Fatty Liver

I predict this will be Romby's last game of professional football.

I predict this will be Romby's last game of professional football.

None of us said Willy sucks, which goes back to the point I made earlier about people being unable to read and communicate without making things up or assuming things they haven't even read. Very hard to discuss football when that's all people ever want to do here.
 
Reilly with the Esks last year was pretty amazing last year, much like this year.
 
Not just his stats but he continually made something out of nothign all year long and was a treat to watch. Sure they didn't want very much, but they lost 7 games by only 5 points or less and many of those games could of and some of  them, should of(if not very getting screwed over by refs) went there way.
 
That being said, Reilly is a great example, because the biggest positive he has as a quarterback, much like Willy, is the fact that he is incredibly tough. Both of them can take a tremendous beating and it's exactly more of a surprise when they take a beating and do get injured. Most other QBs or football players for that matter, if they take a beating like Reilly took in 2013/2014 and Willy took this year, you expect them to get injured, these guys though it seems to take a real freak accident to injure either of them.
 
The above is precisely why even though i ranked Willy so low on the QB rankings in the other thread I still think he is one of the biggest assets to have as a QB in the CFL. Both his college and his pro career, he has had remarkably very few injuries, which means he can have a very long career IF he can continue to improve. One of the keys to building a long term top echelon team, is having a long term top echelon QB, which I fully believe Willy is capable of being. The only problem is we did NOT foster a very good envronment for Willy to learn and improve as the year progressed, and we did NOT help him in achieving that goal this year. Rather than learn more and more as the year went on, he regressed with each and every game, and this started very early in the year, not half way through.
 
Willy had started the year off very impressively, using many quick hitters to help keep the offense in sync and set a tempo moving the offense doing the field. Eventually the offense started to struggle with this and got into a little bit of a funk and then found success throwing deep balls. Willy used this success to open up the field a bit more but rather than going back to the quick hitters, he stuck with the deep balls. At once stage he was even preaching them in interviews after games, even after a loss against Saskatchewan where overcomitting to the deep balls was pretty much the primary reason we lost, instead of saying we were a bit over ambitious and greedy on some plays, he basically said I don't regret going for it on 2nd and short, we were so close to connecting on a few of those and if they had connected it would have been a different game. Basically then he continues on and starts preeching that he just needs to get better at hitting the deep balls and the success will continue. This is the point that I really began to worry and this is the point that our offensive coordinator should of been crapping his pants too. Instead he must of been partially responsible for what Willy was preeching because each and every week under his tutelage Willy progressively got worse and worse and worse and worse at the quick hitters to the point where he would rarely even attempt to do them anymore. When he did attempt them, the play designed usually loooked like the receiver would of been able to make a huge gain, BUT the throw was usually that half second to full second late and allowed the defense to recover and limit the gain.
 
This is also where bringing in Romby Bryant started a huge decline in our offense, with him vs JFG, they thought they had a veteran speed demon and would be able to attack defenses in the back frequently. Instead the opposite happened, Bryant running wrong routes or Willy misjudging Bryants angle with him being a new/unfamiliar receiver. This meant trouble because Bryant wasn't just brought in to be a statue, he was brought in to be one of our big play receivers, and both O'Shea and Bellefool were doing to try their best to make sure Bryant worked out. Our offense actually got worse and worse the more Bryant played and the less JFG played. In the end the only thing this helped was ensure Willy would start staring down Bryant trying to get a grasp of what he's going to do, usually guessing wrong and losing more and more confidence in himself and the offense. As the confidence went down the quicker hitters again just get worse and worse the pocket awareness goes out the window and the QB starts moving randomly around in the pocket rather than gliding up or down the pocket to find better thowing angles. Also, I believe the 5-1 start was probably the worst thing that could of happened to us this year, along with the comebacks(some of which were more fluke than anything) that contributed to Willy getting an overblown degree of self confidence and not being able to think as clearly as when the season first started. Which along with Bellefool's messed up offensive mind, led to Willy throw more and more and more deepballs rather than concentrating on driving the ball down the field keepiing a rhythm and keeping the offense going. That might have been a reasonable or plausible strategy if we had any remote resemblence of a half decent run game to give our QB more time to throw. But, as well know Grigsby wasn't scaring anybody into putting any sort of extra coverage on him.
 
