Bye week should be more flexible

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/09/2014 (4036 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When your franchise quarterback is out for an undetermined amount of time, and your backup has started zero games in the CFL, it might be time to consider changing some bye-week vacation plans.

When you have lost five of your last six games and you’re sitting alone in the bottom of your division, it is worth discussing whether to shorten the bye-week schedule.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far, away, “bye” weeks used to be optional for players. Getting an entire week off from football was up to the discretion of your coach. In fact, it wasn’t until my fifth year in the CFL, in 2005, that I booked my first flight to leave the province. The reason I didn’t go anywhere from 2001 to 2004? I had a head coach by the name of Dave Ritchie who thought the bye week was about as useful as malaria.

Most often, if you went to talk to Ritchie about the bye week, he wanted to know why you weren’t focused on the games at hand. In fact, some seasons he would warn the team at the beginning of the year he didn’t want to hear any talk about the bye week at all, and that was pretty much the end of that. If you did catch him on a good day, and asked him how much time you were getting off, he would tell you it depended upon how well the team was doing. If you had a losing record or had lost the last game before the bye week, he would schedule practices right in the middle of it and say, “the bye week is going bye bye.” You could book a flight and make plans, but you ran the risk of the schedule changing — the bye week being shortened or cancelled altogether. There was never any ambiguity about how he felt about taking a week off from the season.

To be accurate, what head coach Mike O’Shea has allotted for the team this year is not unusual or even uncommon. The CFL is an entirely different animal than it was 15 years ago. Pretty much every coach in the league now deals with the bye week before the season even starts. Regardless of any circumstances like record, injuries, performances, or upcoming critical contests, bye weeks are set in stone and players can count on the details of them being honoured. The only question is whether it should always be this way.

When used correctly, a week off in some part of the football season can be helpful and useful. Players can recuperate, rest and re-immerse themselves in the workout regimens they may have missed during the hustle-bustle of the season. Players who haven’t seen their families in months get a chance to visit and catch up, and sometimes, when it seems like the negatives of a season are overwhelming you, it is beneficial to step away and regain perspective.

Yet if Drew Willy is not going to be able to play against Hamilton Sept. 27 — a game that is more than necessary for the Blue and Gold to win — then an extra opportunity to indoctrinate a second-string quarterback should not be wasted, if it is required.

Nobody outside of Brian Brohm and his coaches know how ready he is to take this thing over, and what his comfort level is with the offence and the players in it.

If a couple of extra practises in an extra week is not needed to further prime him for play down the backstretch of this season, then as fans and spectators we should rest assured unfamiliarity or lack of continuity issues will not be a factor in the game(s) to come.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97