters they will face. Then this slow descent into the scalding waters of the CFL hot tub finally culminates with the Eskimos returning for the CFL opener on June 14.

Round 1 of evaluation is always the body of work in training camp. Players compete against all levels of the depth chart, in various scenarios and tempos, and if they are successful, get their foot in the door for the pre-season.

Round 2 was last Friday night, and was about as easy, and as smooth a transition from training camp as the pre-season gets. The visiting team didn’t bring more than five projected starters — out of a possible 24 — and the home team, that started all 24 front line guys, won handedly, by 20. While it was an inauspicious start, with the franchise QB getting nicked on the very first snap, the talent disparity eventually kicked in, and the starters did what starters do to those not at the top of the depth chart.

U.S.-trained defensive linemen face steep learning curve in CFL

In one of the shortest training camps in professional sport, the danger of the CFL's brief evaluation period is it sometimes forces a rush to judgment on players. And when it comes to potential on the defensive line, this position can take three or more years to uncap true ability — a luxury many teams don’t have.

The initial difficulty with top defensive line draft picks in the CFL is that if they played college ball in the NCAA, especially in division one programs, they are almost automatically regarded higher than their CIS counterparts. There is more competition, better coaching, and much more financial investment in collegiate football in the U.S. Defensive linemen coming out of division one or two programs tend to be more polished with their fundamentals, have big-game experience, and can be more developed physically, due to the rigours of the multimillion-dollar conditioning programs. So when you compare an apple that played in the CIS for four years, to another apple that played for Nebraska his entire collegiate career, scouts tend to go with the fruit from the more impressive tree.

The problem, however, as I’ve seen countless times, is when you pluck a defensive lineman who has been playing square American football for four years or more, and you jam him into the circle of Canadian football, it doesn't always fit right away. And often teams get frustrated and give up on a player. They don’t understand how much time and investment is required to fully integrate a U.S.-trained player into the Canadian game. In fact, if teams are looking for immediate benefit from a first-round defensive line talent—and don’t have the timeline or patience to develop a NCAA one — they would, in many instances, be better off selecting the prospect that played Canadian university ball.

The biggest hurdle for an American-football-trained prospect is the CFL's pass-first reality. In American ball, stopping the run is the foundation and basis of your technique. You drill your run keys incessantly, because if you can’t stop the run south of the border, they won’t stop driving the ball down main street at you. On first and second down, it’s run heavy, and depending on the down and distance, third down can have a run emphasis too.

A player like Bighill can make a big difference

When you sign a player like Adam Bighill, you do a lot more for your defence than simply plug a gaping hole in the second level.

Adam Bighill is a seamless fit for the Blue Bombers' defence, and the football team. For a squad and a town blue-collar and workmanlike in their approach, this is a can’t-miss addition. He has proven to be everything you’d want in the middle of your defence, directing traffic and barking out signals.

When a player of Bighill's calibre walks into a locker room, he's granted instant respect. Not only is Bighill returning from a semi-successful stint in the NFL, where he showed enough to get on the active roster and spend some time on the field, but he is a tenured, all-star player who is relentless.

Coaches talk all the time about pursuing the football, running to the ball and not giving up on plays. Not only will Bighill become one of the biggest-effort guys on the Bombers' roster, but when he does arrive at the football, he brings a level of disruption and violence with him that can produce even more turnovers for a defensive group that thrives off them.

Bombers threw sinking Durant a lifeline, and he set fire to it

Just to recap, over the course of 48 hours, Darian Durant went from being a snap away from leading the Blue Bombers in the regular season to a guy currently spending his free time bickering and insulting the fanbase and franchise on social media, accusing the front office of lying about his retirement notification timeline, and declaring that he “deserves” the $70,000 that he received as a signing bonus in January.

I’m starting to think all of those kind words he uttered in January were, just maybe, disingenuous?

So how did we go from: “I just want to come in and help out Matt (Nichols) as much as I can and have a role with the team — whether it’s in meetings, whether it’s short-yardage. Whatever the case may be, just come in and bring my veteran presence and try to bring a Grey Cup to Winnipeg.”

To ranting on Twitter: “Glad I didn't play there either. The drought continues.” And, “I’ve also see(sic) the way your team has played for decades…. When are u guys gonna win? Crickets?”

Bombers can’t afford to miss out on Muamba

As we enter week four of contemplation whether the Blue Bombers can afford to sign Henoc Muamba, perhaps the better question is: can they afford not to?

No single player is ever solely the difference between winning and losing — except, maybe, when it comes to quarterbacks and kickers — so mortgaging the future in the over pursuit of any singular athlete is both short-sighted and ill advised. That said, there are exceptions that can be the tipping point that propels a team from good to great.

There are countless reasons why Henoc could be a catalyst for the 2018 defence, not least of which would be offsetting the loss of Jamaal Westerman to Montreal. Not only is he an all-star-calibre player with the right kind of passport, like Westerman, but he is the kind of tenured, travelled and respected voice and leader you would want filling the void that Westerman’s departure has certainly left.

Most importantly, however, would be the impact that his insertion into the heart of the defence would have on the defensive dozen. To be an elite defence — heck, to even just be a good defence — you need strength down the middle of the field. You need players who can push up front and others who can discourage a passing attack inside of the numbers. If an opponent can’t run up the middle, and is also concerned about health and ball security issues from throws over the middle, then you have effectively eliminated the most linear area on the football field.

Third time not always a charm for Bombers

When It comes to consecutive winning seasons in Winnipeg, the third one is rarely the luckiest.

With 23 wins and only 13 losses the last two years, there is much to look forward to with the Winnipeg Football Club in 2018. They have an established, franchise quarterback, one of the most innovative and creative offences in the CFL, and a coaching staff that is attractive to free agents, and not a deterrent. Yet, if you think this is the moment the club has finally crested the mountain, and rounded the summit onto easy street, you couldn’t be more wrong.

In 2018, this franchise will be attempting to become the first group to have three consecutive winning regular seasons in a decade and a half. That is correct. It has been fifteen years since the Blue and Gold were able to put together a trifecta of winning programs. Now, they have been to the playoffs three consecutive times as recently as 2006, 2007, and 2008, but three winning regular seasons, year after year after year? With more wins than losses? You’d have to call up the old ball coach, Dave Ritchie, to figure out what that was like.

If you think this is just a turn of the century anomaly, you would also be mistaken. Before that string of successes from 2001 to 2003, there was another six-year drought after the winning seasons of 1992, 1993, and 1994. It has actually been since the 1980’s that this football team was filled with consistent winners, year after year, and the playoff games and championships that accompany that sort of ilk. From 1980 to 1987, the Bombers strung together 8 winning seasons in a row, 8 consecutive playoff appearances, and a Grey Cup for good measure. Oh, and the year that streak of winning football ended, with a 9-9 season in 1988? They won a Grey Cup that year too.

CFL free agency a game within a game

Free agency is little more than the first game of the season. It has fumbles, interceptions, punts and 14-point swings. On the other side, it has converted touchdowns, field goals and even the occasional rouge. You are competing in it, as are your opponents, so keeping tally makes sense. Nobody gets a prize for winning free agency, but it is still a good indicator of whether your team got better or worse.

The scoring rules of free agency are simple. Any player signed to your roster — who wasn’t already on your team and was up for grabs — has a value. They may be worth one (rouge), two (safety), three (field goal), six (unconverted major) or seven points (converted major) — or whatever the rule maker (me) decides. Conversely, any player lost to another team has a value as well. Just like a football game, you win some battles and you lose some others. There are momentum swings and someone comes out on top. As stated, re-signing players on your roster — before they hit the market — doesn’t count, as you were the only one allowed to negotiate with them up until Feb. 13.

Receiver Adarius Bowman was signed by the Bombers after the Eskimos let him go in advance of an enormous bonus payment that was coming due. He will be 33 in 2018 and is coming off one of his least productive seasons — and his worst average yards-per-catch year, ever. He may be inspired by his change of address in 2018, and rejuvenated by increased targeting in this offence, or Edmonton may have correctly read the writing on the wall. 6-0 Bombers.

Travis Bond was one of the players who came into the starting rotation with Matt Nichols in 2016 — where they won seven games in a row — and was credited with improving the physical play and all-around blocking and attitude of the offensive line. This 27-year-old was a divisional and league all-star in 2016, played in 16 of 18 games for the Bombers in 2017, was listed as the 13th most prized free agent by the CFL brain trust and provides shade for your quarterback year round. 7-6 for the bad guys.

Bombers likely eyeing big fish

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers are due for a change in how they fish for new players.

Whereas in previous off-seasons, the Bombers have had to bottom trawl — or drag a large net across an entire ecosystem of CFL free agents to revamp their roster — expect them to address this year’s open season with a single, split, bamboo fly rod, and go after only one or two of the more impactful fish.

With the market hours set to open at lunchtime today, as usual, there will be plenty of river monsters for the taking. Players such as Ted Laurent, DaVaris Daniels, Jerome Messam and Tommie Campbell should be in that body of water, as well as current Bomber players such as Jamaal Westerman and T.J. Heath.

The danger of this fishing season is always paying above-market price for your catch, as the difference-makers in this body of water can be bid on by multiple teams, and in the long term, these inflated prices can end up limiting the amount of improvements a franchise can make in other areas.

CFL players, coaches not on level playing field when it comes to contracts

Welcome to the Canadian Football League, a great place to showcase your football talents and an even better place to coach.

As you may have heard, several players have taken to the airwaves to express their dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of entry level contracts, specifically James Wilder Jr., and the removal of the NFL option window, in this case, Victor Butler. It says here that this bitter pill of 2018 CFL football reality would be easier swallowed if the league wasn't already offering coaching staff each and every benefit the players are looking for, and then some.

Guaranteed contracts? While the NFL is seemingly always increasing the percentages of deals that are guaranteed for their players, the only thing that is for sure for Canadian athletes is the signing bonus. With as many injuries as there are in football, and performance peaks and valleys, clubs feel they must be able to move away from athletes whenever the cost-benefit ratio falls out of favour. Coaching contracts? For the most part are to be paid in full no matter how wretched a defence or offence may be struggling, or how badly the locker room may be tuning the coach out. If you sign a contract as a coach in the CFL, and you’re pretty much going to see it one way or another.

Salaries have always been a point of contention in the CFL and always will be. With a cap that doesn't keep pace with the existing deals that are maturing, there are two ways teams manage to keep their rosters competitive. Every roster takes advantage of the huge supply of American talent and leverage that lack of demand into paying the shortages of elite Canadian talent. You have to be an exceptional American prodigy to continue to convince decision-makers that those cheaper, plentiful options waiting in the wings could not provide adequate performance at a much greater discount. There is always limited money to go around, and to pay the top tier talents, you need many more deals hovering around the minimum mark, and continual turnover of those players who have forayed into the middle class. While coaching salaries in the CFL are certainly budgeted every season, there is actually no capped limit to what can be spent. Whatever a club can afford can be paid out, and you can have as many or as few of them as you wish. If it was a fixed expense for every team, it would be easier to justify diverting more money to minimum salaries and the player salary cap.

Bombers signing Durant a bold, brilliant and dangerous move

When you sign a 12-year CFL veteran to your football team, you pretty much know what you're going to get. That is, unless, you sign a 12-year veteran and put him in a role he's never played before.

Signing quarterback Darian Durant to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers is an unabated eyebrow raiser. It’s bold, it’s aggressive, it’s brilliant — it’s counter-intuitive because he was a 'Rider for a decade — and it’s also dangerous.

To no one’s surprise, Durant has come out and said all the right things since his acquisition. He has talked about how, when he started his career, he went from being a practice-squad guy to a third-stringer to a backup pivot. How he had to “work my way up,” and, therefore, coming in and deferring to Bomber starter Matt Nichols and becoming a “security blanket” for him won’t be an issue.

There is no disputing that he has been a backup in his career before, so how could these inches suggest that he is breaking new ground as a No. 2?

Hall needs to take harder line on player accountability

Richie Hall’s defence is a puzzle.

The reason his return as Bombers defensive coordinator is controversial is a quandary. How can the Bombers be so good at things like taking the football away and intercepting (in which they’ve led the CFL over the last two seasons) while at the same time being so bad at surrendering yardage? They've given up the most yards per game in the CFL in 2016, and the second-most in 2017.

People don’t like what they don’t understand. The contradiction of successes and failures from Hall’s defence is more a head contusion-and-concussion than a head-scratcher.

So how do you account for a defence that is seemingly either busting a coverage, making a spectacular interception and returning it to the house, or surrendering an easy score? Potentially all in the same game? From my experience playing defence, the allure of the big play can often cause players to ignore their assignments and go rogue.

All hail Hall, it’s a sure bet he’ll be back with Big Blue

Happy Holidays everyone.

Since it reportedly has been colder in Winnipeg than at the North Pole during this festive and merry season, it is only fitting some of Santa’s work orders — detailing what gifts the good girls and boys will be receiving — which are normally sent to the coldest place in the world, would end up in Manitoba instead.

Since 12-6 football teams that host playoff games are not on the naughty list, I stumbled across a few gifts that the local football franchise should be opening in the near future, and other presents that can be wrapped by simple deduction.

Since the fishing expedition of a couple weeks past — about the conspicuous absence of a Richie Hall biography on the team’s website — spawned a webpage restoration approximately nine seconds after it was printed, and the fact that we are moving into 2018 without an iota of a confirmation or denial about a certain defensive co-ordinator, you can bet your stocking haul that Mr. Hall will be back for a third time luckier, running the Blue and Gold defensive dozen.

Bombers wouldn’t have far to look for new defensive coordinator

It could be a computer glitch, a web page problem, or it could be it has been taken down from the website to add more spin to the year-end defensive statistics. It could be the festive season triggering visions of sugar plums dancing in my head, or it could very well be the coach was relieved of his duties and it hasn’t yet been announced to the public.

For, as of the time this column was submitted to the sports editors of the Winnipeg Free Press on Sunday night, if you were to click on Richie Hall’s name, under the coaching subtitle, on www.bluebombers.com, all you'd get was a “PAGE NOT FOUND” headline, with a “Sorry; no page was found at this location.”

