Hitting the road for home games could be key to Bombers’ success

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This article was published 17/07/2017 (2998 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Lost amid the many positives from Thursday night’s victory against the Toronto Argonauts was the statistic that is taken for granted in most professional football stadiums outside of Winnipeg — a definitive home-field advantage capped with a victory.

This could finally be the year the Blue Bombers turn this statistic on its head and start reaping the benefits that are due to them in their own barn, Investor’s Group Field. If it isn’t, there may be a recourse for a team that went 7-2 on the road last year and only 4-5 at home. Make the home games like the road games.

Whether you are playing 18 or 16 games a season in the CFL or NFL, the recipe for success is generally thought to be the same. You are supposed to win 75 per cent or more of your home games, and do your best to split the contests on the road.

In the CFL, that equates to six or seven wins at home out of nine, and four or five wins on the road. That gives your football team between 10 and 12 wins a year, more than enough to consistently qualify for the playoffs, and to be in the mix to host a playoff game as well.

The reason this formula is largely subscribed to is the inherent advantage of playing in your own barn. Familiarity, consistency, pride, lack of road weariness, and, of course, more than 20,000 fans drowning out cadences and audibles and applauding every positive thing you do, are but a few of the reasons why most teams win more at home than they do on the road.

So what does a franchise do when it’s muddling through a significantly below-average home record, and yet has shown to be exceptional on the road? You bring the structure, discipline and scheduling of road games to the home games, until the players figure it out themselves.

While Winnipeg would be one of the first teams in the CFL to go this route, it is commonly used in the National Football League. Many NFL teams, just like the Bombers, have been decidedly unhappy with their home-field advantages — even though they were consistently winning on the road — so they implemented the structure and discipline of the road game at home, and eliminated all the distractions that are hard for some players to navigate while in familiar confines.

While it would be cost prohibitive for many CFL teams to do this nine times a year, it couldn’t hurt to implement it a time or two — in extreme scenarios — to demonstrate how the preparation needs to be the same.

The day before the game, and after the last walk through at the stadium, the entire team simply assembles at a hotel close to the stadium. They check in and have their first group meetings around four p.m., followed by a break for dinner wherever they choose. They then have to return to the hotel for more meetings and or film study. A curfew is in place for 11 p.m., which is pretty standard across both leagues, and then there is a team breakfast and final meetings in the morning. The players then check out of the hotel and proceed to the stadium at their regular preparation times.

Some football teams have noticed there are too many distractions, temptations, and lack of structure for their players leading up to a home game. When you are on the road, in a relatively foreign city, you are isolated from most of the people and comforts that could potentially cause you to lose focus at home. For some teams, staying at a hotel on the road is a mental check mark for a business trip, and signals the start of their work day. The seclusion and structure can bring focus and reinforce the objective of the task ahead, whereas the comforts and access of home sometimes do the opposite.

This team is currently batting .500 at home in 2017, with one win and one loss. If the majority of these domestic opportunities don’t start to materialize as victories, it might be a worthwhile exercise to give the players the structure and discipline that their away record is telling them they require.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97