Can’t anybody here play this game?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/09/2013 (4388 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If nothing else, Friday night marked the moment when the Winnipeg Blue Bombers officially exhausted all of their quarterback options, and still had nothing to show.

Now that’s a miserable sort of milestone. Indeed, the offensive performance was so bad that head coach Tim Burke had just a single word for it: pathetic. “Obviously, quarterbacks have to get better,” Burke said after the game, stating the obvious. “They can’t throw picks.”

In any other game, Max Hall’s two first-half touchdown strikes and 169 passing yards might have been worth a celebration, except that he also threw two picks the Lions promptly turned into 10 points, and after a steady stumble of Bombers fumbles and bumbles he got the hook. Backup Jason Boltus came in after the half and performed worse, completing just five of 13 with a fumble and a pick of his own.

Still, Burke said they never considered putting Hall back in. “We didn’t talk about it,” Burke said. “We wanted to see if Jason could pull himself up by the bootstraps.”

Well, that didn’t happen, and the Bombers have already seen lots of Justin Goltz, and despite that pivot’s fleet feet, it never really worked. So, uh, how’s untested practice-roster pivot Levi Brown looking these days? Well, all we really know is he’s played in a single pro game, when he threw three passes for the NFL’s Buffalo Bills back in 2011.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the pivots to blame. After the game, Burke said he thought the receiving corps was “below average.”

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“We dropped some balls. I thought they shied away from catching the ball in a crowd at times,” he said. “Not all of them, just a couple of times that I saw.”

Point is: someone’s going to have to step up. After the game, Boltus sounded hungry for the chance, though he acknowledged his own mistakes: for instance, the wonky short pass in the third quarter, as Boltus was going down under pressure, that was picked off by Lions linebacker Solomon Elimimian.

“The first one was just trying to make a play out of nothing,” Boltus said. “Just gotta throw that one out of bounds.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Every piece of reporting Melissa produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.