Now, before we all start speculating whether this is a cryptic Christmas message from the brass at IGF, it is worth mentioning there are exactly 10 coaches listed on the franchise web page. If you click on any of them, save for Richie Hall and offensive line coach Marty Costello, you get a short biography and summation of their coaching exploits. Hall and Costello are the only two where, as I was trying to do research for this column — I know, surprising — there was nothing to be found.

While this may be nothing more than wishful thinking for many a fan of this team, you cannot deny that on the top of most every Winnipeg Blue Bomber supporter’s Christmas list, is a vastly improved defence. How this is achieved — by hook, crook or a look elsewhere — matters little to most.

A sign of a good contract? Paying players for what they can still do, not what they’ve done

They are the two biggest challenges for all CFL teams on the front end of free agency — ensuring they are re-signing their own athletes for what they will do and not what they have done, and recognizing how durability issues will affect those evaluations.

A common mistake for many football teams is to pay a player like an all-star, once he is recognized at that level, without being mindful of the bigger picture. More important than whether a player has achieved elite status, is whether he will be capable of maintaining it. Many athletes who will be available during free agency will be first-time award winners and will be looking to be paid like perennial all-stars. If you’ve been around the game long enough, you know that the stats can align for many players for a single season, and maybe even two. Whether they can maintain that consistency of play, through the good times, injuries and trying times, is another evaluation altogether.

Most recently, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have crossed the easy pending free agents off their list. Bringing back Justin Medlock, Jermarcus Hardrick, Timothy Flanders, Pat Neufeld and Derek Jones are largely no-brainers. Aside from Medlock, who is more often than not regarded as the best at what he does, the rest of this group has played at a high level of late, and still has plenty of football upside in front of them.

Sometimes, though, deciding what to do with the highest calibre players are the most intricate and interesting deliberations. Upcoming decisions on players such as Travis Bond, Weston Dressler, and possibly Jamaal Westerman, will be infinitely more difficult than the aforementioned signings.

Playoff loss exposed major flaws

Playoff games have a way of cutting through the fat and window dressing of a regular season, exposing the raw underbelly of what a football team really is.

After 18 regular-season games and one home playoff loss, there is no more glossing over the fact this Winnipeg Blue Bombers franchise is not going to the Western final for most any reason other than the play of its defence.

While there were tiny glimmers of hope along the way, such as the moments against the Edmonton Eskimos in Week 15, against the Calgary Stampeders in Week 20, against the Ottawa Redblacks at home in Week 14 and against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in Week 8, these performances were packaged together with an exciting and dynamic offence that was so compelling we could convince ourselves the defence was still one-third of a 12-win football team.

All of those wins make everybody look and feel better than what they really are — and gives credit where it is not necessarily deserved. Yet if you look closely enough at even these sporadic bright spots, you can tell they are a combination of advantageous circumstances — such as backup quarterbacks and zero-win teams — sandwiched together with extreme injury vulnerabilities.

Bombers have been the better team when facing Eskimos

Normally, when facing a pivot who is the likely winner of the league’s Most Outstanding Player award, you have your work cut out for you. And by all means, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers will when they face Mike Reilly and the Edmonton Eskimos in the West Division semifinal at Investors Group Field on Sunday.

Yet, more important than how Reilly did over the course of the season, and how his team is currently on a five-game winning streak, is how they’ve done against their next opponent, and that’s when the perception of the league’s “No. 1 ranked team” gets brought back to earth in a hurry.

Over the course of the regular season, Reilly was easily the league’s best quarterback. He threw for the most yards, breaking the Eskimos’ single-season record. He threw for the most touchdowns, had the receiver with the most yards in Brandon Zylstra, and beat Bombers counterpart Matt Nichols out with the top QUAR rating — the CFL’s version of a pivot evaluation system.

Yet when researching the pending third game of this matchup between the two teams, you don’t just look at how these teams fared against other teams during the regular season — where they tied with 12-win seasons. Instead, you look at how they matched up against each other, and that’s where things get interesting in a hurry. The Eskimos may be the top-ranked team in the CFL right now, and some people’s expectation to represent the West in the Grey Cup game, but so far, head to head, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are a better football team, and have been all year.

Keep Nichols, Harris out Friday, or it’s over for Blue and Gold

On the precipice of the Blue Bombers’ second consecutive playoff appearance, we are presented with the conundrum of the ages: What comes first? The home-field advantage or the extra week of rest for your injured players?

I suppose we were all naive to think, that some way, somehow, this edition of the football club could simply navigate around the injury iceberg that crashes into every football vessel every season. I’m not going to point fingers, but I do believe it was around the time someone released how few “man games” this team had missed due to injuries, that the good ship Blue and Gold got it’s hull perforated by a monster lurking beneath the waves and began to take on water.

No ship is unsinkable, and no team sails through a season without at least doing some patchwork or sealing a flooded compartment or two, and the Bombers just found out that they don’t have enough lifeboats and their captain, Matt Nichols, can’t swim.

So with one game remaining on the season and assurances from head coach O’Shea on our post-game broadcast that the latest casualties are all “fine,” it's full steam ahead for Calgary, where wins are notoriously hard to come by, and the Stampeders have lost two games in a row for the first time this season? Not so fast, Capt. Ahab.

Bombers hurt by abandoning ‘next man up’ system

Once upon a time, in a cold and magical place, a football team had a rash of injuries. Seemingly, no matter what they would do, their players would get hurt, and others would be thrust into the spotlight. While many expected these less talented or less experienced fill-ins to perform poorly, they all stepped up and kept winning, and everybody got contract extensions and lived happily ever after, and the “next man up” phenomena began. Until it was left on the roadside for dead. The end.

With two losses in the last four games, and the most significant injury scenario of the season on top of them, it seems like this “next man up” magic the Winnipeg Blue Bombers had in previous seasons was decidedly more lip service and rah rah chatter than anything else.

Even though the week after they lost two of their best players, they got two pretty damn good ones back in Weston Dressler and Ian Wild, and a new one that looks pretty good in Chris Givens, but this does not appear to be the same football team, offensively. So what gives?

It turns out they didn’t “next man up” the position on the football field that had their offence humming in the first place.

A dominant performance, with a (surprising) capital D

I believe that the American bassist Bill Laswell best described how many of us currently feel about the Winnipeg Blue Bombers defence with this simple quote: “People are afraid of things they don’t understand. They don’t know how to relate. It threatens their security, their existence, their career, image.”

Exactly.

After spending 13 of the first 14 games on the fun party bus of the consistently high-flying, multi-dimensional and prolific offence and reaping the rewards of strong coverage units on special teams, the Bomber defence decided to hold the B.C. Lions to zero points in the first quarter of the game Saturday afternoon. They then held them to three points each in the second and third quarters and gave up only a couple of touchdowns with five minutes remaining in the fourth quarter — in the heart of garbage time, when they started playing conservative “you won’t beat us deep” football.

If you had told me going into this game that the Bombers could defeat B.C. without scoring an offensive touchdown, I would have picked you up and driven you straight back to Crazytown, from where you had obviously just moved. I mean, let’s be serious here: the last four times the Lions played the Bombers there were more points handed out than if you were caught driving while texting on two smartphones.

Bombers can learn plenty from humbling loss to Ticats

In the spectrum of wake-up calls, that range from a gentle nudge and a cascading waterfall emanating from your alarm to an air horn that melts your face with 129 decibels, Friday’s loss to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats was a middle-of-the-road backhand across the jowls of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

Yet with four games remaining — and assuming this notice from Hamilton is heralded and Matt Nichols is not seriously dinged up — this might just be the best thing to happen to this football team as it gears up for a potential home playoff date.

It is true in professional football and most sports that you can learn exponentially more from losing than you can from winning. Winning too much and too often can gloss over fundamental deficiencies you may have and actually reinforce improper techniques, strategies and flaws— shortcomings get sugar-coated with the “whatever it takes,” frosting of winning. When you lose, and you look at yourself in the mirror the next day, there is no makeup or favourable lighting and the swelling around your face doesn’t look near as tough or heroic as you thought it would. Of course, all the lessons you are taught from losing don’t matter if you don’t have the talent or ability to apply the corrections you have discerned. Sitting at 10 wins on the season, it is obvious this team does.

Looking back over the regular season, this football team hasn’t experienced much chop or many swells as its navigated its way to double digits wins for the second season in a row. Other than a 2-2 start as they embarked on their 2017 voyage, the Bombers been able to stay relatively healthy and victorious, with both a five-game and three-game winning streak through the heart of the schedule. They have not lost two games in a row the entire year, and with B.C. coming to town on Saturday, are going to want to see that trend continue.

Bombers fans need to put defeatist attitude to rest

When a football team hasn’t contended for a title in years — or won one in decades — there are always going to be more reasons to not believe than to believe. The burden of proof that things have finally turned the corner gets heavier the longer a drought lasts, and it can turn a fanbase into practised skeptics.

Which might be why, even at nine wins and three losses, two-thirds of the way through the regular season, many of us were still preoccupied with coming up with reasons why they might lose to the Edmonton Eskimos, instead of how they might win. It’s like having a failure complex that compels one to prepare for any one of the multiple ways a team can let you down. Call it a conditioned response when you’ve spent too much time around a franchise that has been disappointed in most conceivable ways since 1990.

For instance, going into Edmonton, instead of focusing on the disparity in win/loss records between the teams, and the victory in the previous meeting, or the fact that the Bombers had won eight of their last nine, the emphasis was always on what Edmonton might do to turn things around. Such as: now that Edmonton had a bye week, and a chance to get healthier, and to put a serious game plan together for the Bombers, how could they not win?

The Eskimos are a franchise steeped in championship lore, and losing six games in a row simply wasn’t plausible. They would be playing at home, and Winnipeg usually struggles out there, and they have Mike Reilly, the former Grey Cup MVP and fiercest of fierce competitors, and the Doogie Howser of coaching savants, Jason Maas, at the helm. How could this visiting football team not become complacent, achieving at this rate, and let their guard down against a team that needed the win much more than they did?

Bombers equipped with all-season tires

It’s not often a lopsided victory over a team with a losing record and a third-string quarterback can be discussed as one of the most impressive victories of the season, but that’s exactly what Friday night’s win for the Blue Bombers was.

Far more important than the record of who they were playing and what number on the depth chart the visiting quarterback was, is that this was our first window into what November playoff football weather can look like and an indication of how that might affect the high-octane and high-scoring Paul LaPolice-led offence.

After 60 minutes of football in some pretty aggressive, inconsistent and sketchy weather, it may have actually made this phase of the football team look even better.

If you’ve never played football in a torrential downpour with cold, howling and swirling winds, there are challenges that need to be navigated. The speed of the game slows as everything and everyone is waterlogged and saturated. It’s near-impossible to use your hands effectively, as jerseys are wet and slick, so grabbing, clutching and pulling is more difficult.

Eliminating pads in football practice preposterous

The CFL and the Canadian Football League Players' Association came together, and announced a united front on two issues this past week. One will benefit the health and well-being of the players, and the other will jeopardize those same principles, while providing little actual value other than as a public-relations maneuver.

If you’re just hearing this now, the league will be implementing a third bye week during the regular season in 2018 in an attempt to eradicate “short weeks” for the players, as well as the complete elimination of padded practices during the regular season. There is no doubt these changes will be well received by most of the players, but that doesn’t mean they are both necessarily good for the game.

The change that will definitely benefit the players is the added bye week. Playing games on short weeks, while you’re still recovering from the last contest, can turn minor ailments into serious ones, and make athletes more reliant on pain killers and anti-inflammatories to weather the storm. Increasing rest time is always a win when it comes to player safety, but the effect of the second amendment is less clear.

If given the choice, there is no disputing most players would choose not to wear pads during the week. Most players would also choose to not condition regularly, work out seriously during the week or watch a lot of film, too, though, so what is popular with the players isn’t always what’s best for the game.

Bombers’ fake punt return was the real deal

By now, most of us have heard how the Blue Bombers executed one of the most impressive punt returns in franchise history over the weekend, but questions remain: What made them think it would work, and why did it?

In case you missed it, at 7-7 in the second quarter, with fourteen minutes left in the half against the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the special teams of the local football club executed a fake punt return to perfection.

A return that, in all my years of watching and playing CFL football, I had never seen happen live before.

As greatly detailed by Free Press sports writer Mike Sawatzky after the game, we all know how it went down — Winnipeg's Kevin Fogg sprinted across the field, pretending the ball was going to him, and the coverage unit followed him, enabling teammate Moe Leggett to return it from the other side of the field, virtually unabated, to the end zone.

In despicable display, Riders faked it till they made it

It’s one thing for coaches to take a challenge and go on a fishing expedition for football improprieties but it’s another altogether more disgraceful thing to strategically advise your players to fake injuries in order to help out your team.

Players overreacting, embellishing or straight-up faking injuries in pro football is certainly nothing new. Some players pretend they are injured to try and secure a pay day if they think they’re going to be cut. Others falsify their health status or play up a big hit in a game to enhance their “toughness” status and to try to win praise and approval from fans and/or teammates.

When a defensive player gets an interception and takes it to the house for a score, it’s practically an unwritten rule that someone “gets injured” during the extra-point convert, so the defence can take an extra break as it has to go right back out on the field.

Heck, I was on teams where defensive co-ordinators lightly suggested that if we were on the field, chasing our tails and getting marched up and down the field by the opposition, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for someone to go down so we could regroup and take a moment to right the ship.

Bombers should make Labour Day game a classic

When something doesn’t make sense, people tend to extinguish the contradiction in their heads by putting forth the simplest of explanations.

For instance, when a team that is superior in the rankings goes into Saskatchewan and loses on Labour Day, most people chalk it up to overconfidence or cockiness, when the reality is a once-a-year phenomena and spectacle-type atmosphere often turn a sub-par team into a superb one.

At 7-2, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are one point out of being the best team in the standings in the CFL. The offence has maintained the ball-security characteristics of last year, while raising their production, effectiveness and efficiency to an elite level.

The defence is continuing to force turnovers and take the ball away at pivotal moments, and the pressure the unit is starting to get on pivots with its four-man rush seems to be improving every game. Even though five of their seven wins have come against Eastern division opponents that are padding the stats of all the Western teams this year, the only game in which they appeared outclassed in the West was against the Calgary Stampeders, and that game took place long before many of these improvements we see today took hold.

