Bombers have been the better team when facing Eskimos

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This article was published 06/11/2017 (2868 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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.

The Eskimos have been streaky this year, and many chalk it up to their record-breaking injury calamities. It says here that their streakiness had more to do with when they faced the Blue Bombers than any other factor.

Edmonton started the season by winning seven straight games, until they played Winnipeg, and the Bombers handed them their first loss of the season.

They lost five more games before winning their next five to finish the season. Their last loss of the year? Once again, to the Bombers, this time at home, with the healthiest roster they’d had all season.

Reilly may indeed end up the most outstanding player of the CFL, but Nichols has been better when they’ve gone head to head this year. In both Blue Bomber wins, Nichols had significantly better completion percentages, better quarterback efficiency ratings, and did not turn the ball over. In both Winnipeg victories, Reilly threw interceptions to defensive back Chris Randle, one of which was returned for a major.

Any and every playoff matchup analysis starts with a quarterback comparison, and Nichols has outperformed Reilly head to head this season. In fact, while many have the Bombers ranked lower than the Eskimos because they haven’t been playing their best football of late, they scored more points than the Edmonton offence this season, and also gave up fewer points defensively. In the second contest, where the Bombers won by nine, Winnipeg kicker Justin Medlock missed all three field-goal attempts. On any other day with Medlock, Winnipeg wins that game by 18 points.

If there is one identifier with the home team, one trait that has stood out through this season, it is that when they win the turnover battle, they win the game. In both games against Edmonton this year, they won this battle, and although Reilly passed for 356 and 311 yards through the air in the two games, he also forced the ball downfield, threw into double coverage multiple times, and was pressured into making bad decisions by the Bombers’ rush.

While the Bombers’ defence has not had a good season overall, they have matched up very well against the Eskimos, and probably had their best game of the season when they played them in Edmonton.

If the Winnipeg defensive line plays anything like they did Friday against the Calgary Stampeders, expect a similar turnover discrepancy and, therefore, when everything is said and done, the same end result.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97