Rich

I know there are a few people that use the chat room during Jets games so I'm posting this notice in here. The site’s hosting company had a bad outage yesterday that sent a whole bunch of their websites down (some of you might have noticed that the board was down for 10 – 20 minutes yesterday afternoon). I suspect they had a power outage or something and all of their servers crashed badly. There are some funny logs on the website that seem to correspond with that time frame, and software support has said that those events are the likely reason the chat room isn't working, and some things need to be cleaned up. I do have a support ticket in right now with the hosting company to get this looked at and fixed. My guess is they are pretty swamped right now cleaning up the after math from their crash yesterday, so I don’t yet have a time frame on when it will get fixed and working again. I will keep you updated.

average: a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number. The average fan does not check this site multiple times a day and obsess over coaches and announcements. The obsessive or hard core fan does. Face it, those of us that obsess at sites like this are not “normal”. And there is nothing wrong with that. The Bombers know that they don’t have to try very hard to get the attention and money of the hard core fan. They do have to try harder to get to the average fan. This is why announcements in the off season are often strategically scheduled to get the Bombers name out into the news at regular times, and not necessarily the minute a signing is a done deal. It doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate the hard core fan or are trying to upset them. They are just doing what a smart organization does to remain in the conscience of a wider fan base. And yes, those people are real fans. They spend money on season tickets and merchandise just like hard core fans else (maybe not as much on a per fan basis, but they spend more money as a group). If the only fan this organization had was the hard core fan, it wouldn't be an organization for long.

Off season and people are on holidays? Often, for things like this they want all the players (GM, head coach, maybe Miller, etc) in town to do the press conference, and it sometimes takes time to coordinate those schedules.

Keep in mind that the Riders have said they are open to keeping Hall on staff, just not as DC. Normally it would be hard to imagine someone wanting to be in that situation but Hall's ties to Regina are very strong, so it is a possibility. Perhaps a remote possibility, but a possibility nonetheless. For sure anything is possible. Assuming he would stay as a defensive coach (and not special teams), can you imagine being demoted to work under a rookie DC who is basically there to run the defense of the head coach who fired you. Awkward situation to be in and would have the makings for a dysfunctional staff / toxic atmosphere. If I was the Riders administration, I wouldn't let that happen.

On the flip side of the coin, with the Saskatchewan job filled, who else is looking for a defensive coordinator? I suppose it is possible Hall decides he just doesn't want to work next year like Benevides, but there isn't much other competition right now for DC jobs. Most teams have kept theirs from last year.

If you find the NFL boring, it could be because a telecast consists mostly of players just standing around between plays (35.5%).

Shouldn't be too disappointed with getting 3 of 6 points on a road trip that includes games against LA and Anaheim. Just hurts a little more with the leads they've given up and it seems the team has regressed a bit defensively.

You are so good at being one, the board awarded you an extra *

I’m not saying I necessarily disagree with what you wrote, but it is interesting how you say that Pavelec played well last night, but he is consistently underperforming for the season and that his save percentage is an indication of that. His save percentage last night was .867, which is obviously not good enough. So then, did he really play well last night? I was curling last night and watched the game in the lounge after so wasn't paying the closest attention to it. He made some big saves after the first two power play goals, but were the goals he did let in weak? Or was the team just playing really poor defense around him? Looking strictly at the numbers over the last couple of months, Hutch is severely outplaying Pavelec in both save percentage and wins.

This poll, while a month old now, had Benevides as the choice of the forum. Hall was a distant 2nd and almost tied with Claybrooks.. Though no requirement to be "smart" to vote. http://morningbigblue.com/community/topic/6269-poll-who-should-be-the-bombers-new-dc/ Benevides 59.3% Hall 16.48% Claybrooks 15.38%

I really think there has to be only one defensive coordinator to determine the style, pace, and plays called. How would that work with co-defensive coordinators? One designs the playbook and the other calls the plays?

It was January of last year when he had season ending spine surgery. Reoccurring back injuries are not a good thing. Assuming the other D-men come back, we are okay depth wise, but sucks for Clitsome.

Go ahead and think that if you want. But the stadium is a one time cost which the government didn't have the money to pay for. Even if the stadium money would have been used somewhere else, then there is additional costs in deferred infrastructure costs that couldn't be completed because it went to the stadium instead. Maybe now they have to rip up a road and rebuild it bottom up rather then pay for maintenance on it to fix it which would have been cheaper in the long run. You can't just say the money would have been spent somewhere else so it doesn't matter. The somewhere else still need to be spent at some point.

It is still a cost to future government budgets when they need to pay the interest. So yes, the taxpayer is paying interest on infrastructure costs. It isn't money that is magically invented because it is government. In fact the Manitoba Governments credit rating has recently been down graded because of their debt and the deficits they run. So the cost of borrowing that money is going up. Just because it isn't talked about in infrastructure projects doesn't mean it isn't there. People just don't like to talk or think about government debt. Ask Detroit how that goes. The government spent an extra 200 million in debt to pay for the stadium (less when you factor in recovered money from the sale of the old stadium property) and since we are in a deficit, we will have less money available in future budgets as it will go to pay down that interest and debt had the stadium not been built. I'm not arguing that it shouldn't have been done or paid but to think there is no cost is naive.

The thing with Lawless is sometimes his speculation is based on solid inside information and sometimes it is speculation. It is tough to know which it is. I have no doubt there will be 9 teams talking to Heenan if he goes to free agency, and if the 200k to Picard is accurate, then 250k to Heenan as a starting offer is not a stretch. The question becomes if 250k is our starting offer, wonder what our limit is. What will Ottawa offer, and does Saskatchewan now have the cap room to match any of those offers. All things being equal, if the money is the same, can't see him leaving Saskatchewan since that is where he is from.

Our provincial government is running a deficit of about $500M right now I believe. So it could be argued the provincial government, who fronted the money for the stadium, took out a loan to pay for it.

Lawless agrees on the January speculation gary lawless ✔ @garylawless Kyle Walters was very careful when answering question on future of #bombers OL Glenn January. Wouldn't be surprised if team went another way

Realistically we can't fill all those holes in FA with proven starters. Free agents typically cost too much to do that and fit it under the cap. I'd be happy with 2 or 3 of those areas filled and the rest is on the scouting staff.

I know these awards usually come from the media and aren't always accurate, but he couldn't have been that bad last year.

I know what his job / purpose is. Doesn't make me hate him any less. From reading other stories of his where I was very knowledgeable on the topic and see how he twists facts to fit whatever narrative he wants, makes me distrust absolutely anything he writes. His job is to sell papers. A combination of him and Friesen make me not read the Sun. And if you hadn't of posted the article, no way I would have known about it. Pretty sure that isn't the reaction his employers want.

Some interesting tweets from Naylor....

If reporters (not that Sinclair is really a reporter) did their job and actually presented facts, then there wouldn’t be people demanding accountability and transparency. It isn’t like this is some huge shell game (well, no more so than most government deals) where people are trying to hide and blurry facts. It isn’t even that hard to do a little research to figure out what is owed on the stadium. Apparently though, anything more than having a single click to tell you everything you want to know is too difficult (actually I take that back, here is a single click that tells you what you want to know, just have to go to google and search for it….). Thanks to Wicek for this article. And as to not paying down the interest ... the original mortgage agreement as detailed below to payback 85 million is 4.5 Million over 44 years which comes out to 198 million total they will be paying back over the term of the mortgage. This probably gets increased by a number of years due to them paying very little in the first couple of years due to the additional 10M loan, but clearly this agreement means they are paying back more then just the interest. Not going to do the math, but I'm guessing this means they got a sweet deal on the interest from the province. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/football/bombers/stadium-a-sweet-deal-253686801.html And then for some comparables from the same article…. Then people still want to complain about how much tax dollars went into IGF and that the Bombers aren’t really paying anything back, let’s look at some more comparables on that front.

They are giving score updates here in the arena. But I won't spoil it for you.