Doesn’t matter who the Bombers play… until November

Many a professional football team has come and gone in these parts, and until the last couple of years, rarely was it worth taking a harder look at the mechanisms and themes that they operate off of. After all, if what they were doing didn't work, then why bring undue attention to the processes?

Almost halfway through the 2017 CFL season, though, the Blue and Gold are looking like a team with ample potential, and few absolute, critical flaws.

So what makes The Bombers tick, and what mentality has bumped them into a four-game winning streak, only two points behind the division leaders? What is the underlying theme in the locker room and belief system that the coaching staff has asked players to buy into?

Most teams have a central approach to games that they reinforce with their players time and again, to try and keep them focused and consistent during the marathon of a five-month regular season. Some, like former head coach Dave Ritchie, would come up with a new reason every week why your opponent didn’t respect you, and it was so compelling you would buy into it and believe him, even in the middle of a 12-game winning streak. Other coaches would remind you time and again that no matter the perceived calibre or record of the opponent, winning professional football games is incredibly difficult to do at all times.

Bombers didn’t need to win, but did it anyway

Probably the most overlooked component of any successful football season is how you play and perform against the teams you are supposed to beat.

Going into a contest on the road against a winless opponent is one of the hardest things you can do in pro football, and that's mainly because the usual incentives aren't there for the players. If you beat the Calgary Stampeders, or the Edmonton Eskimos, or the B.C. Lions, you gain instant respect across the football community, rise to prominence in the standings and show you are a team to be contended with. You open eyes, draw attention to your accomplishment and surprise people everywhere.

When you play a team that hasn't won, the rules-and-reward system turns upside down. The outcome isn't supposed to be in question. You are no longer given credit or respect for simply winning the game. It instead becomes a measurement of how much you won by, and how easily you did it.

Not only are the incentives different for the players in this circumstance, but the environment they prepare in during the week are often also polar opposites. Winning teams are rewarded for their efforts with a break here, a day off there, a practice script reduced on day two and so on and so forth.

Been there, done that — Bombers steal show again

When you’ve recently stared down and conquered Mount Everest, the prospect of summiting a lesser peak is met with both confidence and belief — exactly what the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have done over the last two weeks.

Overcoming a mountainous score discrepancy in the Montreal game two weeks ago was this team’s Everest and ultimate challenge so far this season. They had a map to navigate it — score, onside, score — but there were treacherous crevasses, sketchy ice ladders, avalanches, dangerously low oxygen levels and the advisory that many people died climbing it every year. Or were otherwise defeated and turned around by it. Yet once the team had completed that most improbable and almost impossible climb and overcame a 12-point deficit in only 95 seconds, the next adverse situation they found themselves in didn’t seem to daunting.

In Ottawa on Friday night, the team found itself behind again in the fourth quarter. But it was only by a touchdown and there were more than five and a half minutes left in the game. When you’ve taken down 12 points in 95 seconds, seven in five minutes is almost laughable and they made it look easy — even routine.

The defence, which had already given up 30 points and had hardly covered itself in glory during this game, or so far this season, simply decided they were done surrendering scoring opportunities and gave the ball back to the offence three consecutive times without allowing Ottawa a chance to make it a two-score contest. While a touchdown from the Bombers offence would have made things easier, they had so much time to spare they simply did not need one. It’s much simpler to get into field goal range for Justin Medlock multiple times, so they did that three times and ho-hum, it’s off to Hamilton to play the winless Ticats.

Well, that was fun; now about that defence…

If you have a positive result after a largely poor performance, does it reinforce the same behaviour, or do you recognize you got away with one and attack your issues with urgency? It is my experience, after a win such as the one we witnessed last Thursday night, that a football team usually responds in one of these two ways.

The Blue Bombers will either realize that as amazing as their heroics were, they were fortunate to end up where they did and understand that they’ve got much work to do to clean up fundamental issues that were glossed over. Or, they figure that whatever they are doing right now is still working — they are, after all, tied for fourth in the CFL — so more of the same should suffice.

This opinion is not intended to discount the late-game heroics that we witnessed against the Montreal Alouettes. For an offence to switch gears like that, down by 12, and execute with another level of focus and precision against one of the top defences in the league, was both eye-opening and inspiring. The kind of moxie and mental toughness that is required to overcome such a deficit with time expiring is a promising beacon, and hopefully a rallying point for this team.

Yet, you cannot discount the fact that luck played a role, and that the defence did not play anywhere well enough to win. As methodical and driven as the offence was in the final two possessions, without a successfully executed onside kick — always an against-the-odds proposition — they don’t get an opportunity to drive for the go-ahead score. As good as their kicker is, no team wins more onside kick scenarios than they lose, and if they had lost, their defence would have taken the field to try stopping an offence that had been running the ball against them as though they had four extra players on the field.

Successful coaches use deception as spice, not main ingredient

When all was said and done, after an entertaining see-saw battle against the big-play B.C. Lions, it was not simply the fact that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers attempted and failed to convert a third-and-15 play from their own 26-yard line in the fourth quarter that was cause for concern.

Instead, it was an over-reliance on irregular, non-fundamental plays that they knew they had to convert in order to keep pace with the Lions.

After four games — nearly a quarter of the way through the year — this is a solid football team. Not a great team, but one with with talent that is highly responsive to momentum swings with 14 games remaining on the schedule.

The Bombers have fallen short in two games against the Western Division's best; they had trouble trading punches with Calgary for a full contest; and they couldn't hold on to a sizable lead against B.C.

Hitting the road for home games could be key to Bombers’ success

Lost amid the many positives from Thursday night's victory against the Toronto Argonauts was the statistic that is taken for granted in most professional football stadiums outside of Winnipeg — a definitive home-field advantage capped with a victory.

This could finally be the year the Blue Bombers turn this statistic on its head and start reaping the benefits that are due to them in their own barn, Investor's Group Field. If it isn’t, there may be a recourse for a team that went 7-2 on the road last year and only 4-5 at home. Make the home games like the road games.

Whether you are playing 18 or 16 games a season in the CFL or NFL, the recipe for success is generally thought to be the same. You are supposed to win 75 per cent or more of your home games, and do your best to split the contests on the road.

In the CFL, that equates to six or seven wins at home out of nine, and four or five wins on the road. That gives your football team between 10 and 12 wins a year, more than enough to consistently qualify for the playoffs, and to be in the mix to host a playoff game as well.

And just when you think you know somebody…

The large chasm between what our expectations were for the home opener on Friday night and what actually went down is most likely the cause of any frustration fans may be feeling and why many left the contest puzzled about the current state of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

Just when you thought you had an idea of where they would excel and how they might struggle, they completely flipped the script on us.

In Game 1, we had all the comfort and security of a familiar offence that performed as we thought it would — a scrappy, gritty effort that produced a dynamic 43 points. It was ball secure. It was multi-dimensional. It was prolific. Point of fact, it was mainly what we saw from the offence last year, and that was comforting. Even the defence in the first game was similar to what we had come to know, but in a somewhat more unsettling way. The D gave up a ton of yards and considerable points, but made some plays, complemented the offence when it counted and helped the team win.

So we approached the home-opener against Calgary with an idea of what the team was and what its identity and characteristics were going to be. Then, without warning or rationale, it turned upside-down on our heads.

Building on ball-hawk defence and patient, inspired offence key to Blue striking gold

Anytime you’re opening the regular season on the road against an opponent that was tied for last place in the CFL, and whose starting quarterback was your backup, the danger lies in underestimating the resolve and ability of your opponent.

With that understood, if the Winnipeg Blue Bombers display the characteristics and traits that they forged their 11-7 team identity on last year, they need not concern themselves with the overhaul and new look of their first regular-season opponent.

At the start of a new season, it's important for any team that has significant carry-over to reflect and reinforce which of their habits were most successful the previous year. And the habit that had the most pronounced effect on their win-loss total from 2016 was winning the turnover battle. While the defence reaped most of the accolades and attention for its league-leading 30 interceptions and 59 total takeaways, the offence did a good job of hanging onto the ball, resulting in a plus-29 turnover ratio at season's end.

So it would seem the biggest factor for this team in setting the table for success — against the Riders this weekend, or anybody else — will be to win that turnover battle. When this team forces more turnovers than they surrender, it is incredibly difficult to defeat.

Davis the better athlete, but LeFevour is my No. 2

By all appearances, not only do the Winnipeg Blue Bombers appear to have three viable, and competent quarterbacks on their roster, but Dominique Davis seems to have nailed down the highly coveted No. 2 spot, behind incumbent Matt Nichols. While it is hard to deny the potential and future of Davis, there are only two circumstances in the regular season where I would have him enter the game before Dan LeFevour.

To understand this argument, we must first understand the role of a No. 2 quarterback, and how they are called upon to perform in different, and usually chaotic, environments.

The most common, of course, is when the starter gets banged up. Without warning, the No. 2 is most often asked to grab his helmet off the bench and transition seamlessly to the game, with maybe a couple of warmup tosses under his belt, and zero feel for what is actually going on. He will enter the game, and the defence will immediately smell blood in the water, and try to put their foot on the neck of the offence by being even more aggressive and forcing the one player who hasn’t even broken a sweat yet to get the ball out of his hands in a blink of an eye.

Indeed, it may be one of the hardest things to do in pro football: to enter a regular-season or playoff game cold and secure a win.

Some good, some bad for Blue in Regina pre-season opener

They say a tie game in football — like we saw Saturday night — has all of the merit of kissing your sister, because in either scenario, there are no winners.

Outside of the obvious and immature humour of this happening on a weekend night in Regina, of all places, we also saw many characteristics — both good and bad — that we have come to expect from this Winnipeg Blue Bombers football team over the past few seasons.

The concern is continuity from one year to another; whether the positive identity forged in one season can carry over to the next. Even with about 10 impactful players not making the trip West, many of the attributes this football team has come to define itself with — and struggles against — were on full display throughout the 2017 preseason opener.

In large quantities, the Bombers showed fortitude and grit, and did not give up on the contest even when down by multiple scores throughout the majority of the game, and with time beginning to expire in the fourth. We have come to learn that these football teams, led by Mike O’Shea, are more immune to the momentum swings and highs and lows that are inevitable throughout a marathon season.

Bombers pre-season action far more important for offence unit timing

Each season, no matter how much a team changes or stays the same, they all require something different from their pre-season schedule. These requirements, though, aren't as obvious or as logical as one would think. The only universal mandate is to stay as healthy as possible. But, spending time worrying about injury inevitabilities is as fruitful as trying to stiff-arm father time.

Even though the 2017 Winnipeg Blue Bombers are as similar to their previous-year selves as they’ve been in eons, there still has been considerable change, and change requires evaluation, repetition and cohesion in order to benefit your team. While you will never read in these inches that practice isn't essential, it will never carry the same weight that game reps do.

Out of all of the phases on the football team, the offence was shaken up the least in the offseason. The offensive line is status quo — which might be the most underrated thing the team has going for it in 2017 — and the quarterback is back with a vengeance and without controversy. The running game is stable and similar and the majority of receivers — minus a starter or two — are business as usual. It would appear then, that players on the starting unit would not require as much time together in the pre-season as last year, since it has a degree of continuity.

While the offence should be exponentially ahead at this time than where it was last year — especially in terms of familiarity with returning offensive co-ordinator Paul LaPolice’s playbook — offence is never just about knowing what to do; it’s always about knowing how to do it. With so many moving parts, so much choreography and so many timing variables, game-speed reps are more critical for this phase of the football team than any other. Defence and special teams don’t have to get into rhythms and develop their own metronome-like cadences and patterns to execute football plays effectively. No matter whether an offensive group has been together for multiple seasons, or is completely new, pre-season snaps are valuable. In fact, if you could guarantee a co-ordinator and head coach that you would not lose any valuable assets in the pre-season, you would probably see every starting offence in the CFL taking every single snap.

Football camp powered by generous athletes putting in time

On the day training camp for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers began — that first step towards building a legacy — it was an interesting time to reflect on some of the players who wore those same jerseys over the past couple of decades, and the legacy they continue to leave in the community.

With the Eighth Annual Doug Brown Kidsport Football Camp being held the same day, there was going to be little room for error when it came to staffing the event. While there is only one name attached to the camp, which was free for all the kids who received funding from Kidsport in 2016, it never would have survived eight years without the contributions and sacrifices of former teammates who have all come to make Winnipeg home since their playing days, and continue to spend countless hours servicing it.

The camp now has a title sponsor — David and Ruth Asper — to help get more opportunities for kids to participate in sport, and there is a plethora of other volunteers and sponsors, from RBC, Boston Pizza, the Winnipeg Football Club, KB2 clothing and Save On Foods, that help the camp run seamlessly. However, the actual interactions these kids have, for many hours each year, are entirely dependant on the time of the ex-professional players who show up like clockwork every season.

Obby Khan, who has literally become the football version of Ace Burpee — when it comes to giving back to the community — had already spent his weekend as a ride captain for the Ride for Dad, an annual motorcycle event that raises funds to fight prostate cancer, and as a food sponsor for the Winnipeg Harvest Fast and Furious Feast, which raised more than $20,000. So how did he spend more than four hours of his Sunday? By working on football fundamentals and skills with more than 60 kids, ranging in ages from five to 18.

Bombers getting an exceptional athlete in Ekakitie

With the Winnipeg Blue Bombers making defensive tackle Faith Ekakitie the No. 1 selection in the 2017 CFL draft, as the self-appointed director of scouting for the Free Press it's time for me to take a look at the film and share my thoughts on the player that will, hopefully, be holding down the middle of the defensive line, and the defence, for years to come in blue and gold.

It’s important to note these observations are primarily derived from Ekakitie’s highlight tape and other materials available online.

The danger of drawing too many conclusions from a highlight tape is that, well, it features all highlights. You tend to get a better feel for an athlete’s nature and ability from watching entire game films, but we work with the tools available to us.

Like many collegiate athletes, Faith is not quite as tall as advertised. The standard media guide exaggeration is to add a couple inches. While you can find Ekakitie listed as tall as 6'3", pro days, for the most part, don’t lie and it looks like he is 6'1" and consistently weighs in around 304 pounds. While that weight is suitable for a rotational player — which he will most likely be in his first season — if he is going to be a full-time contributor, and not just a situational starter it’s my opinion he would be more effective in the CFL by dropping around 20 pounds.

Wanted: CEO to carry heavy load in no-win situation; apply to CFL

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to secure the next appointment as the commissioner of the Canadian Football League. As always, should you or any of your Impossible Mission force be fired or fail to fulfil any of the largely unattainable responsibilities of the commissioner, the CFL and it’s membership will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This job offering will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck.

Good luck indeed. With commissioner Jeffrey Orridge and the CFL board of governors mutually agreeing to part ways just over two years into the job, what has to be one of Canada’s most difficult employment offerings is once again up for grabs.

Since the start of the 21st century, there have been only two commissioners that have held the job longer than three years: Tom Wright — who barely made it past the three-year mark — and Mark Cohon, God bless his soul, who made it more than seven. In contrast, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is entering his 12th year, and his two predecessors — Paul Tagliabue and Pete Rozelle — were at the helm for 18 and 30 years, respectively.

Of course it never hurts to be the frontman of a monolithic juggernaut such as the NFL — one that is as successful as it is wealthy, that compensates its CEO exponentially more than the CFL — but this is a striking comparison nonetheless. While the National Football League is undoubtedly easier to run, its commissioners still own a number of ill-fated disasters and fumbles, which never seem to result in their dismissals. The CFL position seems to have about the same life expectancy and tenure as a player who enters the league out of university, and if that player’s career manages to beat the odds and exceed the averages, they are most likely going to see several league bosses come and go.

Winning? Who cares about winning? This is fans in the huddle!

When it comes to the firing of general manager Ed Hervey from the Edmonton Eskimos, the first thing that probably jumps off the page for most CFL football fans is... the Eskimos had a problem with their team? They were 40 wins and 32 losses with Hervey at the helm, including a Grey Cup title in his first four-year stretch.

Most teams would take that all day long and thank you for the opportunity to try it again, but it wasn't good enough for Eskimos CEO and president Len Rhodes.

In case you missed it, Rhodes fired Hervey last Friday, citing two reasons; first because he and the GM couldn’t come to terms on a new contract. This may be true but it looks a lot like a chaser to help you swallow the second reason — a lack of stakeholder access to their football team. Yes indeed, this dismissal was about access, and Hervey's refusal to give it, specifically last season when the Eskimos were asked to “mic up” both their head coach and quarterback for a TV broadcast, and didn’t. Reportedly, in meetings with Rhodes over granting more access to all kinds of partners with the football club going forward, Rhodes said that Hervey, “...thought about it but decided to keep it status quo.”

Hence we have what may be the first case in professional football, ever, where a general manager, who is essentially paid to win games and titles, was fired for only winning games and titles.

Molehills don’t become mountains on a good football team

The most telling sign that a football team is on completely different footing than it used to be is the reaction — or lack thereof — when inevitable spots of misfortune befall it.

With the sudden and unexpected retirement of 25-year-old receiver Ryan Smith, who was only three years into his professional football career, and the departure of running back coach Avon Cobourne to greener pastures, this news in Blue Bomberville would have been received very differently had it happened a year ago.

Smith’s retirement would have been chalked up as an allergic reaction to a losing culture and locker room, and Avon’s transition out of the coaching ranks would have told us all we needed to know about whether dysfunction swirled in those ranks. It wouldn't have mattered what was said on the record.

This year though? A slight shrug of the shoulders is all it invokes. Like bullets off a Kevlar vest.

CFL GMs have insider intel on free agents but rarely use it

They are one of the most accurate and accessible tools in the workshop of free agency that are wielded by general managers — yet, rarely are they cited as a reference when a deal is done.

Every team in the CFL has its own scouting department, and different divisions of this department specialize in identifying Canadian and American prospects that could potentially benefit their team. Yet when it comes to selecting active players in the CFL through free agency, there is often no better source of information than a team's own athletes.

There is more to sizing up a prospective free agent than simply counting the number of awards or accolades they’ve won, seeing how they would fit under the salary cap, and whether they've received or rushed for a century mark against your own team.

You may be surprised to learn that a number of GMs have extended, in-depth conversations with their own players about potential free-agency prospects and, in fact, sometimes consult with them before they even fine-tune their off-season wish lists.

Schedule gives Bombers chance for early jump

Now that the 2017 CFL schedule has been released, it is fair to say that most players took a long, hard look at who their Week 1 opponent will be, and didn't pay too much attention to the rest of it. After all, when there are only nine teams in the league, there are only so many surprises that can pop up from one year to the next. Furthermore, as head coach Mike O’Shea stressed so emphatically in 2016, the most important game is always the next one, and therefore, for the most part, you don't worry about that next opponent until the day after you have played your first game.

Every coach, however, has a way of breaking down the enormity of an 18-game schedule, and one of the most successful coaches over the last 20 or so years in Blue Bomber land, Doug Berry, liked to present it to his team in thirds. The first six games were the introduction to the season, the next six games were the middle stanza, and the final six contests were the conclusion. Every game you played was part of that grouping of six, and it was an effective way to set goals without overwhelming the players or oversimplifying the schedule.

Studying the 2016 season, and grouping it according to that Berry construct, it’s easy to see the trends and identify the patterns that shaped the year. While no two teams are ever the same, with the emphasis in 2017 to not fix what isn’t broken, and instead, tweaking an 11-win team, there should be some similar themes. As you should recall, in the first third of last year’s schedule, the team struggled mightily, and had only one win in the first five games. That was until quarterback Matt Nichols was inserted and won the sixth game, getting the Bombers out of that first six-game stretch with two wins and four losses. It is worth mentioning, however, that this was also the most difficult part of the schedule, as QB Drew Willy faced Calgary twice and Edmonton once.

The middle stanza is where Nichols went on his run. With four games against the East and only two divisional games against bottom-dwelling Saskatchewan, he led the team to six straight victories. In rounding out the year, with four more games against the West and two against the East, he cooled down to finish the final third at 3-3.

For Bombers to dream of Grey Cups, QB Nichols needs to take his game to all-star level

After signing quarterback Matt Nichols to a three-year deal last week, it's safe to assume the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are anticipating the same degree of improvement from him in 2017 as they witnessed last year.

Dare we say, all-star calibre improvement, because unless you’re an all-star quarterback in this league, Grey Cups can be hard to come by.

The last 15 teams that have won the coveted chalice each had a quarterback who was, at some point or another, at least a divisional all-star in the CFL.

The Redblacks won the Grey Cup last season with Henry Burris at the helm and he is a five-time divisional all-star who has won three cups over the course of his career. In 2015, Mike Reilly led the Eskimos to a championship, and he was a divisional all-star in 2014.

Blue Bombers must pony up to preserve continuity

It may not sound logical, but off-seasons for football teams that have had successful regular-season campaigns — such as the 2016 Winnipeg Blue Bombers — can often be more difficult to navigate than for teams coming off a losing year.

The last time the Bombers had a winning record in the regular season and followed it up with a better record the following year was when they went 11-7 in 1992 and improved to 14-4 in 1993. If this team can improve from its 11-win campaign in 2016, and pick up a 12th victory — or more — in 2017, it would be the first time in 24 years it has been able to build off successes and not falter because of them.

What makes it harder to achieve incremental success, season after season? Essentially, it comes down to trying to do more with less.

“More” in the sense you need to find another gear and level of performance out of your roster and “less” in the sense you have to do it with fewer resources in regard to both players and money — neither of which has been Winnipeg’s strong suit.

Blue have only so much gold to sign Nichols

With the head coach and general manager locked up for the foreseeable future, the focus shifts to the quarterback, the next most important asset on the football club. As big and critical as the ongoing negotiation with Matt Nichols is for the future of the team in 2017, it always comes down to leverage; who has it and who doesn't.

It’s never a good thing when your 10-win quarterback is without a contract and only a couple months away from being able to sign with whomever he chooses, but that's the situation after franchise QB Drew Willy was unexpectedly traded away after a disastrous start to the season and his understudy took the reins.

With the negotiation rumoured to be between $400,000 (offered) and $450,000 (asked), it’s worth examining who holds what clout at the table.

While the ground rules don't allow other teams to talk to pending free agents until February, it would be naive to assume that Nichols' agent doesn't already know what the outside interest on his client is. General Manager Kyle Walters is guessing what that amounts to and how much he'll have to pay to keep Nichols in blue and gold. Sure, he could call the quarterback's bluff, letting him test the free-agency waters, but that comes with the very real risk that he'll sign elsewhere.

QB Burris’s quandary? To go out on top, or let injury end his career

While the 2017 CFL season couldn’t seem farther away in early December, decisions made during the next couple of months can be critical in laying a foundation for success or failure in the upcoming campaign. One of the most compelling storylines, soon to be dominating Canadian football airwaves, will be whether Grey Cup champion and most valuable player Henry Burris goes out on top at age 41 or tries to do it all over again.

One of the most difficult moments in any player’s career is deciding whether to hang up the cleats (one of the worst phrases in football; at no point in anyone's career are cleats hung up... they usually sit at the bottom of a garbage bag, but I digress).

A player contemplating retirement is almost always refereeing a wrestling match in his head. One grappler acknowledges the law of diminishing returns with an aging body, recognizes the increasing susceptibility to injury and delay in recovery time, and takes stock of what can be contributed to the team and what's left to prove as a player. The other side makes a compelling argument that football careers have a short shelf life, so you simply play it as long as you can and try to ignore any emerging limitations.

And it must be an epic match in Burris's case, given the triumphant end to his 2016 campaign with the Ottawa Redblacks and the knowledge that the upcoming season would be his 21st.

Does Nichols have the makings of an elite quarterback?

Watching the final four pivots on display in the CFL division finals over the weekend, you couldn’t help but notice how the quarterbacks are also, not coincidentally, four of the best (five if you count Ottawa backup Trevor Harris) in the league, which begs the question: is the pursuit and re-signing of Matt Nichols by the Winnipeg Blue Bombers an exercise in securing the best proven pivot that knows the team’s offence? Or is Nichols a stopgap who went on a hot streak but maybe doesn’t have all the tools to carry the team deeper into the weekends of November?

At first glance and review, all signs point to Nichols being the final piece of the puzzle to eventually end this team’s 26-season title drought. Nichols is a leader, is durable, wields the fiery type of personality players respond to and, most importantly, was the maestro of an offence that turned the ball over fewer times than any other team in franchise history.

The first game he started in 2016, he merely went into the home of the defending Grey Cup champions, Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton — a place where Winnipeg rarely wins — and pulled out the first of what would be an impressive run of seven consecutive victories. He beat every team in the CFL at least once this season, except for the team that lost only twice — the Calgary Stampeders.

After the final six games of the season, where he cooled down and went 3-3, he rebounded for one of his better games of the season against the B.C. Lions in the west semifinal. In that game, the best of Nichols was on display once again, on the biggest of stages. He completed 65 per cent of his passes, threw for just less than 400 yards and two touchdowns and, of course, led an offence that committed zero interceptions, fumbles or turnovers. Were it not for the decision to attempt a 61-yard field goal at the end of the game, Nichols very well might have authored the drive that put his team into the Western final.

The best Bombers stat? Fewest giveaways ever

When the corpse of a football season is still warm, it’s easy to be a prisoner of the moment and fixate on what the Winnipeg Blue Bombers should have done on third-and-four in the final minute of their playoff game against the B.C. Lions Sunday. Yet if you had proposed to the players, coaches, executives and fan base, on Day 1 of training camp, they could have a season where they would win 11 games, make it to the playoffs for the first time in five years, and come within one play of making it to the Western final, you would have had the first ever unanimous vote in Winnipeg history.

That being said, many of us still don’t know where to rank or compartmentalize the successes and failures of this football team. How good were they really, and how did they match up to the different successful teams that have come before them? While winning championships will forever be the standard by which Winnipeg football teams are measured, at least one player on this team — Maurice Leggett — felt strongly enough about the performance of his ball-hawking crew to proclaim on social media that they were, “...the best defence Winnipeg had since Rod Hill played.”

With 30 interceptions under their belt, and a plus-29 difference between takeaways and giveaways they, without question, improved over last year and made their mark on the CFL. Yet when the smoke cleared from the devastating loss in Vancouver, there was something about the 522 yards (193 on the ground alone) and 32 points they gave up that made you want to look into this assertion a little further.

So what makes a defence the best? You could write 10 columns arguing about the merit and limitations of any statistic, but an examination of the points allowed by a defence, the number of sacks and interceptions they went out and got, the average pass and rushing yards they allowed, along with how many times they actually took the ball away, would be a good start.

Lions QB loves to throw, Blue Bombers defence loves to intercept

The last time the Winnipeg Blue Bombers swept the B.C. Lions in the CFL regular season and then played them again in the playoffs was in 2011 — the last time Winnipeg was in the post-season.

While things did not work out so well in that campaign, the one overwhelming trait that propelled the Bombers to an 11-win season this year is the battle they must win to defeat the Lions for a third time in 2016.

On paper, the Lions are a formidable opponent and one of only two teams that were able to beat the record-breaking Calgary Stampeders.

On offence, they have weapons such as running back Chris Rainey, quarterback Jonathon Jennings and receivers Emmanuel Arceneaux and Bryan Burnham. On defence, they boast stalwarts such as linebackers Solomon Elimimian and Adam Bighill, lineman Michael Brooks and halfback Ryan Phillips protecting the pay dirt.

Bombers’ body of work suggests team better than the one that lost to Ottawa

It’s never ideal to lose a game off of uncharacteristic mistakes, or with the post-season only a couple of weeks away, but you may be surprised to hear that all is not yet lost for the 2016 edition of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

In fact, a first-round playoff win is still a distinct possibility.

The unsettling nature of Saturday’s 23-10 loss to the Ottawa Redblacks is exactly why it is not time to start making vacation plans for the middle of November. The players exhibited traits in the loss that they rarely display, and that are uncharacteristic for them, so a return to their normal habits and practises are what the law of averages would indicate will still happen.

If you believe quarterback Matt Nichols is going to throw three interceptions or more a game for the rest of the year, and get sacked three times in every contest, too, then we all have cause for worry. Yet the larger body of work we have seen since he took over as starting QB tells us that for every pick he throws, he will throw two touchdowns, and that his offensive line usually keeps him much cleaner than he was.

