GCn20

I think anyone could see that the Riders will go as far as Harris can take them. He is a good QB WHEN HEALTHY....and there is the rub. The guy is 40 years old and the chances of him finishing this season have got to be pretty low. He has been a faberge egg over the past several years and that was always going to be the Riders achilles heel this season. I really honestly believe that Harris will not last the season, and I'm not cheering for a QB injury to anyone, but that is the likely reality. Are they kind of smoke and mirrors? Yea....they aren't as impressive as their record but their record is all that matters in the end. I just don't believe for one second that they can keep it up down the stretch. Like you, I would be shocked if they were the hot hand by seasons end. I don't think SSK is particularly well built to hand us our asses. However, I don't think we are particularly well built to hand them theres either. I expect a couple of close games with the football gods likely deciding both of them.

Bridges ultimate demise is no surprise after the abomination he called coverage vs. Calgary. He was Calgary's X factor in their victories. Pressure Vernon Adams check, move him out of the pocket check, cover the receivers downfied because all Vernon Adams knows is to launch it as far as he can throw when he is pressured....nope Bridges not within 20 yards of the receiver he was running with moments ago because he stopped to see what was happening. He broke the cardinal rule of DBing several times, stuff you learn in Pop Warner, run with your receiver until the whistle blows. You can look back as a DB but the feet gotta keep moving.

Strev is not a gunslinger QB. Our gameplan needs to reflect that. He has to take his deep shots but it's got to be shots that only his receiver has a shot at. We were winning. Thats the bottom line in sports. Whatever the coaches were doing wrong they were doing enough right to make up for it. Now..not so much.

Who is this tremendous talent at wr, dt, and lber? Ayers maybe has the potential...Who do you got at dt and wr? I suppose Wilson but that's about it. You may like Fox and Garbutt but to call them tremendous talent is a pretty big reach. We are letting tremendous talent go out the door tho.

When you are losing the coach and GM deserve to be on the hot seat. Brown putting him on it isn't a dislike of MOS, that's his job. Wanna get off the hot seat...win.

I acknowledge that this is happening as well. No doubt about out it. You look at who won us the game last night and it was young guys like Vaval that did it.

No...what came to pass is that our skill level was vastly reduced. Roster management is an issue that was minor when our GM and scouts doing their job. Now it is a bigger issue because we don't have the talent to overcome these coaching quirks

The coaches can use our roster better for sure. Never said otherwise. What I don't agree with is this notion that we are sitting all stars in favor of scrubs. That's fantasy-land. Our depth chart is not good and that is on the GM. Our usage of the roster is on MOS for sure, would we be a first place team if he did better? Nope....the talent is not there. Therefore, it's not blame shifting at all, it's correctly identifying what our true problem is....lack of talent. There isn't a bunch of roster moves that gets us back to the beast of the West. That's the sad reality of the situation. Walters needs to get to work. If we had allstars waiting on the bench you would have a point but we don't, they all left because Walters shat the bed in the offseason.

Yep not a great look at all. Our GM needs to get to work. That's fair. I just don't see the talent we are leaving off the field, or at least not enough of it to make a difference and change us into a Grey Cup team. We are nowhere near that right now no matter who we dress and where. That's on the GM and I agree is being made worse by the coaches. My argument that dissing coaches when we are winning is not right and I stand by that. When it starts creating losses you damn skippy I want better coaching and GMing. The only metric I judge a Coach or GM on is wins and losses because everyone has their formula that we may not understand to get the wins. However, when losses pile up because of your methods, you need to answer that bell. Right now I think Walters is our biggest problem, but if Miller came down from on high and decided to clean house tomorrow I'm OK with that as long as it rebounds our season.

Hindsight is always 20/20. I have no issue with the criticism of a roster after the fact. I don't have an issue with those criticizing JT or others. What I have a problem with is people criticizing depth charts and rosters before the actual game is played or favoring players who have not demonstrated in any way that they would be an improvement over the status quo. My issue is that our front 7 is the worst in the league by a country mile really and we can grouse about who should be playing and how often but it won't really move the needle much. We need an influx of talent, our roster as a whole on the front 7 is not good enough. Our GM needs to step up in a big way right now.