This over blown degree of self confidence could have and would have been held in check better, if he didn't such an extremely long leash. This leash would have been understandable if he had been an all star calibre QB for a couple years or if he wasn't having more difficulty with each progressing game. Sure he has good chance of becoming our long term starting QB, but not if we don't coach him properly or help him realize when he's banging his head against a brick wall and making things worse instead of better. Again, the problem with that 5-1 start along with his very good stats, were it put him into a trap of giving him such a long leash where at began to not matter how badly he played if he did anything remotely positive in any game, he would not have to worry about any QB taking some of his playing time. The point of having some or any of his playign time taking away isn't to put pressure on him or to make him worry about his job, it's to help acclimate him to the offense at a slower more realistic pace and give him the opportunity to see what the offense can or should look like from a different perspective.
 
We know the offensive line is NOT top tier or top echoelon, or even average for the matter, however they were good enough to allow Willy to put up hug enumbers early in the year when he was throwing quick hitters and not over thinking what he was doing, and with him doing this even with a crappy o-line and horrible running back, both our passing attack and running game was functioning. The more Willy was encouraged to try unreliable and risky throws, the more his play suffered, the more he began to overthink things, the more he began to panick in the pocket and the more of a beaten he took. End result was more and more interceptions, punts and frustration on our offense as a whole. This is in LARGE part on the offensive coordinator and the QB coach by not keeping hin in check, and not calling a better game, Bellefool was calling a game assuming Romby Bryant is Duron Carter or DeSean Jackson back there, which is sheer idiocy.
 
With all that said even with the bad habits he picked up from our terrible offensive coordinator, who also happened to do an amazing job of making Anthony Calvillo look like crap, Willy still overalll this year has performed admirably well. He has still kept his percentage up for most of the year and kept a relatively close TD to interception ratio and likely would of had pretty freaking amazing stats as a first year first string starting QB. I"m hoping it's not too late and he's not goign to commit to learning too much of what he's learned in the last two thirds of this year and turn these things into bad habits, if he does or if Bellefool remains our OC next year, he may end up cutting Willy's career a lot shorter than it would have been or should be. Currently Willy has hit a curve and has fallen off of it, I got no problem with letting him play, as I said already, he's pretty durable QB and even with the beating he may take, he'll likely survive. However despite what people are saying, he won't learn anythign positive from it under the tutelage of Bellefool, he may have success because of the situation and Calgary not giving a crap, but nothing much will be gained of it. Currently he looks to have fallen so far off the curve that he's both emotionally, physically and mentally drained, his release is about a quarter the speed it was when he started the year and there is a very high probability that he will take a beating that he could avoid if he was in a state that allowed him to better think and react on his feet and a very high probability that the game will be extremely boring. Marve on the other hand will make crap up as he goes along, won't give a crap what garbage Bellefool has taught him and will give us a very entertaining game. Given that the game is essentially meaningless and none of our QBs willl learn a thing from playing in it, I want Marve to play because I want to at least be entertained with some entertaining football on the last Bomber game of the year.

Is he on anyone's neg list!?

Since the sixties? How old is your avatar?

EDIT: I knew that one was going to get me in trouble! 

That's the thing, it's a test for Mike O'Shea to show he can make an intelligent decision and if Willy needs to be replaced, JUST DO IT!!!

I want to see what philpott can do, maybe put him in after marve sees some action.
 
I think he's on the cusp.

I'm going to give O'Shea the benefit of the doubt, and guess that WIlly will get just under a half to play, and show something better than Saturday.  Hopefully they let Marve finish up after that.  If Willy plays the whole game, that's going to tell us more about O'Shea and his unwillingness to deviate from the plan!

The drought continues.  This year started with a mirrage of an oasis....which when we got closer, was a hole filled with poisonous snakes.

