Lack of outrage outrageous

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/10/2010 (5813 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Turns out, there’s at least another empty room in the Heartbreak Hotel.

Here’s the key to No. 7, Alex Brink. Hope you enjoy your stay.

Of course, the initial news that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ tall foreheads decided this week to pull the pin on Steven Jyles — with a whisper of a playoff hope left against the incoming Lions on Monday — has by now been fully digested. With just enough room remaining for turkey and pumpkin pie, we imagine.

The weirdest part is for such a dramatic move the reaction has been far from overwhelming. That’s a little peculiar, what with Jyles still owning the second-best efficiency rating in the CFL and Brink about to make his first ever start as a professional.

It’s just as curious that despite the fact the local 12 have just one victory in the last three months, there has been very little in the way of outrage. Sure, nobody’s happy. This season must be Paul LaPolice’s worst career nightmare. Imagine toiling as an assistant for years, finally getting your shot with a once-upon-a-time storied franchise, then waiting for the airbag to deploy on this car wreck.

Yet no cohesive cry for LaPolice’s job. Same goes for rookie GM Joe Mack, who we knew very little about when he arrived. Hell, we still don’t know anything about the guy, other than his team is 3-10 with barely a pulse.

In fact, that’s the most disappointing aspect of the Bombers season to date: That for all the turnover, for all the frustration, for all the talk of a new era beginning, there is no empirical evidence that the wholesale house cleaning — much as it was required — has amounted to anything other than changing of name plates on office doors.

Are the Bombers a more professionally run operation? Absolutely. But as has been repeated in this space since June, in professional sports you only get so far with not being the last guy. Before you become the last guy.

Of course, when they look in the mirrors on Maroons Road, the likes of LaPolice and Mack might console themselves, just a little, on the torturous number of wafer-thin losses in their column. Clearly, fans not in revolt must be cutting them the same slack.

So you might ask — as I’m sure the embattled Mike Kelly must often ponder — where is the indignant media horde? Why no campaign to send LaPolice and Mack packing?

You know, I can’t speak for others in this dodge, but it’s gotten to the point where I’m too numb to the losses. Even this whole business about tossing yet another unproven quarterback into the fire is a movie I’ve seen more times than Road House. And the ending is almost always worse.

The very essence of benching Jyles for Brink, however, is understandable if you adhere to the No. 1 commandment in the CFL, that franchise quarterbacks are so precious and rare that to discover one of them is next to priceless. After all, the team that finds the next Anthony Calvillo is the team that will contend for a Grey Cup for a decade.

One of these quarterbacks makes everybody smarter. They bring stability. They create an environment where winning is expected and the fan base automatically swells.

They do everything that this Bombers franchise hasn’t seen since Khari Jones was at his apex at the turn of the century.

So starting Brink, in that aforementioned context, isn’t ludicrous — teeny, weeny playoff aspirations or not. And heaven knows that if the kid does the improbable than, trust us, the IQs of LaPolice and Mack will skyrocket 50 points overnight. Hey, you can only win the lottery if you buy a ticket, right?

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But I can’t be the only one out there suffering from loss-fatigue. And that’s kinda sad. Because 3-10 is embarrassing. That’s the kind of record that should have fans and media alike looking for heads to roll.

Yet we’re told that you can’t simply clean house every season. Starting from scratch every December only gets you, well, the tepid results that the Bombers have delivered. Fair enough.

So you shrug and muster the patience required of a new general manager, a rookie head coach, a revolving door of new faces and quarterback No. 3 on the season.

And you sigh, longing for the day when the blinking neon sign in front of the Heartbreak Hotel finally reads, “No Vacancy.”

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca

Randy Turner
Reporter

Randy Turner spent much of his journalistic career on the road. A lot of roads. Dirt roads, snow-packed roads, U.S. interstates and foreign highways. In other words, he got a lot of kilometres on the odometer, if you know what we mean.

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