O2L

So if we’re to paint Calgary with the same brush that we did the Bombers the other night based on them losing convincingly to an “inferior” team, after this week the Stamps and Bombers are basically the two worst teams in the league and both teams should blow up their entire front office all the way down. Two good teams were beaten by two other good teams. Parity in the league is a good thing and hopefully at the end of the year, we’re the ones hoisting the cup. Over the last many many years, Grey Cup winning teams have lost many a regular season game. Here’s to hoping that instead of going 11-7 and losing a playoff game, we go 9-9 and win a damn Grey Cup. Tonight showed us once again that any team can win on any given day. Hamilton beats us earlier in the season and we beat them a month later. Sask loses to Montreal and beats Calgary. We all see our own team’s issues, but every team has issues. I’m hard pressed to say there’s many teams I’d trade places with right now. Not that we’re in better shape than the others, just that everyone has something to be concerned about. Edmonton started and ended hot last year but had quite the losing streak in the middle. Perhaps Calgary will do the same this year.

Or is Adams running the wrong routes? Hard to say. That near pick looking like Nichols threw a fade and Adams ran a streak. Thompkins also has an easy TD if he’s not interfered with which would definitely affect Nichols’ stat line. The Dressler near-TD-drop was also a beautifully placed ball. But yeah, if those passes to Adams were Nichols’ fault and not Adams’, then not a great half.

I wouldn’t say I cheered for the Lions tonight, i just preferred they win as it benefits us, and cheered for the Esks to lose. Welcome to life as a Bomber fan! What made you choose our boys in blue? Do you use ESPN+ for the games that aren’t broadcast?

Yep and works in our favour.

Wow, Lions pull it out!

Ohhhhhh boy

Agreed. I think Buono has lost a lot of his supporters.

I've just been impressed by the discipline by the BC DBs on plays that look like guaranteed PIs they do a great job hitting the ball and not the receiver. How about Lulay just yelling mad at Buono, that was interesting...

BC's secondary has looked fantastic in the second half.

If Edm loses tonight and we win tomorrow I expect we flip.

Haha amazing. Definitely been an entertaining game. If Edmonton wins by a small margin that TD drop we just saw for BC will be all anyone talks about.

Anyone else watching this game? I'm really glad we played BC when we did and don't have another reg season game against them.

Yep and BC put up similar stats and points against Calgary as they did on us in their second game, and Toronto put up gaudy numbers with their third string QB in a comeback effort against the best D in the east. We need to grade our D against the rest of the league, and in that regard, we are in the top four for sure.

I watch nearly every game across the CFL each week and while I get just as frustrated with our defence as the rest of you, I would say the only defences that are better in the league are Calgary and Saskatchewan, and probably Ottawa although their latest showing is disconcerting. So that puts us above league average. Frankly, most of the defences in the league are being exploited like crazy and I think that has a lot to do with the modern PI and illegal contact rules. For several weeks our secondary has had some first year guys due to injury and we’ve still shown well, including sitting near the top in takeaways. I believe that we’ve been making mental errors where someone is out of position on a play. When guys are in position, they tend to win their battles (with the exception of the Edmonton season opener). The only thing that drives me nuts are how successful other teams are with five to ten yard outs on the wide side, but when you consider that that is rarely, if ever, a first read, it means we’re taking away what the QB actually wants. Hall over the last few weeks has let his front four do their jobs more often and been smarter about when to blitz and who is blitzing. Maybe just maybe we’ll see some progress. For those of you that don’t watch every game and complain when Reilly or Masoli puts up 300+ yards on us, try to remember that they do that against virtually everyone they play. It becomes very easy to complain about what we’ve got when we’re not comparing it to the rest of the league, the same way we sometimes see our guys as all stars and forget that other teams have good players too. Our defence is also very disciplined in terms of penalties, rarely being the team that hands over free first downs (with a few exceptions). That’s worth something. I still have the bitter taste of last season’s western final (and season as a whole) in my mouth, as I’m sure we all do, so that definitely creates a bias, but so far this season, this defence has been pretty decent. Let’s see if that remains true on Friday or not.

Sorry if this was mentioned elsewhere, but I’m curious, did Bowman see the field in Montreal’s loss the other day? Also a funny coincidence that in the two games that Adams hasn’t had a ton of catches this season he has thrown completions.

How about against Edmonton? 😉

So I’ve been following all the drama over the last few days in the MTL/HAM trade. Montréal has announced that Vernon Adams will be starting on Thursday, which makes sense, but everyone and their dog knows that the Als picked up Manziel to be their starter. Hell, they mortgaged their future on that fact. So, wise MBB prognosticators, I ask you: what do the Als do if Vernon Adams lights it up on Thursday? Do they keep starting him until he falters? Or is he one and done as soon as Manziel is ready no matter how well he plays? I know that none of this will likely matter since the Als will probably lose again on Thursday, but humour me. If you were Reed and Sherman, what would you do in my theoretical scenario? I kind of feel like they should’ve waited one more week to see what they had in Adams before making this move..

And Heath gave us two solid years.

Also noteworthy if Van Zyl can’t play after yesterday’s late injury, Franklin will have it even tougher than he did yesterday with our D line.

Remember when Nichols was our backup and Willy was our starter? Crazy to think about, and crazy how little we got Nichols for.

I was just thinking this. It feels like a lose-lose for the Als. If Manziel does well then he’s gone in a year and a half, so they get a couple seasons of possible competitiveness and are right back where they started. If he doesn’t do well, then they haven’t improved. Even worse, can you imagine if he gets injured? Yikes.

I’ve done every stadium but Edmonton, Hamilton, and Ottawa! Hoping to get lucky with an Ottawa/Hamilton back to back Bomber road trip if the scheduling gods help me out next year.

O’Shea spoke to the challenge in the post game interview (you can watch it on the Bombers website or in the app). He was trying to challenge illegal contact on the guy covering Dressler (which is why Dressler was so active in the conversation), he forgot that it had been removed. He said he would’ve rather taken the delay of game penalty but he was basically stuck having to challenge, so he challenged PI (Adams was the target, so presumably he was just hoping that they’d watch the review and see the IC on Dressler and call it anyway). He said he just made a mistake, plain and simple. I’m sure he knows IC is no longer challengable, but in the heat of the moment had a brain fart. He’s human.

And if the turf monster hadn’t grabbed Goosen we would’ve had another game without Nichols being sacked.

Oh yeah I forgot about the one that Nichols skipped to him, so in that case he was targeted three times last night, and all three times he was wide open.