No excusing team’s road woes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/10/2010 (5790 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s one thing to not have a season work out the way you expected it to. It’s another level of disappointment altogether to set and or tie records because of your failings.

You may have heard by now that our team has tied a record for being good enough to just barely lose. Seven times over the last 15 games we have dropped decisions by four points or fewer and in doing so have equalled the all-time CFL record. That’s almost 100 years of history we have gone up against in matching a mark that no one wants to attribute to their football team.

After losing by three points to Montreal on Sunday, we are now also on the precipice of another record that no one in pro sports wants to be a part of — going winless on the road for an entire football season. While this record is much more common and happens more frequently, road wins are still one of the basic components of sound football that should have been checked off earlier in the season at any number of venues we competed in.

Over the course of an 18-game schedule, they say good football teams aim to win at least seven of their nine homes games and half of their contests on the road. Since nine road games isn’t cleanly divisible by two, let’s be modest and say you hope for four of nine at a visiting park.

That would give a franchise an 11-7 record — the mark of a good football team — and a winning percentage we have not embraced since 2003 when Dave Ritchie was in his fourth year at the helm.

So how is it that a team can be 4-3 at home but winless in eight games on the road? Some factors attributing to this are obvious, and others not so much.

Those of you who travel frequently know the feeling. After a two- or three-hour flight covering hundreds of kilometres, your brain gets a little spaced out and your body can get lethargic. Whereas at home the day before the big game you might be in your house resting and sitting back, on the road, once you get off the plane it’s an endless procession of buses, media interviews, meetings, securing tickets, dinner with friends or family and other distractions that keep you from catching up on your sleep. A player being tired isn’t just cause to lose a football game, but if you have 20 or 30 guys not as sharp as they usually are, it can spell disaster.

Another problem with road games (depending on what city you are playing in) is nobody wants to sit in their hotel room the entire time. For a lot of players it’s a strange place they have never explored before and almost like a mini-vacation.

Additionally, on game day, you discover you don’t have the same resources as you do at home. There are fewer staff members that travel and less infrastructure like weight rooms and massage tables and exercise bikes to access. Your amenities are limited and space is always at a premium.

The on-field experience is different, too. People discount how much of a factor 25,000 or 30,000 fans can have on a game. Not only does crowd noise disrupt visiting offences and their timing and cadences, but players feed off of the euphoric conditions when they are successful.

When you are on the road, you can’t play to the crowd. When you execute your assignment to the letter there is no instantaneous positive reinforcement that emanates down from the stands. You have to be self-motivated and play for one another, not for the adoration of those in attendance, which affects more players than you can imagine.

So understanding these variables and conditions on the road, why, specifically, hasn’t this team won a game in 2010 outside of the confines of Canad Inns Stadium? For young or old, CFL veteran or rookie, it’s not like we haven’t all played games on the road before in high school and college. Most, if not all of these factors we have learned to deal with and overcome through the years. That leaves us with two plausible explanations on the brink of not winning a road game in an entire season.

Either the assembled players are not good enough to win outside of an advantageous environment, or the players are not making enough concerted efforts as individuals to counteract these obstacles by getting their rest and limiting their distractions, etc, etc. You decide.

That being said, consternation over whether nature or nurture is responsible for our winless road record at this point in our 2010 season isn’t nearly as important anymore as the fact that we only have one more chance to do something about it.

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