Third time not always a charm for Bombers

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This article was published 26/02/2018 (3112 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When It comes to consecutive winning seasons in Winnipeg, the third one is rarely the luckiest.

With 23 wins and only 13 losses the last two years, there is much to look forward to with the Winnipeg Football Club in 2018. They have an established, franchise quarterback, one of the most innovative and creative offences in the CFL, and a coaching staff that is attractive to free agents, and not a deterrent. Yet, if you think this is the moment the club has finally crested the mountain, and rounded the summit onto easy street, you couldn’t be more wrong.

In 2018, this franchise will be attempting to become the first group to have three consecutive winning regular seasons in a decade and a half. That is correct. It has been fifteen years since the Blue and Gold were able to put together a trifecta of winning programs. Now, they have been to the playoffs three consecutive times as recently as 2006, 2007, and 2008, but three winning regular seasons, year after year after year? With more wins than losses? You’d have to call up the old ball coach, Dave Ritchie, to figure out what that was like.

If you think this is just a turn of the century anomaly, you would also be mistaken. Before that string of successes from 2001 to 2003, there was another six-year drought after the winning seasons of 1992, 1993, and 1994. It has actually been since the 1980’s that this football team was filled with consistent winners, year after year, and the playoff games and championships that accompany that sort of ilk. From 1980 to 1987, the Bombers strung together 8 winning seasons in a row, 8 consecutive playoff appearances, and a Grey Cup for good measure. Oh, and the year that streak of winning football ended, with a 9-9 season in 1988? They won a Grey Cup that year too.

So what is it about sustained excellence, and these elusive three-year winning streaks that have hibernated since the 80’s? What makes them so difficult to conjure up? Quite often, a third year of winning is at the cross roads of undiscovered talent and entry-level contracts, T-boning full market value in a cap environment that cannot sustain them. Players you once had on your roster at huge savings and value for their on-field efforts, end up getting paid what they are worth, and their replacements have rarely been on par with their productivity.

For example, in Year 1 of these back-to-back winning seasons, 2016, you had quarterback who is now the franchise pivot playing with a backup price tag. Nichols came off the bench and led this group to seven wins in a row, and he did it at a fraction of what he is making now. Joining him was Travis Bond, who also made his first start in 2016, and after an allstar berth, a top lineman-of-the-year nomination, and 16 more games in 2017 blocking for a running back that almost broke an all time CFL record: you can bet he signed for at least double what his entry-level deal was. T.J. Heath is a similar story. After signing his first CFL contract with Toronto in 2016, he got traded to Winnipeg and put up back-to-back all-star seasons. There is little doubt, once again, he has at least doubled the salary he was making during his first contract in the CFL.

Even Jamaal Westerman, a highly sought-after national player who joined the club in 2015 with a very respectable price tag, left the club for an offer reportedly fifty thousand dollars greater than what his incumbent team could offer. This is what leading the team in sacks, two years in a row, and being a national all-star, gets you on the open market.

Putting together a third consecutive year of both regular season winning football, and playoff football, is a different kind of challenge for this ball club, because it must do more with less, and reinvent itself again, and that is a test this franchise has seldom passed in the last thirty years. The same roster and scouting acumen that landed players such as Heath, Bond and Westerman, will now need to replace these talents on the roster with lesser-known and more economical athletes, to keep this trending in the right direction. And that, over nearly three decades, has been easier said than done.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97