Bombers’ fans have the ability to help tame opponents

It’s not often a professional football coach will give you the keys to victory against his own team, but that is essentially what head coach Wally Buono of the B.C. Lions offered up to Vancouver columnist Cam Cole after his team's first loss to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers a few weeks ago.

How is this relevant now? Well, with a Lions victory over the Edmonton Eskimos over the weekend, the race for second place in the West and a home playoff game now appears to be a two-horse race between the Leos and our young upstarts in Blue and Gold. While the Lions lost both the home-and-away games to Winnipeg, after reading Buono’s comments, you can be assured they are going to do everything in their power to avoid having to return here in November.

“In Winnipeg, we couldn’t use audibles, couldn’t use the cadence, couldn’t communicate. There was too much noise,” Buono said to Cole.

Rarely do you find head coaches being this candid for two reasons. One, it gives their players an excuse for non-performance. Whether it was completely true or not, when your head coach identifies a factor outside of your control in a loss, it takes the responsibility off of the players. The players cannot control the noise volume on the road, so therefore they couldn’t affect the outcome of the game.

Bombers’ style an advantage in cold-weather playoffs

With your Winnipeg Blue Bombers currently sitting alone in second place in the West Division, and on the verge of an 11- or 12-win season for the first time since 2002 or 2003, the biggest advantage that would come with a home playoff berth is this team could potentially play all of its games outside in November.

As well as the team has played this season, winning seven games in a row, and nine of their last 11 after starting 1-4, it’s a reasonable expectation with the cold weather and difficult conditions that often accompany playoff football, they should be even better.

Before we get into whether a team plays the right style of football or not, if you play football in Winnipeg, you practise in the cold more than anybody else — save for maybe Saskatchewan, which is not going to the playoffs. You may not like it, you may not find it enjoyable, but you get used to it and have more practices in it than all of your CFL opponents.

In addition to cold-weather familiarity, the undeniable advantage this team would have, if they are able to finish second and secure a home playoff date, is they already play the style and brand of football that succeeds in the cold, and they are built for difficult environmental conditions.

Blue coaching staff struts its stuff in win

It’s easy to conclude this is the most talented roster Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans have been privy to in years, but the coaching decisions in this latest victory were nearly as impressive as the athletes that carried them out.

This season, versatile running back Andrew Harris has been a Swiss army knife. He does many different things well and is the one multi-purpose implement that can be used effectively in most any situation.

Maurice Leggett, the interception leader of the CFL, has to also be a top-rung candidate for defensive player of the year. He simply has a nose for the football that is uncanny, and the instincts to make game-altering big plays.

Add a vastly improved offensive line and a quarterback who is allergic to turning the ball over, and you have a grouping of talent that is going to make most coaches look more than capable. Yet that didn’t stop this mentoring staff from putting their own stamp on Saturday’s 37-35 win over B.C. with creative flair and piles of bravado.

Can Bombers win without forcing torrent of turnovers?

At this point in the season, every team in the CFL has a recipe for success. Some need to throw for 400 yards to win. Others may need to hit three sacks and limit a team from rushing for 100 yards. 

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers need to force, or have their opponent surrender, a minimum of four turnovers in a game to be assured of victory this season.

In the eight games the Bombers have won to date, they forced an average of almost 4.5 turnovers. With the relatively conservative and clean way they handle the ball on offence, this creates an undeniable advantage.

In fact, they have won just one game when their opponent turned over the ball one time. When the opponents gave up the rock twice, this team lost every time.

Grit? Moxie? Sure, but Stamps took foot off the gas

As far as silver-lining losses go, Saturday's narrow defeat to the Calgary Stampeders was an exceptionally entertaining game of football. The local squad showcased its depth of character and resilient backbone by overcoming a tremendous deficit and forcing a last-second field goal intervention. That said, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are still not at the same level as the Calgary Stampeders.

You see, the problem with turning it on in the second half of a football game is convincing yourself that is simply all that didn't happen in the first couple of stanzas. There is a huge discrepancy in the difficulty between playing with an enormous lead and playing catch-up. When a team is up 27-0, and 27-7 at halftime, the sense of urgency generally vanishes as quick as a G-note at the Apple Store.

There was a loss of focus in this football game, but it came from the Stampeders in the second half. Once, by all accounts, you are convinced the game is over, it's awfully hard to get everyone back on the same page, and all at the same time, too. It is difficult to play with a 20- or 27-point lead because it's near impossible to convince yourself during those moments that every play still counts. The urgency is gone, and before you know it, you are behind with only seconds remaining.

It's a lot easier to keep fighting and focused on the game after you've had it handed to you for the first two quarters. The Bombers came out and played a better second half because they are a proud, able group that got spanked in the first half. Calgary was susceptible and vulnerable to a comeback, because they were so dominant in the early going.

Bombers ready for heavyweight tilt against Stamps

From this vantage point, the two hottest — and probably best — teams in the CFL right now will be squaring off in Calgary Saturday afternoon. This is a long time in coming for fans of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, who will be taking on the Stampeders. A regular season game in late September that will tell us if the juggernaut Bombers can compete with a team that hasn’t lost since Week 1? Yes, please, and make it a double.

We know what the cynics are going to say: But what about the B.C. Lions? The Lions are a team to contend with, for sure — they are the only ones who have beaten the Stamps this season — but they’ve only won three in a row. The Blue and Gold have won an epic seven straight, riding a rocket ship straight out of the toilet, where they initially flopped around at 1-4. No other team has been lighting the league on fire, to this degree, with both their propensity to take the football away and not turn it over.

The margins for error are going to get a lot tighter on Saturday. The windows for victory are going to get smaller, and this team won’t be able to take the entire first half to get on track like they did against the Toronto Argonauts last Saturday. Calgary doesn’t miss out on capitalizing against their opponents when they make a mistake, and for the most part, they don’t make many mistakes themselves either.

They have scored the most points in the league so far, with the second-place team more than fifty points behind. They have also given up the fewest points, and have a quarterback that is No. 1 in passing yards and touchdown passes. Their running back (Jerome Messam) is tops in the league in both rushing yards and rushing touchdowns, and he has had multiple monster games against the Bombers.

Nichols-led gritty offence complements Bombers’ dynamic defence

In the annals of pro football, there is little chance the 2016 Blue Bombers offence is going to be confused with the greatest show on turf — the NFL’s 1999 St. Louis Rams — or even be mentioned in the same breath as what the Bo Levi Mitchell-led Calgary Stampeders or the Zach Collaros-led Hamilton Tiger-Cats offences are on their way to accomplishing this season.

A juggernaut they are not, but they are everything their team needs them to be and a near perfect compliment to an evolving, ball-hawking defence.

Throughout the team's current six-game winning streak the offence is averaging 363 yards and almost 30 points a game, just about 30 minutes of possession, and most importantly — and incredibly — averaging only half a turnover a game, or 0.66 give aways an outing, to be exact. The stats are pretty good numbers in the CFL — not great — but when you have committed just four turnovers in six games, and only one of these has been an interception tossed by your quarterback, the rest of those numbers don’t need to jump off the page.

Speaking with Bombers QB Matt Nichols after Saturday's 17-10 victory over the Saskatchewan Roughriders, he agreed that he is at the helm of an offence whose identity is shaping up to be a workmanlike, blue-collar outfit, that is heavier on the grit, fight, and compete ingredients, than just flash and pizzaz.

Nasty stains on the Bombers vanishing one by one

It takes an awfully big stain-remover pen to eliminate all the markings on this franchise the past few CFL seasons, but that's exactly what the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have been up to over the past few weeks. Here are but a few of the blemishes they've recently erased:

• An inability to win two consecutive games , going on multiple years? Try four in a row now and looking for a fifth in Regina Sunday.

• An anemic offence unable to put at least 30 points on the board? A balanced attack and an opportunistic defence have counted more than 30 four games in a row.

• Haven’t won a game in Edmonton since Milt Stegall pulled in a miracle, last-second Hail Mary in 2006? With backup QB Matt Nichols at the controls they took down the defending Grey Cup champions in Week 6.

Healthier Bombers headed into uncertain waters

There will be some awkward conversations and difficult decisions around Investors Group Field over the next few days as the Blue Bombers come off a bye week with several injured starters ready to return to the lineup, beginning Friday night in Montreal.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to returning to action in professional football after suffering an injury.

The first, subscribed to by 100 per cent of injured players, is that you don’t lose your starting position if you get hurt. The idea is that once you are healthy enough to return to the lineup, you get the opportunity to regain the spot you most likely earned in training camp. It’s a premise based on logic: if you beat out all comers once and were good enough to start but then got hurt, it makes sense that you should be able to return to what was rightfully yours.

The other premise is the “what have you done for me lately” line of reasoning, and when it comes to injured players, all they’ve done for you lately is get hurt. This school of thought focuses on team chemistry and the now — how the team is faring with a replacement.

What will it take for Nichols to shake the No. 2 label?

It is exceedingly rare in pro sports for any athlete — let alone one in the seventh year of their career — to elevate and shake loose from what personnel managers have deemed them capable of. Yet that is exactly what it appears Matt Nichols is doing.

In spite of winning five games and losing only two as a starter in Edmonton, it wasn’t hard to decipher the depth of attachment they had for him, when they were willing to depart with his services for a conditional seventh-round draft pick. At the most important position on the field, that is about as close as you can officially come to getting something for absolutely nothing.

When Nichols arrived in Winnipeg in 2015, there were two things that became abundantly clear — he was an immediate upgrade over anything else the team had in its stable in the quarterback position; and once Drew Willy was healthy, Nichols would immediately be relegated back to the bench. While going 2-5 as the injury fill-in here in 2015, Nichols had some shining moments and displayed some grit and resiliency while pulling out a couple of victories. But there was never a moment’s hesitation over who the starter was going to be going forward.

Even after a training camp in 2016, where several sources confirmed that he out-played and out-performed Willy on a regular basis, Nichols was still, almost automatically, demoted to the dutiful, serviceable backup who was only here as a stop-gap in case everything went horribly wrong, again.

Nichols pretty good on defence, too

With the first two stanzas of the redemption song this football team has been singing, there is no denying that Matt Nichols has been the primary catalyst behind it. His precision passing, his infectious enthusiasm and energy, and his — by all appearances — mastery of this multifaceted offence are but a few of the variables he has successfully introduced the last couple of weeks, that have resulted in back-to-back wins for the Blue and Gold.

While Nichols certainly has proven to be an inspiration to the two phases of this football team that he doesn’t play on — defence and special teams — it is the trickle-down effect of the offence he is running that has brought about the most compelling changes.

In the history of professional defensive football, the one universal constant throughout all the evolutions of the game is that no defence has ever made a mistake while sitting on the bench. In some of the best defensive groups I ever belonged to we prided ourselves on how well we played when we weren’t playing at all. The changes Nichols has brought about in this offence, thus far, have had a pronounced effect on his defensive colleagues.

Prior to Nichols' last two starts, the offence was spending, on average, just over 27 minutes a game on the field. Since he has been at the helm, this has increased to more than 34 minutes a game, an increase of almost half a quarter. Seven minutes a game may not sound like a lot of time to you, but with a play clock that starts and stops, that can be the equivalent of two, if not three, offensive drives. If you subscribe to this theory of how defences are perfect while watching the game from afar, another half-quarter of sitting on the bench, not getting tired and not making mistakes should lead to a drastic change in results — and it has.

This is no time for coach O’Shea to spare the lash

Here’s hoping Winnipeg Blue Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea showed appreciation for his team’s efforts Thursday by tearing a strip off them, and running them into the ground every chance he got this week. For if there is one consistency this football team has shown us over the last couple of years, it’s they don’t handle success on the field the right way, and if this is going to change, it needs to start now.

You can rationalize and make every excuse in the book for a team’s inability to win two straight games over multiple years, but when it’s gone on this long, the only legitimate conclusion is they take their foot off the gas at the first sign of reprieve. That isn’t necessarily the reason why they’ve lost every game after a win, but when it’s gone on this long, you can’t seriously attribute it to anything else.

The challenge that faces them at home Wednesday — other than simply playing at home — is there won’t be near the same amount of dramatic subplots to energize and engage them, and this is not the time to exhale. Last week the team put on a show the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 2015 season opener in Regina, but their world was also burning all around them.

Nothing stokes the fire of a player’s engine like a quarterback controversy unfolding, and in Edmonton the team handed the reigns to Matt Nichols for the first time without Drew Willy first being airlifted to a trauma ward. Shakeups like that get the attention of the roster because of the realization other changes aren’t far behind.

Careful what you wish for; Willy healthy, but hamstrung

The most confusing aspect of the Bombers' underperforming offence so far is that the conservative, quick-hit scheme they came out of the gate with is precisely what most of us thought Drew Willy & Co. needed to be successful.

Under the category of “careful what you wish for,” it wasn’t long ago that the generally accepted cure for what ails Drew Willy & Co. was better O-line protection and getting the ball out of his hands quicker.

In the first seven games of 2015 before his season-ending injury, Willy threw for eight touchdowns, had been intercepted just three times and was wearing a sparkling quarterback rating of 106. After he went down, there seemed to be only one conclusion left to be drawn: protect him at all costs, and speed up and simplify his decision-making in the pocket.

Those of us who watched Willy work with just a little more time — on occasion — during the past couple of years saw a quarterback who could be considered among the top pivots in the CFL. He was decisive, judicious and accurate... when he wasn't running for his life and getting pounded into the turf.

Stop Messam and see what happens

It's as simple and obvious as an exchange overheard in the broadcast booth after the Winnipeg Blue Bombers' deflating Week 4 loss to the Edmonton Eskimos.

At the conclusion of the July 14 game, won 20-16 by the Esks, one observer remarked to another, “I don’t care what went down tonight, I’m still taking the Bombers to win at home against Calgary next week.”

When the optimist was reminded that Jerome Messam was coming to town Thursday with those same Calgary Stampeders, his response reversed. “Oh yeah, I forgot about that... Can I change my mind?”

Jerome Messam is the question the Blue Bombers franchise seemingly has no answer to — or at least not when it comes to limiting him on the football field.

