Keep Nichols, Harris out Friday, or it’s over for Blue and Gold

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/10/2017 (2932 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the precipice of the Blue Bombers’ second consecutive playoff appearance, we are presented with the conundrum of the ages: What comes first? The home-field advantage or the extra week of rest for your injured players?

I suppose we were all naive to think, that some way, somehow, this edition of the football club could simply navigate around the injury iceberg that crashes into every football vessel every season. I’m not going to point fingers, but I do believe it was around the time someone released how few “man games” this team had missed due to injuries, that the good ship Blue and Gold got it’s hull perforated by a monster lurking beneath the waves and began to take on water.

No ship is unsinkable, and no team sails through a season without at least doing some patchwork or sealing a flooded compartment or two, and the Bombers just found out that they don’t have enough lifeboats and their captain, Matt Nichols, can’t swim.

So with one game remaining on the season and assurances from head coach O’Shea on our post-game broadcast that the latest casualties are all “fine,” it’s full steam ahead for Calgary, where wins are notoriously hard to come by, and the Stampeders have lost two games in a row for the first time this season? Not so fast, Capt. Ahab.

While an opinion is hard to formulate when you have incomplete medical information, I would dare suggest that Andrew Harris, Matt Nichols, and possibly Travis Bond and Weston Dressler sit this one out. Don’t even practise this week, don’t push the injury threshold, don’t even test to see what you’re working with, or where you’re at. Just go get treatment and sleep in a hyperbaric chamber until things get real. For as many advantages as there are in acquiring a home-field playoff game, that ship has sailed.

This team had back-to-back games against sub-.500 winning percentage football teams to secure home-field advantage. It’s not meant to be. Not only were they not up to the task, but they turned off their marine radar at night and powered right into a catastrophe.

A home-field playoff game was a splendid thought, and would have brought with it many advantages and financial windfalls, but that is no longer what’s important anymore. If it happens, if Saskatchewan beats Edmonton in the final week of the regular season, or if somehow Dominique Davis figures out how to defeat the best defence in the CFL in Calgary, so be it, but it says in this space that the club should not tempt fate and push the recovery schedules of two of it’s best players.

Once again, we do not know the extent of the injuries to Matt Nichols and Andrew Harris, but we do know what we saw. Nichols dropped to the turf with a non-contact injury on his plant leg. Rumor has it that it’s his calf, and it was bothering him even before this game.

Even if it was a bad cramp, which it wasn’t, he should get a week off to make sure there is zero per cent chance of that happening in the playoffs. As for Andrew Harris’s short, unscheduled trip to Planet Unconsciousness — I know what I saw — I wouldn’t care if he came up with an equation this week to end the world’s energy crisis — he gets a week off, too.

No ship is unsinkable, and no team sails through a season without at least doing some patchwork or sealing a flooded compartment or two, and the Bombers just found out that they don’t have enough lifeboats and their captain, Matt Nichols, can’t swim.

Whether they play their first playoff game at home or on the road, the only absolute we know about their competitive chances is that if Nichols and or Harris are banged up and are limited at all, they don’t have a hope in hell of winning anything.

Nobody likes to pull the chute on a game, especially when there is still something to be earned, but at what cost is it worth going into Calgary when the football gods have decided to show you how vulnerable you are to injuries?

This team is currently 5-3 on the road and have already won in Edmonton this year. If they don’t play their damaged starters in Calgary, there is still a chance that the Blue and Gold can get a home playoff game with an Edmonton loss to Saskatchewan in Regina.

If Nichols and Harris are compromised — even marginally — by injuries going into the playoffs, the chances of this team winning a game are impossible. You do the math.

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

Twitter: @DougBrown97