Stop Messam and see what happens

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/07/2016 (3368 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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.

Since the current Winnipeg regime kicked off in 2014, Messam has faced the Blue and Gold a total of seven times, rushing the football roughly 10 times a game, but piling up a staggering 548 yards. That’s more than seven yards a carry every time he’s touched the ball against Winnipeg in a league that has gone away from the run like it was a Blockbuster video-rental franchise.

According to the CFL website, Messam stands 6-3 and weighs in at 263 pounds, and has been doing his best impression of what it was like to play against Mike Sellers — a former enormous, and enormously successful tailback for the Bombers. The results have not been pleasant for Winnipeg.

While Messam has only gone above the 100-yard mark twice, that has primarily been because he has rarely had many carries. For instance, in 2015, he played in a game where he only rushed the ball four times, but he rumbled for 75 yards. In another game, he carried the ball only six times in Winnipeg, but gained 64 yards. Up until Week 2 of 2016, the most damage he’d done against the Bombers was in 2014 when he rushed 19 times for 126 yards; an average of almost seven yards an attempt.

Which brings us to the most recent and pressing problem of the week that points to things possibly getting worse before they get better.

In Week 2 of this season (a 36-22 Calgary win), Messam put up his biggest rushing total in the last three years with 137 yards on only 16 carries. That’s an average of almost nine yards a carry, or nearly a first down every time he toted the pigskin.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad news story. The beacon of light for the 1-3 Bombers is the hope that after giving up more than a 100 yards on the ground against Montreal in Week 1, and more than 200 yards in Week 2 to Calgary, the defence buttoned down and held Hamilton (and league-leading rusher C.J. Gable) to only 44 total yards in Week 3, and a very capable John White last week to only 23 yards.

While we realize the defence’s vulnerability to the pass has been its undoing in two out of three losses so far this CFL season, Calgary passed for the fewest yards any team has against the Blue this year, and its running game accounted for more than 40 per cent of its total yards.

So the moral of the story is: if you can defend Messam and the Stampeders rushing attack like you have played the run the last couple of weeks, then this team has a legitimate chance of winning Thursday. In the games in which Messam has averaged more than six yards a carry, the Bombers have only beaten him one time in the last three seasons.

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The deflating part of this analysis is the fact Messam (second in the CFL in rushing yards with 185) is often severely limited by other teams. In his two other games this year, he averaged 2.3 yards per carry against B.C. and four yards per carry against Ottawa, and the Stamps (1-1-1) didn’t win either.

Sometimes in the realm of professional football, when it seems like you have more problems than answers, you just need to focus on taking away one area of your opponent’s strengths and the rest can fall into place for you.

Stopping Messam may not guarantee Winnipeg a win Thursday, but it’s a good place to start when preparing for Calgary.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97