Doesn’t matter who the Bombers play… until November

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This article was published 21/08/2017 (2963 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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.

So on the post-game show last Thursday, we asked the same question to the two undisputed leaders of this football team. We wanted to know if the win over the Edmonton Eskimos was a “statement game” and a warning shot across the bow of the West division — that they are a true force to be reckoned with. Or, as we have heard many time before, was this “just another game,” and merely the next opponent on the schedule in a long line of 18?

Not surprisingly, without having heard each other’s answers, the head coach and the starting QB both had the same answer: that it was just another game. No matter how much we built upon the enormity of their most recent victory, and the favourable repercussions that would result from it, we could not get Mike O’Shea to take the bait and conclude that it was anything more than a divisional game against a very good opponent.

So for the entire weekend, I puzzled over this approach. While media hall-of-famer Bob Irving has said this approach has recently become more popular in the CFL — taking everything one game at a time and placing the same emphasis on every contest — one would dare surmise that the buy-in on every team isn’t anywhere close to the degree that this football team has.

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Yet, how could a game against the winless Tiger-Cats, in Hamilton, possibly mean as much, or be as greatly anticipated, as a game against the No. 1-ranked, undefeated CFL-leading Eskimos, a team that had never lost a game at IGF until last week?

Were they simply being modest and respectful of their opponents, or was this some sort of mathematical approach or coping strategy for an entire season? The first conclusion to be drawn was that because of this approach, the team doesn’t get too high after any win, or too low after any loss. If the coaches want to deliver a consistent message of preparation and process for each opponent, then opponents all have to be weighted equally as adversaries, and that makes sense.

If you get up for only some teams — like the front runners, and the ones where the storylines are large enough to grab your full attention — then logic would dictate that when you face someone who doesn’t measure up, the same work won’t be put in. A professional straps it on and does the job no matter the size or scale of the task at hand. Whether it’s a winless Hamilton one week, or an undefeated Edmonton the next, the preparation and process has to be the same to have regular and consistent success.

The end of the road for this approach to the regular season, though, will be once this team finds itself in the playoffs for a second consecutive year, for the first time since 2007 and 2008. What will be interesting is how well this team will play once their reserved and understated coach tells his players that it’s no longer just another game anymore, and in fact, it means everything, with everything on the line. As fun a thought as that is to toss around, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and just take it week by week.

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