Bombers hurt by abandoning ‘next man up’ system

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/10/2017 (2937 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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.

What may surprise many is the injury that appears to be impacting the offence the most is not the absence of the club’s best receiver in Darvin Adams; instead, it seems to be the absence of Timothy Flanders. When this offence was at its best, it wielded a two-headed monster of both Andrew Harris and Flanders, and it made it near impossible for opponents to keep both of them in check. Spend too much time worrying about Harris, and Flanders could gash you on the ground, or in the air, and vice versa.

Before Flanders’ injury, the last three games these two were both on the roster against Ottawa, Edmonton and Hamilton, Harris averaged 7.5 yards per carry, 6.8 yards per carry and 5.2 yards per carry, respectively. Through the air of those same games, Harris averaged 8.2 yards per reception, 9.0 yards per reception and 16.2 yards per reception.

The last two games against Toronto and B.C. when Flanders was not playing, Harris averaged 3.2 yards per carry, and 3.6 yards per carry, respectively, and 5.5 yards per reception and 2.0 yards per reception. That is a significant and devastating loss of production to the offence’s most important weapon after quarterback Matt Nichols. The offensive line has been the same, the quarterback has been the same, the play calling appears to be the same, but now defences only have one multi-purpose back to defend, and they’ve made a point of taking Harris out of the game.

Since the team has not put another tailback on the roster, this should mean Flanders should be returning from injury sooner rather than later, and that hopefully will result in more space for Harris yet again, and a return to the kind of production we saw from him earlier, along with the offence as a whole.

But why abandon the two-back set that was working so well for the last two weeks in the first place? How come they couldn’t replace Flanders with another tailback that could both catch and run? Aren’t there always supposed to be backups on the roster ready and waiting to step in and fill in?

Looking at the team lineup from the Toronto game, outside of Harris and Flanders, there is not another tailback on the 46-man roster, on the injured reserved list, and only one on the practice squad of this football team — a Zach Bauman — who has yet to play a regular-season game of pro-football.

In previous seasons, this team had great success with their “next man up” mentality of simply injecting another player into the lineup for an injured one and watching them carry on the torch and the production. For some reason, though, and for two weeks now, Flanders has not been replaced on the roster by another running back who could do what he did, and when that affects the part that makes your offence tick — namely Harris getting the space and quality touches that he needs — it makes you wonder why they didn’t stick to the system that was working so well for them.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97