Blue and Gold playing some dominant, offensive ball

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This article was published 12/11/2018 (2490 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The most compelling thing about the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ victory over the Saskatchewan Roughriders on Sunday afternoon was the visitors were able to execute their offence against a defence that knew exactly what was coming.

Years ago, I played on a team that had to contend with an opposing squad able to figure out what plays we were going to run. In fact, at the end of the game, there were testimonials from the offensive linemen that defenders were calling out the exact play they were going to run, before they ran it.

Half of the advantage an offence has is the element of surprise. They feed us — defenders — keys that make a pass look like a run, and a run look like a pass. They use misdirection to obscure their true intentions, and most plays are filled with fakes and deception. As a defender, you really have to stay dialed in to your “keys” or you start chasing your tail.

So, when multiple members of your offensive line share with you how the opposing defence is calling out their plays before they run them, you aren’t exactly surprised that they got shut down. Or annihilated. Or demoralized.

Half the battle of playing defence is fighting pressure and figuring out what the offence is trying to do to you and your teammates within half a second of the ball being snapped.

If your film study has revealed cues and pre-snap reads that tell you what the offence is doing, and you are able to share it with your fellow defenders, for the most part, that play doesn’t have a hope in hell of being successful.

That is, unless, you are a part of one of those exceedingly rare offences, and an offensive line, where it doesn’t matter if your opponent knows what play you are about to run.

Shortly after this revelation from some of my former teammates — way back in the day — I spoke to former offensive lineman and three time Grey Cup winner Lyle Bauer about it. While the exact conversation escapes me, I do remember the gist of it centred around how stupefied I was that our opponent was either that well prepared, or our offence was that easy to diagnose. Lyle looked at me with a mix of amusement and pity, and told me that it really shouldn’t matter. In some of his experiences, the offences they ran weren’t always that complex, and the opponent could figure out what was about to happen to them. In fact, he may have even suggested to me that, on occasion, they told the defenders they were facing off with exactly what was about to go down and they still couldn’t stop it. That is what dominant offensive football looks like at the professional level, and the current team appears to be executing at, or around that elevation.

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Running back Andrew Harris had a lot of superb runs in the second half. The most impressive one was brilliant because of its simplicity. On first down, with minutes remaining, well inside its own half of the field, Winnipeg was intent on killing the clock and getting out of the shadow of its own end zone if it was going to be forced to punt. So, on first down, with all 30,000 in attendance fully aware of what was about to happen, the ball was handed off to Harris, and he ran for 10 yards — and a first down — straight down the pipe.

On a day where the weather and conditions dictated the best ground game would prevail, Harris rushed for 153 yards on 19 carries — an average of just over eight yards every time he touched the ball — and the team netted a colossal 201 yards on the deck. When your players dominate to the extent they can execute and succeed when they are no longer catching anyone off guard, it also surprises no one they are now taking their show on the road to the Western final.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97