Player airlift not in the cards

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This article was published 08/10/2014 (4073 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mike O’Shea continues to insist he was hired as Winnipeg Blue Bombers head coach to build the team up, not tear it down.

Even as the calls grow louder in Bombers Nation for O’Shea to make serious changes to a struggling team that has lost seven of their last eight, O’Shea remained defiant Tuesday he is going to dance with the ones who brought him this far.

“My job is to coach these guys and find a way to win with these guys and build these guys up into a winning team. And I would say right now we haven’t done our job that way. But these are the guys we’re going to win with,” O’Shea said as he met with the media for the first time since Friday in Ottawa, where his club registered their fifth loss in a row.

“My job was to come here and build a team, not tear it all apart.”

Speaking of building a team, CFL clubs could expand their practice rosters to 15 as of last Friday and there was already talk on Twitter Tuesday the Bombers had signed offensive lineman Jace Daniels, a Northern Michigan grad who was on the practice squad of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers last year.

The club didn’t confirm the Daniels signing, but O’Shea said anyone expecting a sudden airlift of personnel this week to solve all the Bombers’ problems is going to be disappointed.

“The timing of it is such that it’s a tough situation,” said O’Shea, noting his team needs to start winning immediately and doesn’t have the luxury of the time necessary to teach a new player the intricacies of the systems.

On the plus side, the Bombers will at least get some players back from injury this week. O’Shea said injured defensive lineman Jason Vega and linebacker Ian Wild will likely be back in the lineup when the Bombers play the Eskimos in Edmonton Monday. He said there’s a good chance receivers Nick Moore and Cory Watson will also play versus Edmonton.

He described linebacker Ejiro Kuale and defensive back Demond Washington as questionable for Monday.

O’Shea has been relentlessly upbeat throughout the current losing skid, insisting over and over — and again yesterday — there’s nothing so wrong with his team a few better-executed plays from game to game couldn’t fix.

As O’Shea continues to see it, the big things with his team are operating fine; it’s the little things that are letting him down.

Case in point: Although his defence has yielded 160 yards or more rushing in six of their last eight games — and lost all six — O’Shea continued to insist he doesn’t think a league-worst run defence has been particularly significant in all the losing.

Instead, O’Shea pointed to all the tackles the Bombers missed against the Redblacks as a major reason behind a loss to an Ottawa team that had a nine-game losing streak on the go until they met Winnipeg.

“Those (missed tackles) hurt,” said O’Shea. “Multiple times we had three or more players miss tackles on plays. And that’s not acceptable, obviously.”

Right, but what about all the other games and the team’s run defence generally?

“I’m seeing it as one of the factors of why we’ve lost games. But it’s not the only reason we’ve lost games,” said O’Shea, citing too many turnovers and too many big plays yielded on special teams as other contributors.

‘My job is to coach these guys and find a way to win with these guys and build these guys up into a winning team. And I would say right now we haven’t done our job that way. But these are the guys we’re going to win with’

— Mike O’Shea

The Bombers are last in the West Division at 6-8, a win behind the 7-7 B.C. Lions, who host Ottawa this week.

The Bombers’ best chance to make the playoffs is by finishing fourth in the West and hoping their record is good enough to earn a crossover spot in the East Division. But Winnipeg’s remaining schedule doesn’t favour them. Their last four games are in Edmonton, at home versus Calgary and B.C. and then on the road in Calgary to finish up the regular season.

The Bombers haven’t won in Edmonton since 2006 and haven’t emerged victorious in Calgary since 2002. They are also just 1-5 this year against the West Division.

O’Shea was asked if his club’s troubles have reached the point where he needs to get loud and start confronting his players for their poor play.

“How do you know I haven’t?

“What we talk about in the locker- room and how I conduct our business is generally going to stay in there,” said O’Shea.

O’Shea added he’s skeptical about the efficacy of yelling at his players

“Yelling at a guy to make a tackle, I don’t think is going to have the desired effect,” said O’Shea. “If you’re an accountant and you add up a column wrong, does your boss come in and scream and yell at you?”

The Bombers haven’t practised since the loss to Ottawa and won’t return to the practice field until Thursday.

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