Bombers hit rock bottom with Labour Day Classic loss to Riders

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This article was published 06/09/2015 (3902 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

REGINA — They’re beat up and banged up. They can’t score, they give up too much defensively, they are horrific on special teams and have all the discipline of a prison riot.

And now it’s reached this for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers after another loss in the annual Labour Day Classic:

They are officially now the free space on the Canadian Football League’s bingo card.

The Bombers dropped their fourth straight game and sixth of their last seven in a 37-19 loss to the Saskatchewan Roughriders in front of a sold-out crowd at Mosaic Stadium Sunday afternoon.

Winnipeg is now 3-7 while the Riders, who hadn’t won since last fall, pick up their first win of 2015 to improve to 1-9.

Now, losing on Labour Day is hardly a newsflash for the Bombers — that’s 11 straight Classic defeats dating back to 2004 — but it’s the nature in which it all unravelled which now puts everyone under the microscope.

Yes, if beleaguered offensive coordinator Marcel Bellefeuille felt singled out heading into the weekend, he’s now got a whole lot of friends swimming around with him on the petri dish. Everyone in the organization, from Wade Miller at the top of the food chain right down through GM Kyle Walters, head coach Mike O’Shea and every player who pulled on a helmet Sunday wears a piece of this one.

“It’s pretty rough,” said a despondent Greg Peach, who sat staring at the floor in a morose Bomber dressing room. “We needed that one. There’s nothing more we can do now but get back to work. You can’t start pointing fingers and blaming others.

“You’ve got to look at yourself and that’s what we’re going to do.”

FLAG ON THE PLAY… AND ON THAT PLAY… AND THAT PLAY, TOO.

The Bombers took a whopping 17 penalties for 140 yards, including six unnecessary roughness infractions — two for late hits out of bounds and four more after-the-whistle. Among those was centre Dominic Picard, who was caught head-butting Riders defensive end John Chick.

“I’m trying to play on the edge, man,” Picard said. “Sometimes they’re going to let us play and sometimes they’re not going to let us play. I’m going to watch it on film and see it exactly but… I’m trying to finish the play.”

O’Shea on how he deals with the undisciplined play:

“We’ll deal with it in house. We don’t talk about that kind of stuff. But yeah, that to me is the major difference in the game. That’s the thing that cost us the most was being undisciplined in the second half. We have a chance to get off the field. We have a chance to stop them and get the ball back several times, and penalties just killed us. It’s not acceptable, but how we deal with is in house.”

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

The Bombers jumped out to a 10-zip lead in the first quarter and were still ahead 10-3 when former Manitoba Bisons star — and Winnipeg product — Nic Demski took a Lirim Hajrullahu punt 60 yards for a touchdown. It was the seventh punt return touchdown in the CFL this season and three have been against the Bombers.

THE QB COMPARISON

Brian Brohm made his second start as a pro and while his numbers were decent — 21 of 26 for 184 yards — he still hasn’t thrown for a TD and takes very few shots downfield. His counterpart, rookie Brett Smith, put much more of an imprint on the game by throwing for one score and rushing seven times for 59 yards to keep drives alive.

“It’s a loss. It’s frustrating,” said Brohm. “We need to come out and play better as a team. It hurts. We need to win.

“We’ve got to find a way to make some bigger plays, get some more yards on offence, convert a few more of those second downs and be better on first down. I thought we played pretty clean on offence, we’ve just got to find a way to generate more yards.

“I thought we had a high completion percentage. We weren’t turning the ball over… we need to find a way to get some bigger plays and produce a bit more on first downs.”

O’Shea, for what it’s worth, did not declare who would start next weekend’s Banjo Bowl but didn’t seem to have an issue with the production. Winnipeg finished with 230 yards net offence, but the boss was fixated more on the penalty issue than the offence’s lack of finish.

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“I don’t think that we were that bad off,” he said. “Really, what I thought was certainly just penalties kept on putting us in holes. We saw a spark near the end. Just prior to that it got away from us.”

Finally, consider this: the Bombers are now 5-17 since opening up 2014 with a 5-1 record.

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @WFPEdTait