Win over Als told Bombers very little

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/06/2010 (5653 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So what can you say when your team defeats the defending Grey Cup champions the first game of the pre-season and are up 21-1 at halftime with almost 200 yards more offence in the bag? Not as much as you would think.

It’s a week into camp and many are discovering that the pre-season is not only a difficult stretch for the players, but a trying time for the coaches and managers. Because this intense, three-week training session is predominantly about evaluating the new and existing talent, the process gets ultimately more difficult and murky when the opposition does not co-operate fully in the process.

While it’s great to see offensive and defensive systems executed properly under live-fire conditions against a game opponent of professional calibre, ideally, to properly assess your players, you would probably prefer to see them compete against all the championship players that were left in Montreal. As our coach advised our dressing room after the game with the purpose of keeping the room humble about its successes on Sunday, your first-team offence is supposed to move the ball against Montreal’s reserves, and your defence is supposed to stop them as well.

This is what makes the pre-season such a difficult stanza to measure. After one game and with only one game to go, you still don’t know how most of your roster would have fared against Montreal’s Grey Cup winning personnel. Whether Anthony Calvillo could have moved the ball on you, whether Avon Cobourne could have run it against you, and how well could you have blocked last year’s top-rated defensive group? All you can conclusively say after the game is that our starters and our rookies are definitively better than their rookies.

Which leads us to the next conundrum in the pre-season, the last game before things get real in a hurry. This is usually the contest that pits starting units against starting units for a limited stretch as the final tune-up before the games start counting for real. The interesting subplot in this one, however, is the fact that our last exhibition game is against the same team we start the regular season against, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

The theories for approaching a situation like this are endless. Do you travel to Hamilton armed with all of the players and all of the playbook to give yourself the best chance of winning the game and build momentum for the home opener? Do you run all of your plays to see what may or may not work against the Tiger-Cats and refine your strategy from there? Or do you keep it simple, play your starters for a spell, and try to ambush them when the regular season kicks off?

The most interesting component of these next two weeks is the back-to-back scenario. If you know the CFL, you know that back-to-back contests are commonplace. What you may not know is that the statisticians will tell you that the team that wins the first game at home in a back-to-back format rarely wins the second the next week on the road. As a player I can tell you when you win a game, and prepare to play that same opponent the following week, you do not necessarily have the same urgency as you do when you have been defeated and are being threatened and screamed at.

The intricate strategic options available to you in the CFL and the pre-season that the purists love to argue over are also the same analytical options that can give you a headache. In the end, the best governing dynamics for evaluating the pre-season and strategizing against opponents I suppose, may just be to focus on controlling what you can control, and to not worry about anybody or anything else that is out of this realm.

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