Better to be safe than sorry with Willy

If it’s possible to pick up on a trend three games into the regular season, we may be seeing the gradual exit of starting Blue Bombers quarterback Drew Willy from the home run derby of pro football. And when everything's said and done, that’s probably a good thing for the team.

So far this season, when comparing passing numbers from 2015 to 2016, Willy’s averages are down on both passing yards per attempt (1 1/2 fewer yards) and passing yards per completion (three fewer yards) compared to what he accomplished in seven games in 2015.

Even though the team is coming off a win on the road in an area code that is akin to getting blood from a stone — with or without starting Hamilton QB Zach Collaros in the lineup — the post-game radio show last Thursday night had higher than usual percentage of callers less than euphoric with the play of their quarterback during the first sixth of the regular season.

Apart from the first drive of the Calgary game, and the Hamilton contest, Willy has struggled to find a groove or rhythm until late in the fourth when hope was all but lost.

Relax, Bomber fans, all hope isn’t lost… yet

The hardest thing to do, after witnessing the displays of football we’ve been privy to during the first two weeks of the regular season, is to remember that it is still, only, the first two weeks of the season.

As much as the results on the field seem to be a continuation of what we’ve been exposed to for extended stretches in 2014 and 2015 — a largely uninspired group that is struggling to be competitive, let alone close — it is still a predominantly new cast of players and coaches who have nothing but time and opportunity in front of themselves this year to retool the narrative.

Even the most perennially successful teams in the CFL season have a stretch of games where they look totally out of place and relatively incompetent, every year. Each season there are unfortunate circumstances that will manifest and make even the most competent teams look juvenile and out of their element during an 18-game schedule. This team just needs to ensure its spell of ineffectual football ended with its dismal performance in Calgary.

After a bad game, there are two things you hope for in the coming week: One, a short turnover, so you have the opportunity to make amends and right the ship as soon as possible, and two, you face a credible and worthy opponent the next week, so if you are successful, it will bring immediate pause and new perspective to the symphony of doubt and criticism you are inundated with. The Winnipeg Football Club has both of these opportunities this week in Hamilton.

First commandment of pre-season: thou shall not overreact

It’s not often we have to go down this road, but when circumstances call for it — like a negative fan reaction to 75 net yards of offence from the starters in a pre-seasonloss to Ottawa last Monday — it’s time to get biblical and invoke the first five trusted commandments of the preseason.

Thou shall not overreact.The pre-season is a lot like watching film when you're a rookie; it’s never as good as you wanted it to be, and it’s never as bad as you thought it was. It always lies somewhere in between.

Yes, last week the offence looked like the 2015 season could be a highlight tape for them, but when it doesn’t count, it doesn’t count. It's nearly impossible to gauge how much a game that means absolutely nothing can affect not only the mindset of the veteran players, but the play-calling, and the strategic approach to a road game that was their second contest in only five days.

Even if that game happened to be their best effort at the time — which few think it was — sometimes the best thing that can happen to any phase of a football team is to get punched square in the mouth in the exhibition schedule, because it erases all pretenses that you have arrived and that things are ordained to fall into place. They had ample time — 11 days for the Blue and Gold since that game — to put that behind them, and focus on the fundamentals that failed them.

Bombers better not be looking past opener

Sometimes, when you are so focused on the upcoming challenges that a professional football schedule can throw at you — going toe-to-toe with some of the top contenders in the first third of the schedule, for example — it can be easy to underestimate a lesser-ranked combatant waiting to pounce.

When you take a look at your upcoming schedule and your opponents between the second week and the eighth averaged 12 wins a piece in the 2015 regular season and were all competitive in the playoffs, it’s easy to lose focus on the importance of the opening-week challenge against a team that went 6-12 last year and missed the playoffs.

While success in 2015 guarantees you nothing going forward, when you play Edmonton, Calgary, and Hamilton two times each by Week 7, it is pretty much universally agreed that this is the death valley trial of your schedule. Which means that gaining confidence and momentum right out of the gate, and getting that all-important first win, is critical for the players on this team. Losing to the Als — at home — to open the season on June 24, could set the charges for a disastrous early season landslide for the boys in blue and gold.

So if you think the Bombers are going to kick off 2016 with a cakewalk victory against the Alouettes after beating them into submission by a margin of 23 points in last week's first preseason game, or because the Als accounted for 20 per cent of the wins in the club's 5-13 record last year, well... that's precisely the kind of thinking that could set the stage for big trouble a week from Friday.

Pre-season games offer risks and rewards

At the best of times, when an offence and its staff have been in place for a number of years, and the majority of the players are comfortable with the system, deciding on how long the starters should play in the first preseason game is a difficult decision. When you have a large percentage of coach and player turnover on offence, though, like the team does this year, this decision, and subsequent roll of the dice, becomes even more difficult to navigate.

There really is no script for how much, when, and where you play your starters in the preseason, which opens Wednesday with the Montreal Alouettes in Winnipeg. It used to be that the majority of your savvy vets, who have been around the block and who are going to make the team, would simply not play in the first preseason contest, unless, maybe, it was a home game. If it was a home game, depending on who the coaches were and how they were influenced by a management team that wanted to maximize profits in every game, those vets might see a quarter of action on the high end.

Deviations from the script were sometimes made with the offensive line, which in some schools of thought, require more live-fire repetitions and game-day scenarios to operate cohesively as a unit, but when all is said and done, it really just comes down to addressing the needs of your team. With somewhere in the neighborhood of five new starters on offense, a new coordinator and receivers' coach, and a different quarterback and running back coach, it would be fair to assume that this phase of the football team needs to get more out of the preseason than is generally customary, and that is what can make it potentially dangerous.

While defenses can overcompensate for a simple and short playbook with energy and effort, and are at their best when they are fresh and only sporadically deployed, high yielding offenses are a craft of precision and methodic execution, that can easily take months to hone.

Adherence to scheme equals success for Bombers

Ideally, you are not supposed to judge a book, or a CFL prospect, by its cover, but since there are only 25 days until the regular-season opener against the Montreal Alouettes, many of the books in camp are going to have to be evaluated solely by the illustrations on the front. With only two preseason games to build a case, and not enough reps to go around, first impressions are a critical tool in today's CFL, as nobody has time to read to Chapter 2, and most are likely to draw their conclusions from what they've skimmed on the inside of the dust jacket.

So where does a new prospect go for guidance on how to nail that initial impression? While “being seen and not heard” is always a can't-go-wrong proposition for any new player to a team, it's encouraging to hear high-profile veterans impart words of wisdom for how delicate this balancing act really is — even from those who already have their roster spots locked up. For not only do newcomers —rookies and veterans alike — have to learn a new playbook, but they also have to learn how to get along with the social animal of the locker room.

Case in point, Justin Medlock, a shoe-in to take over the kicking duties on the Blue Bombers, showed a level of insightfulness to these locker room dynamics that few veterans are even aware of. In his first in-house scrum interview, Medlock said a couple of things that show he is a big-picture guy and has an understanding of the subtle nuances that need to be recognized to be part of a successful squad in the CFL.

When asked about what kind of winning ways he’ll bring to the team, he said, “Leadership, but you know it’s hard. I’m new, so I’m trying to fit in. Not have them adjust to me, right?” Those three sentences right there might be close to some of the most pointed and humble phrases ever uttered from a high-profile free agent addition, when discussing the prospects of joining a new team. Medlock might have been instructed to help overhaul a losing culture and to change the fortunes and vibe of all things blue and gold, but you don’t show up in Week One with a bulldozer; you show up with a hardhat and a shovel. So many high-profile players sign with a new franchise and try to make a room adjust to them and their personality. They have little respect for those who were there before them, and little awareness for the group dynamics and leadership that already exist in the room.

Blue pegged for mediocrity despite upgrades

With all the speculative successes the Bombers have had this off-season, if you have concerns the team may be overconfident going into 2016, don’t be. While the optimism within Manitoban borders seemingly grew with every Harris, Dressler, Smith, and Shologan signed, it’s fair to say the national CFL audience of pundits and prognosticators have not bought into what is being sold here.

With CFL training camps about to start in earnest, it has become very fashion forward to put out predictions for the 2016 season, and the near consensus opinion on what has transpired here seems to be the old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Looking at seven different predictions and opinions of people and or conglomerations that make predicting CFL news their business, three of them had the Bombers last in the West, three of them had them slightly better in fourth place, and only one publication that I came across had the team as high as third. Going over the arguments made for these placements, nearly every publication acknowledges how aggressive the team has been in the off-season, and the return of a healthy Drew Willy at quarterback, but you get the sense they saw this in the off-season prior to this one too, and aren’t about to get on board until the returns start coming in differently, and they have a valid point.

So what optimism is there for fans of the Blue and Gold who want to hang their hats on something other than a near-identical blueprint of change from last off-season? If a number of new coaches and players don’t automatically elevate the win column, then what will make this season any different than the previous two?

CFL draft picks must be aged like a vintage wine

Today, in the Canadian Football League, the untrained eye may bear witness to one of the most bizarre phenomena in all of professional sport.

Upon selection of their draft picks by the member clubs, casual observers will observe brief, intense moments of jubilation from these teams, which will be echoed by supporters and fan bases nationwide. Then all of the celebratory theatrics and rejoicing will promptly end, and franchises will patiently wait anywhere from two to three years before it sees any sort of return on the field.

It is no wonder general managers in the CFL are often some of the most tenured and long-lasting positions: by the time their well thought-out and researched draft picks can be measured as a success or failure, most of us have forgotten when and where they were taken, and what the initial expectations were.

The best way to approach today’s draft, and to prime your levels of patience, is to think of the picks like bottles of wine. Unless they are cheap, and you don’t invest much in them — or they are an incredibly rare vintage — very few of them will be ready to open and indulge in right away.

Keeping pivot off the turf Job 1 for Bombers

If there is any conclusion to be drawn from a three-day mini-camp where not all of the phases of the team participated — and plays were run against the air — it’s that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers seem to have an understanding of their vulnerability, and appear to be determined to do something about it.

While mini-camps will tell you close to nothing about the quality and calibre of the team that will eventually take the field after weeks of condensed training camp, it does tell you exactly what your offensive or defensive co-ordinator has been obsessing about all off-season, and what weaknesses they have been itching to address from the get-go.

Regardless of how instructional and fundamentally simplistic mini-camps are, the themes and concepts introduced first are usually a road map and blueprint of what the franchise wants its identity to be. As strategic and cunning as some co-ordinators can be when implementing their game plans, they most often cannot hide their eagerness and enthusiasm to jump right into those defining aspects of their scheme from their very first practice.

Whether it was mentioned in passing, shared on fan forums or filed in accounts by those who were assigned to be there, the same observations and common phrases kept showing up and were seemingly repeated throughout the entire three-day ordeal.

Three keys to Blue Bombers' success

During a recent four-minute radio bit, I was asked to come up with three of the most imperative, actionable items the local professional football squad needs to deliver on for a successful 2016.

While it can be difficult to sort through the chaff and identify these key kernels — as an obscene number of variables can impact a football season — it is an interesting and thought-provoking exercise.

It’s easiest to begin with what is sure to be a consensus factor for success for most any CFL team: the task of keeping your starting pivot clean and upright for 18 games. With all due respect to Matt Nichols — who does give the Winnipeg Blue Bombers an opportunity to win should a piece of starter Drew Willy break again — the franchise quarterback is still the quickest road to competence and to redeeming a ticket to the playoffs.

While the play of the offensive line is critical in keeping any pivot functional, the line should never carry this burden alone. If you give most defences enough of the same looks as to how and where your quarterback will operate in predictable scenarios, regardless of whom you have on your line, they will find a way to get to him.

Roster retooling suggests assurances merely lip service

It’s not that the cuts that happened last week — and in the previous few weeks — caught anybody off guard. It’s just the fact that with each successive veteran player they move away from, the Winnipeg football club also departs from it’s “one player away” narrative they offered as a bill of sale on 2015.

In case you missed it, the final two pieces from the organization’s last winning season in 2011 were released last week when receiver Clarence Denmark and defensive lineman Bryant Turner were let go.

There are now 78 players on the roster, none of whom have more than four years of experience with the Blue and Gold, and the majority have three seasons or fewer under their belts.

If you’ve read any number of newspaper articles, or spoken with most anybody involved with the team about the 2015 football season, you’ve probably heard the suggestion the injury to Drew Willy was the turning point of last year, and it’s not the most far-fetched of theories. They were at three wins, and in the third quarter of their fourth loss when the franchise starter went down (they had been outscored 210-140 at that point in the season) and they spiralled into a 2-9 tailspin following his collapse.

Actions on field speak louder than interviews

Imagine signing up for a speed-dating exercise, and when you sit down, not only are you across from a potential suitor you've never met before, but their entire extended family is with them and each one is prepared to ask you an aggressive and probing question about your intentions. How defensive or forthcoming would you be?

Welcome to the modern day football combine, where many of today's top CFL executives consider the player interview to be one of the most important and telling measurables from this past weekend in Toronto.

For the most part, I happen to believe it to be an exercise in futility.

First off, today’s pro-football prospect knows he is going to be verbally challenged, and many of them admit they go online to see what the previous year’s questions have been, and prepare for them. This is really not very different than the standard job-interview preparation: you practise going over potential questions and work on how to give the best impression with your answers.

The only thing Tebow should be throwing is a towel

If you were surprised to hear that a quarterback — who is exceedingly more famous than talented — is contemplating coming to play in the CFL, you wouldn’t be as surprised to hear that the Montreal Alouettes, naturally, already own his rights.

Whether it was Michael Sam, Chad Ochocinco, Jesse Palmer, Ahman Green, Jerry Porter, or the now-late Lawrence Phillips, the Als seemingly, and on an annual basis, never miss an opportunity to sign a neon-light NFL castaway who brings both attention and hopefully ticket and jersey sales to their franchise. While Phillips was the only one in recent memory that was actually successful as a contributing starter, the others certainly drew their fair share of both headlines and spectacle.

Recently, in an interview with the NFL Network, when the CFL option was discussed, Tim Tebow’s former college coach Urban Meyer mentioned that, “...if there’s a right (opportunity) I think he’d probably do it.”

Allow me to echo the sentiments of most of those who follow the CFL in saying that the game up here is most certainly not the right opportunity for Timothy to refine his pivot skills.

Don't believe the Bombers' hype

WHEN seven coveted free agents sign with your football franchise — such as what we saw happen a few weeks ago with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers — it is easy to infer they saw more benefits than potential pitfalls in doing so. What is much harder to pin down, however, is the exact rationale for making such a determination.

The local football team has recently promoted a couple of stories on its webpage that credit the appeal of its head coach as the critical factor in these signings, and that’s a valid point.

In spite of losing twice as often as they have won over the last couple of seasons, it has obviously not deterred new players from bringing their talents to Manitoba. In fact, this losing record and substantial coaching and player turnover on a yearly basis makes these free agent signings and comments all the more impressive.

It takes charismatic and strong leadership to not waver in the face of adversity and to still present an appealing environment full of possibilities in spite of short returns. The cliché tells us hard times reveal character, and there is seemingly no shortage of that on several rungs of the coaching staff in Blue and Gold.

First half of 2016 season will tell Bombers’ tale

Now that we know what the 2016 CFL regular-season schedule looks like, what do the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have to do with their piece of it so extensions — and not dismissals — are handed out to those in charge of the football team?

While a minimum .500 winning percentage and a playoff berth shouldn't be too much to ask for in year 3 of any coaching/management regime in a nine-team league, the first half of 2016 should reveal whether this group has finally got it right, or not.

When you are 12-24 after your first two years of work, not too many things land gift-wrapped on your doorstep — and this schedule is no exception. If new co-ordinator Paul LaPolice and his offence need time to get into a rhythm and synchronize, or if the defence needs a moment to gel, they simply aren’t going to get it.

In their first nine games, the Blue and Gold twice play the defending champion Edmonton Eskimos, the team that had the best record in 2015 (Calgary Stampeders), a team that absolutely owned the Bombers last year (Hamilton Tiger-Cats) and a team they split with (Montreal Alouettes), plus one game against a team that swept them in 2015 (Toronto Argonauts). Other than that, it's a walk in the park.

Few red flags for Blue on Chick, Dressler

There are hard-hitting questions to be asked when brand-name, franchise-type players, hit the open market and are considered possible additions to your football team.

With the release of John Chick and Weston Dressler late last week by Saskatchewan Roughriders general manager and head coach Chris Jones, there are a number of considerations teams have surely already begun working through.

Inquiry No. 1: Will they fit into our system? Can they play just as well in our offence or defence?

Free agency not a magic elixir for Blue

It sounds as though, once again, the Winnipeg Football Club has made a New Year’s resolution to be highly motivated in free agency, and will wade into the fountain of players next month with its purse strings wide open. The question that remains, though, is whether it actually should or not?

As confirmed by Free Press reporter Paul Wiecek Saturday, the football club is, “promising to be aggressive in the free-agent market next month,” and why not? Even though there is still ample time for players to re-sign with their respective ball clubs, there are more than 100 prospective free agents currently out there, and some very talented ones at that. When your football team is coming off a five win season, the status quo isn’t a viable option, so a willingness to change is a good thing, right?

Imagine a Bakari Grant, a Chris Williams, or an Andy Fantuz in the receiving corps of this football team. How much more dynamic would this group be with a proven home run hitter to stretch the football field? What about an Andrew Harris or a Jerome Messam in the backfield to bolster what has been a marginal rushing attack the last couple of seasons? How much would QB Drew Willy benefit — from both health and performance perspectives — if he was running a balanced offensive attack that included one of these proven all-star backs who each happens to be Canadian too?

Speaking of Drew Willy, how much better would he and the team be if he was competing with a Trevor Harris or a Travis Lulay in training camp? Imagine a scenario where the season wouldn’t be lost if the starting quarterback went down for a spell — for a third season in a row.

LaPo’s success pivots on quality of his QB

The thing that many of us appreciated most about professional football, was that as a player you had a high degree of control over your successes or failures. Whether it meant increasing your hours in the film and weight room or branching out and learning new training or on-field techniques, you always had a recourse to get better. No matter what had or hadn’t occurred in the past, the opportunity to reinvent yourself and change the path you were on was always seemingly available to you.

I believe the same can be said about coaches and their potential in football. If they have the capacity for change, and the advantage of self awareness, a breakthrough season can happen at any point in their timeline, just like it can for a player.

Though his first two kicks at the can may not have reshaped the wheel of fundamental offensive football and co-ordination, at the best of times Paul LaPolice’s schemes broke offensive records in 2002, and contributed to a Grey Cup appearance in 2009 in Saskatchewan, and 2011 in Winnipeg.

It is true he has been fired twice during the low points of offensive quagmires in Manitoba, but he has a much better shot this time around than just a “third time lucky,” premise.

Blue Bombers face off-season math test

It is the simplest, and hardest, of mathematical questions for the Winnipeg Football Club this off-season: how do you transform a 5-13 team into one that can win at least nine games when the CFL salary cap increases by only $50,000 and your starting quarterback is due a raise roughly three times that amount?

The answer will undoubtedly lie in addition by subtraction.

Before the Winnipeg Blue Bombers write their first franchise quarterback cheque to the order of Mr. Drew Willy, they will be doing some spring cleaning and trimming of investments that did not pay out the anticipated return.

With receipts in tow, expect the organization to be standing at the head of the returns-and-exchanges line at the department store for the near-$400,000 it spent on receiver Nick Moore, who produced only four touchdowns over the course of two seasons. When this organization spends that kind of money on a wideout, it expects Milton Stegall-type performances, not Milton Bradley games of chance.

Former Bombers instrumental in Grey Cup victory

It is often said one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but when the collection of talent you’ve put out to the curb happens to win a Grey Cup in your own backyard, it makes you wonder whether they should have been disposed of in the first place.

It’s like breaking up with your girlfriend at a social in Transcona, and watching her leave the same night with an astrophysicist who moonlights on the cover of GQ. But I digress.

If you thought you were hearing a number of familiar names being heralded Sunday, while the Edmonton Eskimos were toying with the Ottawa Redblacks, it wasn’t just wishful thinking. The Eskimos started six former Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Grey Cup game — more than any other team in the CFL — and a seventh was a vital part of their defensive-line rotation.

Justin Sorensen and Chris Greaves started the championship game on the offensive line, and Cory Watson was in the slot. Adarius Bowman and Odell Willis have been Eskimos for a while now — at slotback and defensive end, respectively — and Cauchy Muamba was the starting safety. Lastly, Don Oramasionwu, who has started many games for Edmonton in his four years there, was an important part of the rotation for one of the best front fours in the CFL.

Familiar names should top Bombers list

When it comes to the hiring of their next offensive co-ordinator, the process shouldn’t be like going through a nondescript box of chocolates — the Winnipeg Blue Bombers definitely need to know what they are going to get.

By saying he wasn’t going to look south for a potential candidate, head coach Mike O’Shea essentially acknowledged that when it comes to the new-hire process, the Bombers are all out of mulligans.

With all due respect to offensive assistant coaches such as Markus Howell (wide receivers) and Buck Pierce (running backs) — who may have the offensive equivalent of the special recipe of 11 herbs and spices combined with the Cadbury Caramilk bar secret of how to eviscerate defences up their sleeves — this team can no longer afford to wait and see.

When a regime has fired all three co-ordinators during the course of a two-year run, making a mistake with yet another hire spells incompetency.

Two strikes for Bombers staff not an out

When you finish a two-year stint at 12-24 and miss the playoffs in consecutive CFL seasons, you don’t get to bathe and relax in warm fuzzy discussions of contract extensions and “lame duck” scenarios — or at least not from this perspective.

If anything, one should acknowledge and review how fortunate the top tier of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers coaching staff and management is to be getting a third opportunity to right the ship, and expect they should be counting their blessings on an almost daily basis.

Because, if we are being honest, the most compelling reason why head coach Mike O’Shea and company should be given a third chance to succeed has almost nothing to do with what has or hasn’t happened on the field of play. They are expected to go into the final year of their contracts even though they have regressed from one season to the next, have already fired a defensive co-ordinator (in 2014) and special teams co-ordinator (in 2015) — and soon an offensive co-ordinator — and had a veteran player publicly acknowledge on a post-game radio show Friday they have the wrong mix of players in the locker room.

No, the justification for keeping the magistrates in their current roles can be rationalized by two reasons:

Bombers in need of better direction, coaching

When you get a head start on the 2016 season — which the Bombers were just granted care of a B.C. Lions win over the weekend — the first step in the evaluation response is always what came first, the bad scheme or the player?

In a five-win and most probably a 13-loss season, the answer unquestionably lies in both camps, but if last year the focus was on acquiring better players, this year the focus should be on better everything else.

In Year 1 of this regime, it was determined the football club needed a major talent infusion to be in a conversation of Grey Cup relevance. Though a defensive co-ordinator was swapped out, the emphasis was always on a personnel upgrade. After Year 2 now, where the team regressed with these changes in tow, it’s fair to say while they still need better players, they also urgently need better direction and coaching.

In pro football, when things go awry, you tend to blame the players first. It’s never that the systems were inadequate — goes the premise — it’s that the players in it weren’t good enough. It’s why so many coaches will tell you when they have good players, they make great instructors. They know their systems are fallible, and if they don’t have the right pieces in the right places, they underperform. Yet looking at the offence and defence of 2015, when compared to 2014, the production has been very — almost eerily — similar. The players may have been upgraded over the off-season, more money may have been spent, and more comfort should have been found running these schemes, but the output on the field has been virtually the same.

Latest Blue Bomber move has a George Costanza feel

If every instinct the Winnipeg Blue Bombers organization has had over the last 25 years has led us to where it stands today — in the second year of yet another 12-23, playoff-free era — then perhaps it is prudent to take a lesson from George Costanza in the 86th episode of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld, titled, The Opposite.

In what has to be one of the greatest airings of all time, George, with many traits similar to the Blue Bombers hierarchy of today, has come to a reckoning and crossroad in his life. After some time for reflection at the beach, George realizes all the instincts he has had in his life that led him to become an overweight, unemployed, single, bald man who lives with his parents, have been completely wrong. So for the rest of the episode George contemplates what he would normally do in every scenario he experiences, and does the complete opposite, with astonishingly positive results.

While this example is a little extreme to recommend verbatim to the current brass of Bomberville — giving raises and contract extensions to this staff would be the opposite of common sense — the path they appear to be taking for 2016 is the opposite of what many of their predecessors were granted, and certainly contradicts the logic of the moment.

Not since the Dave Ritchie era has a coaching regime been awarded a third year after back-to-back losing seasons. Yet with Ritchie, he went to the playoffs in his second losing season in 2000, and it wasn’t until he turned in a 14-win season in 2001 the Bombers extended his contract.

Trouble for Bombers before plays called

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.”

Gadgets, tricks won’t cut it

To win their second game in a row -- for the first time this season -- all the Winnipeg Blue Bombers need to do is replicate their keys to victory in their upcoming games against the Ottawa Redblacks. They need to block another punt for a touchdown, pull off two fake punts at critical times to extend drives, and pitch a near shutout in the second half defensively. Nothing more, nothing less, which therein lies the crux of the matter.

If you have an idea of how difficult that will be to duplicate in Ottawa, you understand this team needs another recipe for success when they travel to the nation's capital, because it's highly improbable they will be able to play this same hand again.

Last Saturday we were treated to a "playoff-mode" performance from a team that had its back squarely up against the wall. After an uninspired first half, the light went on for this squad they were on borrowed time, and two out of their three phases played ultra-aggressive, risk-taking football for the duration of the game. But is the way they played, and the manner in which they pulled this game out, something that is sustainable on a week-by-week basis? I wish I had better news for you.

Call it a coincidence if you will, but the first time head coach Mike O'Shea declared the game a do-or-die scenario was the first time this season we saw how O'Shea made his name as a special-teams co-ordinator in the CFL. When they were set to receive punts, they went for the block instead. When they were in a position to punt the ball away, they went out and got the first down for good measure. It reminded me of the days when I would be stuck in meetings with the Blue and Gold special-teams units and our own coaches would be in a bit of a panic and frenzy over how and when O'Shea would turn the game on its head with some sort of trickery or fake.

Far-from-stellar company refusing to let Blue die

If the cliché is true -- what doesn't kill you makes you stronger -- the B.C. Lions should fortify their kitty litter before the Bombers come knocking Saturday night. Because nobody has been taken to the brink of death more often than them.

Of course, the flip side to this equation is the Blue and Gold may already have had their spirit murdered courtesy of the last two games, which would mean it is far too late to benefit from any character-building losses or perceived silver linings.

In a season that has been nothing short of agonizing, the Bombers have been wounded and leaking on the roadside for some time now, yet because of the company they are keeping in the four- and five-win range, the suffering won't go away and refuses to end.

The unpleasantness these teams have endured is much like a scene from the comedy Me, Myself, and Irene where Jim Carrey and Renée Zellweger are trying to roll a lifeless bovine off the road, when they discover it is still alive. Carrey ends up shooting it nine times in the head with his side arm, and then puts it in a chokehold, all the while exclaiming, "What the hell is wrong with you? Die!"

Bombers have opportunity to prove their fortitude in upcoming games

Whoever said, “It’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up,” might have reconsidered their inspirational sentiments had they watched the Winnipeg Blue Bombers lose in every excruciating and conceivable manner this season.

After all, there are limitations to the reach and scope of even the most effective proverbs.

After being knocked down nine times in 13 tries — the latest loss courtesy of a phantom “no end” call — it leads one to wonder in how many more instances this team will be able to dust itself off, crawl up off of the floor and maintain a positive mindset.

If you simply look at the stat sheet, it screams at you that the Bombers had no business being in this football game. Calgary had more first downs, more passing yards, more rushing yards and more net yards. The Stampeders also had fewer team losses, a better completion percentage, more sacks, more return yardage, fewer penalties and they had possession of the ball for almost an entire quarter more than Winnipeg. Yet because of a bend but don’t break defence and a supercharged fourth quarter sparked by a much-maligned returner, they found themselves driving for the go-ahead score, until — as you should know by now — they were taken down by officiating incompetency.

