Only thing Blue have to fear is Stamps

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This article was published 22/09/2017 (2934 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re looking for reasons to think this is the year the Grey Cup drought finally and mercifully ends for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, the team has given you lots of supporting evidence lately.

A consistent, reliable and healthy quarterback? Tick.

A ball-hawk, opportunistic defence? Tick.

The best kicker in the league, possibly ever? Tick.

It’s all been on display this CFL season and it’s all reason for optimism for a long-suffering Bombers fan base that has been waiting since 1990 to party again at Portage and Main.

But it wasn’t until Friday night at Investors Group Field that the Bombers added another key championship ingredient, an ingredient that a dig this week through the franchise’s history suggests might actually be the most important one of all.

With a 29-9 win over the Ottawa Redblacks Friday, the Bombers will post a winning regular-season record at home in 2017 for the first time at Investors Group Field.

After losing their 2017 home opener to the Calgary Stampeders, the Bombers have rattled off five straight wins at home this season to finally turn their shiny — and costly — new football palace into their home-field advantage.

It’s been a long time in these parts since a Bombers team won more often than they lost at home and it’s probably not a coincidence the last time they did it — they finished 5-4 at home during the 2011 regular season — also happens to be the last time this franchise appeared in a Grey Cup game.

Consider: never in the history of the Winnipeg Football club has a Bombers team posted a losing regular-season record at home and gone on to appear in the Grey Cup in the same season. Twenty-five times, Winnipeg has appeared in the Grey Cup and 25 times it came in a season in which they first took care of business at home.

The quarterbacks have come and gone. The defences have been better and worse. The kicking game has been up and down.

But if you are looking for the one bedrock ingredient upon which Grey Cup teams in this town have always been built, it has been their ability to make a visit to Manitoba decidedly unfriendly for opposing CFL teams.

That great 1984 Bombers Grey Cup champion? They were 8-0 at home that regular season. Those 1992 and 1993 Bombers East Division champions, considered by many to be the best Bombers teams never to win a Grey Cup? They were a combined 16-2 at home those two seasons.

And that 1990 team — the last to win a Grey Cup in these parts? They were 8-1 at old Winnipeg Stadium.

Put it together and the Bombers have posted a mind-boggling 129-37 record at home in the seasons they went to the Grey Cup game — and a 56-14 home record in the 10 seasons they won the big game.

While all wins count for the same in the standings, Friday’s victory perhaps counted for a little more in the grand scheme of things, bumping as it did Winnipeg’s home record to 5-1 with three home dates still to play.

It has been a long time coming. For all the flaws that have emerged since IGF first opened in 2013, the biggest of all wasn’t the cracked concrete or lousy drainage but rather the lousy performance of the team that played on the field.

Through four seasons prior to this one, Winnipeg posted just an 11-25 record at IGF. Even last year, in a season the Bombers finally got back to the playoffs after a five-year absence, they lost more often than they won at home, finishing 4-5 at IGF.

It was frustrating for the team and it was frustrating for its fans. And it was the opposite of what we were told would happen when the province signed up taxpayers to foot the huge bill for construction of the new stadium.

From the unique roof design that was going to reflect crowd noise back onto the field to a first-class home locker room and training facility, we were told the new stadium was going to give our football team a home-field advantage that would be the envy of every other team in the CFL.

Well, better late than never. To their everlasting credit, this 2017 edition of the Bombers is finally providing some return on that big stadium cheque we all wrote, while simultaneously paying back the club’s fans for their loyalty through the years.

And the fans have, in turn, paid the team right back. After posting attendance declines in each of the last three seasons, the Bombers have so far matched their winning season on the field with a winning season in the stands in a way they didn’t last year, even when the team at one point went on a seven-game winning streak.

Through five home dates in 2017 heading into Friday night, the Bombers averaged 28,973 fans per game, or 87.7 per cent capacity.

That’s a big jump over last year, when the team averaged just 25,935 fans, or 77.6 per cent, per game.

Now that gap will almost certainly close a little — late-season games and the inclement weather that comes with them are almost always more poorly attended than the summer affairs that everyone likes best.

But barring a complete collapse — on the field and in the stands — the Bombers will post their first year-over-year attendance increase this season since they moved into the new stadium back in 2013.

Even Friday night’s crowd of 26,588 spoke more about the fans who were there than weren’t, enduring as they did a lightning delay to the start of the game, a monsoon for the opening kickoff and another monsoon for much of the third quarter.

Lesser fans would have bailed and left — these fans stayed and bailed.

Winning, as they say, fixes everything. And the rest of the world is beginning to take notice what’s been happening in Winnipeg this season.

Earlier this week, the online gambling site Bodog Canada updated their Grey Cup odds and what it showed was even gamblers are beginning to think this might be the year the Bombers finally break through.

What were 9-1 odds back in August that the Bombers would win the Grey Cup have been slashed in half to 9-2 now, with only the Stampeders at 2-1 listed at shorter odds.

Now, it needs to be said that is a monstrous caveat. The Stamps have won 16 of their last 17 meetings against the Bombers — including nine in a row at IGF — and Calgary has been beaten just once in 2017.

In other words, the path to a Grey Cup may begin for the Bombers with posting a winning record at home, but it won’t end until they first figure out a way to beat Calgary.

Indeed, the irony that this is all happening now is that in a season that is increasingly looking like the Bombers will host their first home playoff date at IGF, the easier path to the Grey Cup looks to be on the road through a woefully anemic East Division as a playoff crossover team from the West.

Still, history counts for something and the Bombers have a lot of it. And what that history says — in volumes — is that this team took a huge step toward ending the CFL’s longest championship drought with another win at home on Friday night.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek