We have Tabbies’ number… or do they have ours?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/11/2011 (5263 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is bizarre, when your career is winding down, how you start to notice things coming full circle.

For instance, the first regular-season game I played in the CFL was in Calgary against the Stampeders in 2001, and the last regular-season game I played in my career was also in Calgary against the Stampeders in 2011.

In 2001, we won the East Division in the regular season and got a bye in the playoffs, and, as you have probably heard by now, it didn’t happen again until 2011. In 2001, we got together as a team at David Asper’s house and watched the Hamilton Tiger-Cats defeat Montreal and win the right to face us in the East Final, and this Sunday, once again, we got together as a team in the Blue and Gold room and watched Hamilton defeat Montreal and win the right to face us in the East Final. Those are a lot of familiar variables to accept even for someone who is not superstitious.

Of course in an eight-team league, there are bound to be parallels and repeatable circumstances and my subconscious is probably just searching for sentimental triggers, now that my playing days are numbered. But I still say it’s unusual all the same.

Speaking of repeatable scenarios, the initial reports coming in on the upcoming 2011 East Division Final suggests a theme that, “it is difficult to beat a team four times in a row.” We already recognize we will have our work cut out for us facing Hamilton in five days, especially after their performance against Montreal, but are the odds against us as well? And what makes it difficult to beat an opponent four times in a year?

To catch you up, we played Hamilton three times in the regular season in 2011. Week 1 we went to Hamilton and won 24-16. In Week 9, Hamilton came to play us and we won 30-27. In Week 15 we went back to Hamilton and won 33-17. For the record, none of those games were easy to win. It was hard to win one in a row, it was hard to win two in a row and more of the same for game No. 3. In fact, a number of players on the Tiger-Cat roster indicated to the press that they gave us at least one of those wins, so maybe, according to the laws of the universe, they already won one game.

But the reason people say it is hard to beat any team four times in a row is because of the nature of how the game works. Usually when you beat someone and you play them again, you stay with a game plan that somewhat resembles what worked in your earlier successes. When you lose, you are more prone to change things up, and eventually, over the course of multiple games, you land on the most effective strategy to defeat your opponent. You also tend to work a lot harder after a loss. It’s why in most of the back-to-back games in the CFL — except us of course — the contests result in a split.

Those in the business of breaking down our sport often say that most games turn one way or the other on a handful of plays. Most often those plays are determined by talent, but many times those plays are also greatly influenced by luck, and with two comparably matched teams, luck will usually even out.

The scenario awaiting us this weekend reminds me of a question I once encountered on a statistics exam in university. If the probability of a coin flip coming up either heads or tails is 50/50, and the first nine times you flip a coin it winds up as a head, what are the odds on the 10th flip the coin will be a tail? Ninety per cent? Nope, it is still 50/50 no matter how many times that coin lands on one side.

In the big picture, it’s not like players enter a playoff game thinking ‘Well, we already won three in the regular season, how are we possibly going to go about winning a fourth in the playoffs?’ Unlike NHL playoff scenarios where games are played back-to-back, we played our first three games against Hamilton over the course of 15 weeks. Each game involved different players, different scenarios and different environments. This playoff game will be more of the same. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are not the same team we saw in Week 1, 9, or 15, and neither are we. The lineups are different now, the plays called will be different and the stakes will be different. What matters now is how we match up on Sunday, Nov. 20, not what has happened in the past.

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