Offence is a mess. I don't have much hope with our current roster. Defence can be moderately fixed through better coaching but an influx of talent is needed there as well. Bridges to the PR should have been done 3 games ago.

Adams may be playing the best out of a well below average DL interior for sure. That's not the point I am trying to make. Watching Sayles make a dud like Fox look good is what our DL should look like if we were properly recruiting talent around here. Look, Garbutt, Fox, Adams etc may be better than Thomas or Lawson, not arguing that, but they are all substandard. If we are going to flip ratio to get an IMP snaps the Bombers need to bring some guys in that actually move the needle when they get in. This is no longer a problem of who the best is on our roster, it's a problem of none of our guys measuring up. That is a far bigger problem and one that the GM needs to correct.

Hallelujah. Guy has been terrible.

The CFLPA has air quality guidelines that dictate the matter. It's not up to the teams.

How sad that Osh doesn't have the keen eye for talent that you have. Just imagine a DL of Garbutt, Fox, Adams, and Person....we would be the envy of the league.

No they haven't. They have done zero there as well. At best these guys are lower end IMPs.

Adams has been below average at best and the stats are accurate. He is averaging just short of 30 snaps a game.

I expect that Person will get more reps as well. As a rookie he played himself into the lineup quite quickly I think. If you are suggesting that we didn't move him in quick enough as a rookie I disagree.

I agree with some of that. Our guys in house are not going to fix anything. Adams has had more reps than JT and done absolutely zero with them. Scrap heaping and air lifting isn't my favorite way to build a team because it shows your offseason was a bust, but a GM needs to do this once in a while when it is apparent that it needs to happen. So far bupkus. Garbutt, Fox, and now Adams had ample time to show their worth. They failed to do so. Are there some guys we ripen on the vine too long....maybe, but that is not the problem with our DL right now. Guys need to grab the job away through their play and we haven't seen that at any position for a couple of years now. Losing jobs through injury? No one has made a case for that.

Two roster moves to fix one is not using your roster to its maximum potential. Winner winner chicken dinner. The problem lies with us settling on mediocrity for far too long.

Exactly right. We can criticize our NAT guys, but we sure don't have the IMPs to make a noticeable difference if we were to change that up. Our DL is a mess and it doesn't predicate at all on how many reps Jake Thomas is getting. That is a symptom of the problem not the cause. Vaughters has underperformed his contract as well. RIght now we are not getting reliable play from anyone on our DL and a good portion of our secondary. Exactly. The problem isn't that we are sitting massively talented players and refusing to play them. The problem is we lack talent across the board on the DL.

Exactly right. If someone wants to criticize moves made where we lost real impact players like Stove, or Lawler I can't argue but grousing about how Garbutt and Fox moved on because they were treated unfairly is a real head shaker to me. We haven't brought in anyone worth a snot since Stove and Casey. The interior of our DL is a giant mess because we haven't recruited a lick of talent there in 4 years. We haven't recruited anyone worth a snot since Casey.

I agree that we ripen prospects on the vine way too much, however, when they do get their turn very few have seized it. It's easy to criticize our lack of transition from old to young, because that is indeed what is happening, the problem I have is no one has stepped in when opportunity presents itself through injuries. We grouse about player A or player B being past their prime or just not good enough and then the next guy up comes on and shits the bed. The first part is poor coaching but the second part is poor GMing. I mean you listed two examples of guys we moved on from (Garbutt/Fox) who both sucked when they played. The fact that they are better than who replaced them on the roster speaks volumes about the job our recruiters and GM are doing. How in blue blazes does anyone expect MOS to get rid of vets when we consistently recruit crap on our DL.

Almost definitely. He was a scrap heap pickup prior to the injury, it is hard to imagine anyone giving him a serious look next year.

You keep saying that...name one IMPACT player that left here for any other reason than we wouldn't pay them, they went to the NFL, or our geography wasn't to their liking. Sure there are some guys that exited off the fringes of our roster for more playing time and not a single one of those guys would make an impact for us whether they stayed or not, We've lost an all star team of talent to $$$$$ and that lands squarely on KW's shoulders. I'm quite happy with the job they've done. 2 Grey Cups, and 5 straight trips to the big game. I am, however, not impressed with the job either man is currently doing.