I don't buy the notion that Willy is playing with crap talent on offence any longer.  A lot of the blame that has been thrown on the receivers recently is misdirected and is partially on Willy.  Before the game Willy was talking about spreading the ball around making use of all the weapons but he did nothing of the kind and yet last week with the two backup QBs playing miraculously this was accomplished.  And as for Kelly being too slow, Kohlert caught 8 balls last week and he makes Kelly look like the roadrunner.

No logic to that and waaaay too much of a gamble in the precarious situation the Bombers find themselves in after this season.  Best to get out of the blocks early in the off-season and grab the best fishes in the CFL pond.

You mised mistake #5.  Sitting Sears for 5 games when he was healthy.

The only thing Willy did well tonight, was raise more food for charity! Purolator was probably yelling for him to throw the damn ball away too!

It's not just O'Shea; player recruiting and the coordinators need to be better next season. Was surprised to be reminded Benevides is in his third season as an HC - there were plenty of times when I thought for sure he was gonna get axed. Here some are saying chop O'Shea by Labour Day??!! Obviously if the team goes winless the first half of next season then sure (as that would basically be a seasons worth of straight losses). I don't believe that will happen. The management genuinely seems to care and I think they'll use the offseason to think real hard about the good and the bad this year.

TSN had a stat. that in 61 out of 66 games this year the team with the most yards rushing has won the game.  Seems contrary to Etch's theory that the pass is the primary determinant of wins in the CFL.

Hell with Marve, I want to see what Philpot has to offer. 

Too bad Brohm got injured because I think Willy could learn a lot from watching him perform.  They're basically the same QB's with poor mobility but Brohm manages to make his reads that much quicker and gets rid of the ball even with the same weak O-line.  After watching him for a full season I suspect Willy, like many first year QB's does not see the field that well.

Too bad Brohm got injured because I think Willy could learn a lot from watching him perform.  They're basically the same QB's with poor mobility but Brohm manages to make his reads that much quicker and gets rid of the ball even with the same weak O-line.  After watching him for a full season I suspect Willy, like many first year QB's does not see the field that well.

"Not paying attention to what the stats reveal will give you a 6-12 team." Norman Einstein. 

Are you two dating now?

Just re-watched the Stamps game and have to marvel at Cornish's running ability, he is an absolute beast.  Every time he touches the ball it's a first down. Can't put a finger on what makes him so great but have to think we're watching one of the best RB's to ever play in the CFL.

I have been thinking for a long time, since maybe game two of the season that the offense was going to be the problem with the season for this team. A couple of reasons for this: 1. we have a o coordinator who has not been very successful during his time in the CFL and 2. we have Buck Pierce as a position coach and one that he is not well versed in. I also made the assumption that Pierce would likely be dealing with the QBs more than the running backs. The combination of these facts seemed to show me a few things which seem to have evolved during the season: 1. our offense regardless of what we think of the o line has become predictable with the exception of the last half of the last game, 2. our QB Willy in particular has developed happy feet and has also developed a tendency to hold the ball far too long (before you blame the o line for not giving him more time ask yourself how many times you have seen receivers standing still making a catch rather than running to a spot where the ball is being thrown and also consider how Brohm and Mavre were able to pick targets quicker than Willy even though Marve moved the pocket much better) and 3. our running game was/is next to nil (I too like Cotton but one game does not make him a good running back) and that can be related directly back to those in control of the offense. Reminds me a little of Tim Burke - great defensive mine who left the offense to others (one the same name as the incumbent) and what did that get him? 
 
With all that said I personally like Pierce as a person, not a positional coach - he does not possess the broad vision or knowledge required simply review his playing career to substantiate that comment. Secondly I don't believe our present O coordinator cannot and will not be successful in the CFL. For some reason he does not understand or if he does will not incorporate any timing routes for his receivers aka Cavillo in Montreal. And thirdly, they have to get Willie some good QB coaching - he could be our QB of the future but at the rate he is going he will not.
 
Just my thought
 

Maybe Austin has plans to add Grigsby to the passing attack as Austin is not big on running anyway.  Combined with a solid runner like Gable, Grigsby could look good in this role, this is a scheme that the Bombers should have been working towards.

Now if they can only get Edmonton to play the game in the locker room...