Blitzing is the blueprint to beating Bombers — and the word is out

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/07/2015 (4082 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Early in the season, it’s never the fact that you lost a game that frustrates football fans, it’s the way you went about losing it.

As we all know, even after a couple of contests, it is still too soon to write anything in wet cement about this football franchise. Depending upon which version shows up Friday against the Montreal Alouettes — the Week 1 or Week 2 edition — this squad could very well have twice as many wins as losses, or vice versa.

So why all the angst and derision? Because despite all of the changes and promise that this off-season delivered to the football club, and the formidable and unusual performance that materialized in Regina two weeks ago, Friday’s blowout loss to Hamilton followed a far-too-familiar framework for those who know this team.

After poring over the tape of the Saskatchewan game from Week 1, it must have reminded Hamilton how effective Bombers QB Drew Willy can be when he has time in the pocket, and is at the controls of a balanced offence. After all, he broke a record for passing accuracy and efficiency by completing almost 90 of his throws, and his running game kept his opponent honest and guessing — and from coming after him for pretty much the entire evening.

So with only one game film from 2015 to scout, I’m assuming the Ticats took the time to revisit the archives of some footage from 2014, and guess what they found? The step-by-step instructions for how this team was taken apart from contender to calamity during the second half of last year’s season.

Willy has demonstrated in his short career here that he can be a force when given time to survey the field and step into throws. So Hamilton decided to follow the blueprint of last season and committed themselves to taking away that time, and knocked him out of the game. If you looked at that film you would see that one of two things happens when teams commit to pressuring the QB in Winnipeg. He either gets the $%&! knocked out of him, or he is pressured into making poor throws and poor decisions in the pocket. Both are suitable outcomes for opponents, so they play man coverage and blitz like an obsessive behaviour, without a care in the world that their back end may be exposed.

At times on Friday we saw up to seven men on the line of scrimmage, and plenty of five and six man pressures, with unblocked players coming from every which way. When Willy got hurt, his backup entered the game — the backup that the team must covet because he plays a very similar style to Willy — and unfortunately, got a very similar result. Ack, pick, QB hit, quick throw, punt. Mix and repeat.

You would think that Hamilton would be concerned about opening themselves up so much, but when your opponent can’t pick up the blitz, and you don’t have to cover for more than two seconds, you can jump routes in one-on-one coverage without concern of being beaten deep. If there was one realization that came out of Friday’s game, it was that this offence, regardless of how many new and improved players it has on it, still hasn’t demonstrated that it knows how to hurt a defence enough to make them stop blitzing, and/or doesn’t have the right player behind the centre to make those quick decisions, or who can escape the rush and extend the play.

All is not lost, however, as we begin Week 3. This team had to go away from the run last week because of how far and quickly they fell behind. If their defence starts to live up to their billing and starts to settle in, they can afford to be much more judicious with the football, and thereby keep their opponents from unleashing the hounds whenever the mood strikes them. Besides, it’s better this team faces up to this affliction now than at the end of the year again.

They often say that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and after the last game, this seems truer than ever. This football team needs to begin bucking this trend on Friday, for the blueprint on how to beat them — that took half of last year to go to print — has already begun to recirculate.

 

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97