deepsixemtoboyd

What happened yesterday can hardly be considered surprising on any front. I have been a Bomber fan since the late 70s, and even when we have had dominant teams and the riders have been abysmal – see the entire decade of the 80's - we have tended to lose and even get smoked on Labour Day. That said, I will repeat the obvious, stated here and elsewhere by many posters, for my own self–cathartic reasons: We have a strong, steady, though non-explosive offense. That offense has and will continue to put up points though isn't a group that will ever strike a deep fear in the hearts of defenses. They are more a get it done/lunchbucket crew. And, as such, they are good enough: good enough to make the playoffs, and possibly push into them, even win the big prize. If... If they were supported by a even average defense. Which they are not. Our defense frequently has inadequate pressure/push, a linebacking corps which is 2/3 inadequate, and a porous bend and break secondary. I believe we have given up an average of approximately 30 points per game. And that, folks, just ain't gonna get it done. It is simply unrealistic to expect our steady but unspectacular offence to bail out a weak defence every week. So, going into the LDC – an extremely hostile environment – it really was asking a lot to get another Houdini moment. Finally, until the blue bombers acknowledge the core problem on defence – and I don't know whether it is schemes or personnel or both – this team will not be a serious contender to end the longest championship drought in blue bombers history.

K, now I feel old + depressed. Thx!?

Please say more about this. Assuming you are talking about the "diversity is our strength" message, why do you object to that?

And he's a self-aggrandizing windbag, so there's that...

100% agreed. 0 value added, whatsoever.

I really like the way we are looking at this point in the season. Things seem to be rounding into stronger and stronger form in all three phases. That said, I have two continuing concerns: 1) The dink and dunk passes on second and long. It appears that Lapo is content to play the high percentage pass and then hope that our guy can break a tackle or make a guy miss for the first down. sometimes it even works. Like when Harris, on the penultimate drive, caught a pass at about the 6 yard mark and turned it into a 15 yard gain for a critical, drive sustaining first down. Still, I'd like to see us run more routes and throw more passes closer to or the 10 yard+ range in second and long. 2) I still think Sam Hurl is a weak link. He looked very slow when he was running with the ball. If we had a strong MLB, we'd be a more serious, consistent threat against the best teams. A final minor beef? I'd like to have seen the Blue go to Dom Davis in garbage time when we are up by 20 points. He needs his reps and we don't need to risk Nichols when the game is won. Anyone remember 2007? When Kevin Glenn goes down in the eastern final and we have to start a quarterback in the Grey cup game who didn't have a single down under his belt? Same goes for Harris versus Flanders at that stage of a contest. Having said all that, I am – overall – extremely content feeling this afternoon as a fan of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

Sweep? Didn't we already beat them once this year, making a sweep impossible? What am I missing?

I agree, Hurl's main responsibility is stopping the run; that is his core task. He's not good enough at it. HH's to: 1) Loffler and whomever the other player was that helped rip that ball out on the big TD by Randle. 2) Whomever in the bombers' brain trust finally decided to get Flanders on the field. That was huge and overdue and we need to see more of it. He has quicks in a way that Harris does not – not taking anything away from Harris, he is amazing and arguably our most consistent, high-impact player as well as a tremendous leader, right there with Nichols and then Medlock – but Flanders brings a different dimension and he is simply too good to have on the bench. He will also eventually grow dissatisfied with that role and sign elsewhere, so that's just another reason to involve him.

Yes, it was too bad when O'Shea had to burn his only challenge on what should've been an obvious PI.

Yeah, I do wish coach would acknowledge we have a line backing problem and then make a plan to do something about it. On another positive note, the one challenge rule change means that the d-backs actually get to play football again. This is nothing short of an awesome development. Several times during the game I found myself cringing – expecting a challenge – and then realizing with something close to a flood of relief that the coaches had both already used their challenges. OK… I'll admit this was really only a flood of relief when it stopped Campbell.

Thanks for this. Always nice to re-visit the game via your odds and sods. I think Nichols is actually 14-5 as our starter. Regardless, the guy is a winner. Scrappy. No panic in hm. That little desperation-broken-play-forward-shuffle-pass-just-before-taking-a-sack play to Thorpe was just that sort of staying calm and making something outta of nothing, a first down instead of a disaster, that the winners make happen. Yeah...there were also a few home run misses tonight where Nichols missed open receivers with overthrows or threw 'em outta bounds but - that said - when he's really gotta do it, in absolute crunch-clutch time, the man is...well...clutch. Repeatedly. Been a long time since we had a QB like that. Orchestrating comebacks and last min drives and last second plays to win. Khari had his moments, esp in 01 and 02. Before him, it was really all the way back to Tom Clements in mid 80's. He was also a dude with that kind of cool command of the 2-min drill. Confidence. Smarts. Leadership. Hell, three of our four wins this year have happened on the last play of the game! Exciting football. Glad to have #15 as our QB. And #9 as our kicker.

Didn't Rick Campbell do a fair amount of this last year?

And your father was a hamster and your mother smelled of elderberries

I must admit, your retort post made me smile.

Ok, now read Tait's post game report. Precise responsibility for miscue remains foggy. What remains clear is this: Jones didn't look for the ball when evidently the ball was coming to him on an absolutely crucial play that the vast majority of head coaches would never have green-lighted in the first place. Responsibility is still, therefore, on both counts on the coach. To be more succinct: it didn't work, ergo no one is a genius, and **** has been happening too often.

I can agree that Darvin Adams was excellent. After that, though, you lose me a little bit… Medlock's punts were not "good." They were mostly pretty bad. And he threw the extremely ill-advised third down gamble pass, and he came up short on the game-winning field goal at a distance which is normally quite makable for him. Don't give me wrong, the whole offence choked away the entire fourth quarter, especially Nichols on that absolutely gawd-awful, telegraphed pic at the very moment that the best quarterbacks go to work (see exhibit A: Mike Reilley's performance 24 hours earlier). That said, if Medlock is hanging his head just a little bit this morning, I don't think that's the end of the world. The guy gets big money to be money and has been till now, but that isn't a reason to treat him with kid gloves when he ain't. And last night he wannit. Also, we used Harris quite a bit; the question is more in the way we used him. Too many dinks & dunks short of the yardsticks. I mean, to your point, maybe he should've got more handoffs in the third and fourth quarter… Don't know haven't checked the stats on this… But my main thought is that the other receivers needed to see the ball more, and more down field.

Definitely true that Jones was not expecting a pass, but MOS does not get off the hook that easy; he absolutely claimed full responsibility for the decision in the post game interview on CJOB, saying he had "green-lighted" Medlock to throw that pass. And, even if he is just trying to cover for Medlock, the fact that Medlock believes he he has the authority to make that decision as well as the fact that Jones seems to be unaware of what's going on the play; both of these things ultimately fall on the coach. And while Kelly Moore was doing his best Bob Irving impersonation – ie. defending all things Bombers – by saying that "if they had made it, we'd all be calling him a genius" (which is sort of like saying I'd be devastatingly handsome if I were only better looking), the reality is that our coach was, once again, employing some very unconventional reasoning to extremely unsuccessful affect. Was cruelly reminiscent of his decision to attempt a 61 yard field goal in the same facility last year; these absolutely crucial brain farts just keep coming and, I fear, are a sign that he is ultimately not up to the job. To whit, the first special-teams gadget play was brilliant. But the decision to go back to the well a second time, particularly at that point in the game at that position in the field, is suggestive, as the realist Doug Brown observed, of the addictive gambler who gets a big win and keeps coming back until he loses it all. The first 3rd down gamble demonstrates MOS to be a very competent special teams coach. The 2nd third down to gamble demonstrates MOS to be an incompetent head coach.

Oops... sorry about the repeat.

see below

These are two of my favourite posts in some time. I shared them with my 11-year-old who agreed Dickinson does seem like a weiner and added this gem: "he seems like a guy who someone just pushed into a pool with all his clothes on."

There's no doubt that Westy is sometimes pretty annoying. And repetitive. Hey, come to think of it… The wife says the same thing about me. ? Seems a bit harsh to me, however, to say that he "has no knowledge or insight." He seems to me to be about roughly equivalent to the other dudes they have on there in those categories. Maybe that's not setting the bar too high but… ? That said, I did not hear him kvetching about the woman and her million dollars… That would be highly vexing. I just don't listen for a while when I get tired of him and the rest of the guys. All that said, I still found your post pretty amusing, so keep at 'er!

Out in Fort Frances at a cottage on an island with the fan… So only able to watch the first 3/4 – not quite even - at BP. :-) What I loved, though, and I thought it was the turning point up till that point in the game was the long TD drive back end of the third-quarter, where Nichols and the O really answered after a similarly long field goal drive by Ray and the double blue. That was big-time, my friends!

K, now ur blowing my mind!

Thx, guys. I enjoyed these...I'm a sucker for puns!

Well, while I certainly can't – and don't want to – argue against your point that Nichols had a bad game, I'm not sure how you can so definitively conclude that coaching had nothing to do with the outcome… you say "how so?" I would argue that the best coaches demonstrate their competence and earn their keep in halftime adjustments. And while I can't break down the specifics of the superiority of their halftime adjustments ( I don't pretend to know enough about pro football to do that), it seems to me that the results speak for themselves. To whit, it wasn't just BLM that was better than Nichols in the second half. Their offence dramatically improved and had all kinds of success against our defense compared to the first half. Meanwhile, our offence dramatically deteriorated or I suppose you could also say that their defence immeasurably improved against our offense. We looked scrambly and ineffective, with a lot of short to medium routes that – by evidence of Nichols happy feet – we're not open whereas they look smooth and found lots of openings in the short, medium, and long arrange areas. This, to me, suggests that their coaching staff did a better job of evaluating what we were doing and re-scheming what they were doing than our coaching staff did. I mean, clearly their players executed better than our players that… but again I just know know how you can seriously contend that this has nothing to do with coaching; the results were quite sweeping across the board.