Camp is a canvas

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This article was published 20/06/2015 (3761 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

He was listed at 6-3, 230 pounds back in the days he was one of the most feared middle linebackers in the CFL.

Even today, he looks like the kind of man who could kick your butt up and down the block without so much as spilling his beer.

All of which is to say, Winnipeg Blue Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea does not exactly come off as the “artist” type.

Yet what O’Shea has done this month, whittling what began as an unwieldy mass of 90 overgrown men into the finely tuned football team that will be a 46-man roster when he makes his final cuts Saturday night, is precisely that: art.

In an age when sports are increasingly dominated by advanced analytics — whether it is the wins-above-replacement (WAR) numbers that now determine so many baseball careers or the possession stats (Corsi, Fenwick) that are now all the rage in hockey — the job of a football coach remains much more about art than science.

And never is that more on display than during the annual ritual that is training camp. While football is not without its quantifiable stats — How fast can you run the 40? How much can you bench press? How high can you jump? — to hear O’Shea describe it, the job of player assessment remains, in football at least, more of a qualitative than quantitative thing, a feel and soft touch more than a calculation and hard number.

“I don’t want to say it just boils down to gut feel — because it’s definitely more than that,” O’Shea said the other day. “But a lot of it really does come down to — you know what good football looks like.

“You have a picture of what good football looks like on certain plays and certain drills and then you look for a player on a certain play or a certain drill who does something that fits that picture.”

That’s a tall order on a football field where, over the course of the past month, there have been at times 90 different players moving about and running drills all at once.

In the middle of it all, stands O’Shea. Literally, the Bombers field boss generally stands near midfield during practice. He will liase at times with individual players or his small army of assistant coaches, co-ordinators and, during training camp, guest coaches.

But more than anything, O’Shea said he simply lets what is unfolding in front of him wash over him — two practices a day for the better part of three weeks — as he tries to figure out who gets to stay for the upcoming regular season and who gets a ticket back home, where for many cuts the hard reckoning of a life after football will begin.

“When you’re watching practice,” said O’Shea, “you’ll usually focus on one particular player or concept or drill at a time to get an idea of what’s happening. But then something will flash in the corner of your vision that catches your eye and you’ll have to go back later and look on film to verify that you really saw what you thought you saw.

“You’re just really trying to take in as much information as possible as often as you can.”

The challenge for players, of course, is trying to separate yourself from the squirming mass that’s out there on the field so that you’re the one who stands out to O’Shea and his staff.

And standing out means different things to different players. For a veteran Bomber such as defensive tackle Bryant Turner, his job is largely safe coming into training camp and his challenge is not so much to stand out by doing something right — the club already knows he does lots of things right — as it is to avoid standing out by doing something wrong.

Because if Turner does too much of the latter during camp, a well-paid veteran with a seemingly safe job can very quickly turn into an overpaid veteran who can be replaced by someone younger.

“If they got a younger guy who can do the job better or just as good, then what do they need this older guy for?” said Turner, a five-year veteran of the team. “So it’s tough. In a way, being a veteran at camp comes with more pressure, not less.”

That may be, but you’d have a tough time convincing Tony Burnett of that. The rookie linebacker is in camp this month, trying to win his first professional job.

After a standout collegiate career at the football factory that is USC, Burnett has already been cut twice — once in the NFL and once in the CFL — and he had no illusions that this might be his last best chance to finally earn his first paycheque playing football.

So, while Turner has been trying this month to keep his head down and keep his job, Burnett was trying to get noticed so he could win a job.

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“It’s really hard to stand out,” said Burnett. “Not only are there 85 guys or so out here, but you’ve also got the ratio issue too. And that’s a big issue for a guy like me because really there’s only 20 or so spots on the team for Americans.

“I’ve been cut twice. I know that feeling and I don’t want to know that feeling again. It’s stressful. So I stay in my Bible, man. I’ve got a saying: Stay humble, pray double.”

Burnett certainly isn’t the first football player who’s prayed for divine intervention at a training camp. But at the end of the day, there’s only one god at Bombers’ camp — the guy with the clipboard standing at centre field.

O’Shea might not see all, but he’s trying to at least see most of it. “Training camp is tough for a reason,” he said. “I need to see who rises to the challenge.”

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @PaulWiecek