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The shorts issue is arguably the stupidest head coach related issue of all time. I loved his answer to it. Keep them just to spite the complainers is exactly what I would do.
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No needs to talk down to someone because of their "inferior post count". I don't post that often, but I'm on here almost day and consider myself a pretty knowledgeable fan. Many others are in the same
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I'm with you on this, except I always get my hopes up too high. Wouldn't have it any other way.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/football/bombers/snappy-hed-373580051.html#st_refDomain=t.co&st_refQuery=/QmAbKLelGf
He’s got a football team counting on him.
And he’s got a city of frustrated football fans counting on him.
But it wasn’t until our discussion this week turned to the wife and three children that are also counting on him that it became clear just how much weight Mike O’Shea feels pressing down upon him right now as he heads into what is a make-or-break season for the beleaguered Winnipeg Football Club.
Make no mistake — one of two things is going to happen in 2016: either the Blue Bombers are going to make the playoffs for the first time since 2011, or the head coach — and probably a few others in the Bombers front office — are going to be looking for a new job.
And it’s that latter prospect, and what it would do to his young family, that this week brought tears to the eyes of one of the most feared linebackers the Canadian game has ever known.
Yes, you read that right: Mike O’Shea cries. And yes, it was uncomfortable to watch — and not just because it was happening in a crowded restaurant.
"I’m getting emotional now and I’ll tell you why," the Bombers head coach said over lunch this week. "I’ve got a great family. They really do a good job in making their dad feel comfortable at work…
"They’re doing more than holding up their end."
The question heading into this season is whether O’Shea can now hold up his end of a family bargain that saw his wife, Richere, and the couple’s three children — Michael, 16, Ailish, 13 and Aisling, 10 — leave the only home they ever knew in southern Ontario in 2014 to follow O’Shea to Winnipeg so he could fulfill his dream of being a pro football head coach.
It was a bold move for a young family that O’Shea had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect from the itinerant pro football lifestyle. Indeed, O’Shea says he played his entire 16-year CFL career with just two teams in Toronto and Hamilton — turning down, he says, more lucrative offers to play in Western Canada — precisely so he wouldn’t have to uproot his family.
So moving to Winnipeg was a big thing for the entire O’Shea family. And now that they’ve finally settled in — his son is on high school football and hockey teams, his daughters are competitive gymnasts, the family spent the entire winter here, save for a week-long Bombers cruise — the idea that they’d have to move again this year because O’Shea’s head coaching dream turned into a nightmare weighs on the man of the house.
Don’t misunderstand — he says he is at peace with the fact 2016 is the final year of his three-year contract with the Bombers and there is going to be no contract extension on offer until there are first some winning results on display.
Head coaches who go 12-24 in their first two seasons don’t get contract extensions and O’Shea accepts that.
What troubles him more, however, is that he cannot insulate his family from the uncertainty. "I’ve just realized recently that my kids really do follow all that stuff (on social media)," said O’Shea. "So it’d be naive for me to think they don’t know about the contract or lack thereof. All of that stuff — they understand...
"And that comes as bit of a shock to me — that they know more maybe than I want them to."
Now make no mistake: O’Shea is not unique. Almost every head coach in pro sports also has a team at home that is counting on him.
And O’Shea is not complaining, either. I dragged this stuff about his family out of him because it interests me to know how a guy in the spotlight copes with the vagaries of chronic job insecurity when those lights are turned off and the house is quiet and it’s just you alone in the dark with your thoughts.
The answer, it seems, is you spend a lot more time worrying about how it will affect those around you than you do about how it affect yourself.
The good news for O’Shea is that while there is no room for error in 2016, he will have by far the best team he’s had in Winnipeg with which to work.
Off-season free agent signings in Weston Dressler and Ryan Smith will make the receiving corps spectacularly better. A defensive line rid of underperformers and bolstered by some other free agent acquisitions, including Canadian Keith Shologan, will be better. The signing of all-star kicker Justin Medlock gives some much needed consistency to special teams. The Canadian content overall will be deeper, including a ratio changer at running back in Winnipegger Andrew Harris.
And, most important, with a proven backup QB in Matt Nichols behind a proven starting QB in Drew Willy, the Bombers are deeper at quarterback this year than they’ve been in a decade.
So the team around him has changed. But has O’Shea?
He admits to making mistakes in his first two years as Bombers boss, but they’re mostly detail stuff rather than big-picture. And so, for instance, O’Shea takes full blame for that blocked field goal in 2014 that cost the Bombers a win against Saskatchewan — poor scheme, he says — but he doesn’t see much in his general approach that needs to change.
He rejects a popular criticism that he should hold individual players more accountable — either on the sideline or before the microphone — and he says it’s simply not true he worries too much about players liking him and not enough about them fearing him.
"I can’t deny I still want to be one of the guys," says O’Shea, "but that doesn’t mean I want them to be my buddies... I’d love to still be playing…
"But for 16 years, I watched what works and doesn’t work with a coach. And what doesn’t work is a lack of authenticity. I’m just not that guy who’s going to publicly display some player getting in (trouble)...I’m not going to put on a show."
And so while the team around him in 2016 will look different, don’t expect O’Shea to look different. And that includes the shorts he wears on the sidelines during games — which have filled both my mailbox and the Bombers mailbox with emails of complaint from fans.
The shorts are comfortable, he says. And they’re practical, he says. But as we’re walking out towards the parking lot, he also admits the shorts are here to stay for another reason. "If I stopped wearing them now," he tells me, "people would think it was because they complained."
You want to see stubborn? Try those shorts on for size. And then text me a picture on your Blackberry, something O’Shea also clings to.
"This phone works fine," he says. "What do I need an iPhone for?"
The man is who he is, in other words. And for all the worry about his family and his team and the upcoming season and what a very uncertain future holds, he says that, yes, he is willing to die on that hill.
"I would just die quicker," he says, "if I pretended to be someone I’m not."
paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca