TBURGESS

Who do you think has the inside track at safety then?

Is our secondary really that good? Adams is a shutdown corner and Randle was a shutdown corner before his injury, so assuming he's OK that's 2 very high level players. Johnson is loved by some around here but I don't put him in the top level category. We don't know yet if Randle will be a corner this year or if we need to keep a NI on the field which basically means Bucknor who isn't great by any stretch of the imagination. We don't know who the safety will be, but it looks like Macho Harris has the inside track and he's never going to even be average. We have a free DB spot that Washington played for most of last year... Randle or Adams means finding a new CB or Bucknor gets to play. A newbie may be anywhere from terrible to great.

Don't make statements that I didn't make then add my name to them, then see if I'll complain then say 'just joking' then call it satire. That's douch-bagery. Just saying...

Don't stick my name on your jokes and we'll get along better.

Nope. I didn't say that and it's not accurate.

The first half of our season is way tougher than the second half. I could easily see O'Shea getting fired mid season and PLAP taking over. He'd look better based on the schedule without making many changes.

Excellent read! Thanks for posting it. Any idea who wrote it?

Folks around here don't like his opinion, but Brown's not wrong. New systems and players take time to gel, protecting the QB is job #1 and we have a very tough start to the season. Most of the goodwill the Bombers had has been used up over the last 4 years out of the playoffs so they won't get much support if they can't put some W's on the board early on.

Last time we hired a HC with good experience (IE Winning) was Richie back in '99 worked out pretty well IIRC. I can't remember the last time we hired an experienced GM, but Walters, Mack, Bauer and Reinbold certainly weren't so it's been a long time.

Mike has an opinion that he refuses to share, yet he calls me out on my opinion. Like most folks around here, I watched the games and formed my opinions based on what I saw. I didn't see a (m)any big plays by Waggoner. In fact he was pretty much invisible most of the time. I looked up his stats to see if anything stood out to change my opinion. Nothing did. 18 Games, 7 tackles. Nothing to see there. I stated my opinion in my very first post with Waggoner's name in it in this thread... "First Round Misses: Maybe Waggoner, but that's still TBD.". Strong opinion? Nope. Solid special teams player? Based on what? Lining up in a position that isn't a gunner? Simply being on the field? Your own observations that don't match mine? FUUUUUCK is right.

As you know Justin Medlock isn't supposed to make tackles, so what's the point your trying to make? I did read your post. I'm not backpedaling. I didn't say you shared an opinion on him. I asked how you got your opinion. If you're not going to even bother to read my posts then what's the point of replying to them?

I disagree with calling him a Strong Special Team player. How on earth do you call that a strong opinion? It's not like I called him garbage or said he wasn't doing his job or even said that he was a bad 2nd overall pick. Those would strong opinions. BTW: How did you base your opinion on him?

That's a true statement, how do you know it applies to Waggoner?

Actually it is what I said and what I meant. The number of tackles on special teams means something whether anyone wants to admit it or not. Waggoner showed up about half a dozen to a dozen times on the TSN game feeds last year and most of those were his tackles. I was wondering where he was for much of the season. You can infer his assignment from where he lines up but unless you have access to the wide angle 'tape', can follow Waggoner down the field on every play, and cross reference that to his assignment, you have little to no idea if he's playing well or badly or if he's doing what they expect of him. I doubt anyone on these forums has done that, so how do you form an opinion of his play? His only stat is 7 tackles or about 1 tackle a month. That's all we have IMO.

I never said or implied that every guy on special teams coverage is assigned the same job. I never said or implied that tackle stats are the one and only way to determine worth. Both are bogus arguments. Coaches give players jobs they can handle. In Hurls case, that's to simply fill a hole. In Waggoners case it's a 'position that isn't primarily responsible for tackling the ball carrier' (Your words, not mine). That's the connection I was trying to make, but was lost in translation.

Recap: The original poster called him a 'Solid Special Teamer'. I disagreed with that statement and provided tackle stats to back up my opinion. I was told that the stats were wrong on the CFL site (Which is possible) and that Waggoner had played every game. That made Waggoners stats even worse IMO. You jumped in and said his job wasn't to make tackles, but to take up the man opposite him, which I called the Hurl defence. That's not going in circles complaining. I never called him total garbage. I simply said that he wasn't a 'Solid Special Teamer'. Way to overreach. The whole argument boils down to the word "Solid". Folks around here think it means "Average". I think it means more.

The Hurl defense. He's filling a hole, he's not supposed to make tackles, but he's really good even tho the stats don't show it.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I don't think he's a bust or a star. If he played all 18 games and only had 7 SP tackles, then he's not a solid special teamer. It's that simple.

That would be worse for him because he'd have played 11 games without a single stat.

He played in 7 games and got a single tackle. Pretty low bar for a 'solid special teamer' IMO. Revised: Special teams tackles are in a separate column and are not added up. Looks like he got 6 special teams tackles and 1 playing on defence.

Joe Mack - 2010-13 2010 - Watson (9th), Smith(28th), Woodson(29th), Greaves(45th) 2011 - Muamba(1st), Etienne(4th), Dunn(17th), Swiston(24th), Volny(32), Mahoney(31) 2012 - Pencer(3rd), Poblah(4th(pick we used to get him)), Aprille(16th), Bilukidi(21), Stephan(23rd), Thomas(29th) 2013 - Mulumba(2nd), Robertson(11), Fitzgerald(20th), DiCroce(29th), Alli(46th), Pavopoulos(54) Hits: Watson, Greaves, Muamba, Thomas. First Round Misses: Etienne, Pencer, Poblah, Mulumba Kyle Walters - 2013-Present 2014 - Goossen(2nd), Briggs(17), Jones(29), Everett(47), Eisho(56) 2015 - Chungh(2nd), Richards(11), Morgan(15), Normand(33), Lattanzio(38), Warden(46) 2016 - Waggoner(2nd (pick we used to get him)) Hits: Goossen, Chungh First Round Misses: Maybe Waggoner, but that's still TBD

I don't measure his success via his late round drafts. They're mostly shots in the dark, if they stick it's just as good a chance that we got lucky rather than we made great choices. Quite frankly, I don't know enough to have an informed opinion on who to pick in the later rounds anyway. I don't like Walters second round picks though. IMO there were better players available, especially in 2015 where we had 2 2nd rounders. We chose Richards over Waud and Morgan over Durant.

I'll take Mack's scouting over Walters and it's not even close. I'll take Walters work in FA over Mack's and it's not even close either. Every year that Walters has been here, he's signed 7 or more FA's. Some are top tier. Some aren't, but all have proven that they at least belong in the CFL. His scouting and his drafting (Except for the first round) have been poor to say the least. He is certainly part of the problem. Lots of folks thought we were a QB away from being a good team before O'Shea. Willy is the best we've had in years and we still can't make the playoffs. Willy being hurt shifted the view to needing a good backup QB. Nichols is the best we've had in years, but that still didn't result in many wins. Blame the OC? Sure, but the HC who hired him and kept him on needs to take his share of that blame too. It's likely that the good assistant coaches had better choices than tying themselves to a rookie HC, with tons less experience than they had, who had to turn around a bad football club. The coaching graveyard scenario is far less likely IMO as there've been tons of teams who fired their HC's more often than we have and they still manage to hire new HC's, most with way more experience than O'Shea. Last off season I was saying make the playoffs or get fired because year 2 is the make it or break season 90+% of the time. This off season lots of folks are saying this year is O'Shea's make or break season. Personally, I'm worried that O'Shea won't make it past mid-season because of the way our schedule looks and replacing coaches during the season almost never works.

Dave Richie made the playoffs and won a playoff game in his second year. Even in 1999. his first year, he won 4 of his last 7 games which gave us hope of better things to come. (He also won back to back games (For Mr Dee)). Sure O'Shea inherited a poor team, but he had better talent than his predecessor right off the bat. He had a real QB (Willy), which is the #1 player you need to be successful, a top receiver (Moore) and a shutdown CB (Randle) that Burke would have loved to have, plus we added several other FA's. He surprised some teams in the first half of the season then won a couple of games in the second half. In year 2, we added another couple of top FA's in Bryant and Picard which was supposed to fix the O line and 5 other FA's. We got Westerman, an all star DE and Adams at CB. He got 3 of our 5 wins in the first 6 weeks then a couple more later in the season. Quite frankly, we should have done better with the level of talent we had on the field. I don't think that our talent level is anywhere near as bad as our record shows and O'Shea has been give the tools he needed to do better than our record. His choices of coordinators has been brutal. Thinking that Etch or Bellifool were viable in his first year was bad enough, keeping Bellifool for his second year shows incompetence IMO.

Of course you can say he's a bad coach when he loses twice as many games as he wins. What other criteria would you use for a bad coach?