Signing Wild OK, but Blue ignoring elephant in room

From the vantage point of this high-perched armchair, signing Ian Wild to your local neighbourhood football team is like buying a Louisville Slugger to fend off a marauding polar bear. It sounds heroic, it looks incredibly tough, and baseball bats are good for many things, but is it really going to help get you out of the situation you're in?

Don't get me wrong, Wild is a dynamic football player who can probably play all three linebacking positions with a high degree of competency. He pursues the football relentlessly, his physical play can change the nature of a game, and from what I hear, he is the consummate teammate, who will even lead the occasional yoga class. Yet in my estimation, the two most fortified positions on this 4-8 football team are the defensive line and the linebacking corps.

Without question, this team needs a lot of help in a number of areas, but the play of the defence should be the least of its concerns at the moment.

As a former defensive player, I see the value in covering this phase of the team with the personnel equivalent of gunpowder and methamphetamine. I still want Henoc Muamba back on this team, and hell, while we are at it, if they can get Ray Lewis to come out of retirement and take a few snaps at middle linebacker, I'll be at the base of the pyramid for the Blue Lightning cheer squad. But wanting and needing are two very different things.

Bombers defence is coming into its own

It’s a little early to anoint them the second coming of Swaggerville — why would we want to anyway? — but it appears the 2015 Blue Bombers defence is finally coming into its own and forging a long-awaited identity.

Typically, we should have known the potential and limitations of this defensive 16 or so (rotational players included) by the one-third mark of the season. After five or six games, even with a new defensive coordinator, the players should have been settled into the new system and figured out how to maximize their roles and contributions. Yet they weren’t just transitioning into a new scheme, and adding new players, they had to expel all the counter-intuitive habits they had been forced to pick up in the previous regime.

Of course we weren’t there, but it’s not hard to imagine the first day of defensive meetings for returning players like Greg Peach, Bryant Turner, Jake Thomas and Zach Anderson, after spending their previous season in the unorthodox school of Mr. Etchevery. It had to be a mix of both surprise and relief to be issued a playbook and not be told to forget everything they had learned their entire football careers. Mix in a host of new players like Jamaal Westerman and Justin Cole, and you had two groups of linemen, fresh off different football histories, all trying to fit their talents into a Richie Hall system that no one, outside of linebacker Sam Hurl, had been exposed to before.

While sack statistics are seldom the be all and end all when it comes to taking the temperature of a defense, with this group of late bloomers, they do provide a decent read as to when the lightbulbs collectively came on. In the first six weeks, this defense had a total of seven sacks. The last five weeks, they have had 18. While Westerman has half of those to himself, after speaking with him on Saturday, he would be the first to tell you that on numerous occasions, he has been the benefactor of the collective efforts of this group.

O’Shea’s stonewalling a slap in the face to fans

It is difficult to understand the decision to put up walls and be reluctant to answer questions at a time when things are seemingly falling apart and need to be explained and examined.

One would think that being transparent and open about your systems and processes could benefit the fan base of a football team that has reached a point far beyond that of frustration.

The latest example of this behaviour occurred on the post game show Sunday evening after the 11th consecutive loss at the no longer classic Labour Day game. Though it was acknowledged that the 17 penalties for a 140 yards were a major contributor to the loss, when queried as to what the in-house mechanisms were to correct this lack of discipline, Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea decided that this was not information that he wanted to share with the public, and responded with a series of, “I’m not going to answer that,” rebuttals.

While I can appreciate that the locker room is a refuge and safe haven for athletes, and that some coaches feel that all of their interactions with players — good, bad, and ugly — be kept behind closed doors, there comes a point where being clandestine does more harm than good.

Vanilla playcalling took the flavour out of Marve’s multi-faceted attack

After one game at the controls, many of us pundits are less concerned about Robert Marve’s potential and ability to run the offence than we are about the offence he is being asked to run.

With his first start at quarterback for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers on Friday night, Marve showed us both things we knew he could do, and limitations we did not yet know about.

We knew he could scramble with the football and extend plays — he evaded the rush a number of times and was able to move the chains and keep drives going.

We also knew he would put it all on the line and put himself in harm’s way for the betterment of the team when the occasion called for it.

Blue lack identity, but so does every other CFL team

It’s OK to not really know who you are yet, when everybody else in the room is unsure of themselves, too.

The universal measurement of pro football is one is only as good as his last game. If this is standard for evaluation, it means with the way the Blue and Gold performed last week, they are now a top-tier CFL team. It also means, however, if you applied the same burden of proof to the previous week, you would have buried your face in the palms of your hands.

A third of the way through the season you are supposed to have an outright understanding of the identity of your team. The strengths and weaknesses are supposed to be clear and concise and something you can come to rely on, on a week-to-week basis. Six games in, we can say with the utmost certainty this team has a productive and dynamic offence, except for those times when it doesn’t. We can also add with a degree of confidence the defence has been fallible and vulnerable this season, except, of course, for those recent instances when they’ve been a strength. Confused yet? Good, you should be.

So while it’s fair to suggest this team is still coming into its own, and doesn’t really know who it is going to be on a regular basis yet, the good news is in this league, they happen to be in very good company.

Offensive line allowing too much banging for the bucks

At this juncture, the argument over which quarterback should be No. 2 for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers — as obvious as that is — is still a point we shouldn’t even be discussing.

No, what we should be is proactive instead of reactive, and be concerned about the fact that the team invested over three quarters of a million dollars into preventing the scenario that we are seeing unfold for the second time in five weeks.

Quite frankly, Drew Willy is not supposed to get the $&#% kicked out of him anymore. That was the idea when GM Kyle Walters opened the purse strings this off-season and acquired the most expensive security detail he felt he could find.

As I noted in a prior column, this bunch showed up eager for work in Week 1, where they kept Willy so clean and upright that equipment manager Brad Fotty simply folded up his jersey instead of washing it for the next game, as they performed like who we thought they were. They ran the ball for more than a 100 yards, and gave Willy so much time in the pocket he got caught up on Netflix, and finished the game with a perfect passer rating.

Blue and gold must play bigger and better in coming weeks

If we’re being honest with ourselves, the reason Friday’s victory over the Montreal Alouettes was so critical for the Bombers, is that almost nobody — except for the coaching staff and the players — expect the Blue and Gold to come out of the upcoming two-week road rumble with anything more than a single success, and more likely, a powdered doughnut in the win ledger for their efforts.

In spite of the exponential improvement in many areas from Week 2 to Week 3, and the “whatever it takes” resourcefulness that was on display against the Als, after last season the pundits and the masses will no longer be premature with their optimism in 2015. After the snake oil show we saw in the first half of 2014, which had the team at 6-3 and in the thick of everything before plummeting to last place in the West, an already guarded and naturally pessimistic fan base will be even more wary of flawed victories going forward.

As alluded to by head coach Mike O’Shea, each week has its own recipe and ingredients required for victory, and the win over Montreal demonstrated that this club is capable of taking a relatively mundane, leftovers performance and turning it into a solid meal that we can all digest. But when you can’t rely on the staples and basics to be there on a week-by-week basis, it makes it difficult to expect beef wellington and foie gras in back-to-back appearances in Alberta. (The Bombers play Saturday in Calgary and the following Saturday in Edmonton).

Thus far, the offence has been the most consistent of the three phases of this team and statistically they are decidedly middle of the pack in total offence, rushing and passing yards in the CFL.

Looks like Beverly Hills Bombers spent wisely

Evaluating a player and a performance is never as simple as grading plays and watching the stats pile up on digital game tape. Age, injury history, expectations, competition, and cost are all variables that need to be taken into account — and when it comes to money spent, it should always be about paying for an anticipated future, and not what has been accomplished in the past.

Suffice to say, when it came to Saturday evening’s performance against the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers got out of this one — for the most part — exactly what they paid for.

The differences in aggressiveness and spending for 2015, in comparison to other years, was as markedly pronounced as going from shopping at consignment stores and digging at the bottom of discounted bins to front window shopping on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

The Bombers went out and paid full sticker price for imported and national goods alike, and got what was the latest and greatest, and on the cutting edge of fashion. No waiting around for seasonal leftovers or clearance sales, or for the coupon book to arrive in the mail. The football club went on a supermarket shopping spree and put more expensive pieces all over their chessboard than anyone had seen in years.

Blue morphing into Prairie rivals

If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, there should be no shortage of blushing brides on the sidelines of the Saskatchewan Roughriders this weekend as Winnipeg prepares to meet them in the regular season opener.

Regardless of the player and coaching acquisitions this off-season from these Prairie brethren, you don't have to be a lucid John Madden to realize the Blue and Gold are starting the year against the team they are hoping to become. There will be schematic and play calling differences to be sure, but at their most fundamental and philosophical levels, it seems the Blue Bombers are being built and moulded in the image and framework of their fiercest rivals to the west. Some may say it's coincidental that the Bombers have simply been addressing their weaknesses this off-season.

Others will insist they are following a blueprint for success the Riders have employed for almost a decade.

With all due respect to the Calgary Stampeders, the green Riders almost perennially field the highest number of homegrown offensive linemen in the CFL, and most frequently the best. Their front fives seem to characterize all of which their franchise hopes to embody: tough, physical, unrelenting and workman-like players.

Bombers could surprise in 2015

From the realm of agriculture comes the saying to, “make hay while the sun is still shining.” Apply this concept to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, and they appear primed to take advantage of their last season before their quarterback potentially assumes a disproportionate amount of salary cap in 2016.

Over the past year and a half, it is reasonable to say this organization has put together its most talented roster in recent years. With just under a week until the main training camp begins — regardless of what oddsmakers at Bodog might think — this will be the most competitive team the Blue and Gold have fielded since 2011. And rightfully so — with a golden carrot like the Grey Cup dangling in front of them in November, the only way the organization can sell it out and maximize their cash windfall is if they can convince the masses that the team will be more than just relevant. Or of course, if Saskatchewan wins the west.

Sign me up as someone that not only believes that Winnipeg now has the horses in the barn to make the playoffs, but also a puncher’s chance of shocking a critic or two as to what their limitations are.

Since his appointment, GM Kyle Walters has commented several times to the press that every decision they make is geared toward winning a Grey Cup now. This makes more sense than ever in 2015, as this team will soon have some creative accounting on its hands, and some difficult personnel decisions to make.

You know CFL draft is boring when…

While the CFL is more than a worthy opponent for the National Football League when it comes to on-field entertainment, it is fair to say the Canadian Football League Draft, which begins tonight at 6 p.m., regularly has all the appeal of a blizzard in May.

Like it or not, in Canada, university football is nowhere near as popular as its American counterpart, so CFL fans don't tend to get too excited, or even get to know their newest players until they've been in the pro ranks for at least a season or two. Yet finally, tonight, through the emergence of an unfortunate drug testing result, for those of you interested in the inner workings of CFL franchises, drama and intrigue will now be on deck.

In case you haven't heard, Quinn Smith, a 22-year-old defensive tackle out of Concordia, recently acknowledged he tested positive for stanozolol metabolites when administered a drug test at this year's CFL combine. The fact he made a mistake isn't what interests me here -- there are active players in both the CFL and NFL who have committed far more treacherous transgressions than using performance-enhancing drugs -- but the repercussions to his draft status do. The interest and curiosity is now whether his ranking as the fourth-best prospect will change, to what degree, where he will end up, and how it will be justified.

Less than a week ago, you could have read about how Smith -- who wasn't even a ranked player until the combine -- was in the discussion to be the No. 1 overall pick in the draft. Not only did he dominate on both the defensive and offensive lines at the evaluation camp, but his testing numbers were not of this planet. In fact, one of his physical measurables was so incredible, I wholly endorsed him as someone the Bombers should seriously consider taking with their No. 2 pick -- if he were still to be available -- on last week's CJOB sports show.

Blue growing pains likely

The odds are not always in our favour.

There is a lot to like about what is happening, and what has happened so far in Bomberland for 2014, but what should our expectations be in year one for yet another new regime and head coach that have taken control of the franchise?

Thus far we have seen the scouting department double in size and competency, yet stay within the same operational budget.

A new quarterback has been signed who, though he has only started three games in the CFL, has completed 68 per cent of his passes, has a QB rating of 99.1, and has thrown nine touchdowns versus five interceptions.

Glenn only as good as team around him

At their current level of development, Kevin Glenn is an upgrade over every single quarterback on the Winnipeg Blue Bomber roster, but he is not the pivot this team should move forward with.

In the ongoing Glenn sweepstakes, there are said to be two remaining franchises interested in acquiring his services. Rumour has it the B.C. Lions and the Blue and Gold are waiting patiently for Ottawa GM Marcel Desjardins to awaken from his dream-like state and lower the asking price for this accomplished and tenured CFL veteran.

Since Glenn left the Bombers at the end of the 2008 season, he has been to the playoffs every year, and has put his best football on his resumé. Apart from 2007, the year the Bombers went to the Grey Cup, where Glenn was the Eastern Division MVP and the runner-up for league MVP, all of his most impressive seasons came over the last five years. So why wouldn't it make sense to bring him into the fold, even if the asking price sits somewhere between obscene and ridiculous?

Because in the nature-versus-nurture debate over skilled quarterbacks, it is my estimation that Glenn is more a product of his environment than most. He is as good as the team and scheme around him, and at this point, no one is expecting the 2014 Bombers to be as good as either of the last two Stampeder teams Glenn has played for.

Body by Brown: Getting Bombers fit for ’14

It's the time of year for resolutions, when hordes of people take stock of their health and well-being and vow to improve and do something about it in the coming months.

In the spirit of this self-improvement, if the Winnipeg Football Club had been a physical being in the 2013 CFL season, its resting heart rate would have been 120 beats per minute and its body-mass index a morbidly obese 42.

It's a harsh comparison to make, no doubt, but if one wants to use the previous football season -- where the all-time record for fewest wins was tied -- as a metaphor for physical health, then we have to come to terms with the fact the on-field product spent last season on the couch eating saturated fats while chain-smoking and binge drinking.

So like any shape-up resolution for the new year, it's important to assess one's individual physique and identify areas of weakness in order to put a comprehensive wellness plan together.

Yes, there is a fast fix: Fire Burke now

Why are we waiting?

When you tie an all-time record for futility, it is not the time to stand pat.

When a game is so insignificant to the opposition they leave 10 starters at home and still win by 30, urgency should be the new mandate.