I love reading the comments lists at both winnipegfreepress.com and winnipegsun.com. Everybody has an answer for what ails the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, but few want to admit that this re-building team (yes, rebuilding again) isn’t quite good enough yet.
Saturday night the Bombers lost 29-22 in Hamilton. The CFL, being what it is, the Bombers will likely beat Hamilton when the teams return to play in Winnipeg this Friday night (The Bombers and Ti-Cats play four times in the first seven weeks. If that’s not the worst schedule in the history of professional sports, I’d like to see what is.).
Seems folks really want to blame kicker Alexis Serna for the loss, but to his credit, head coach Paul LaPolice took the blame. The team’s offence isn’t much, but it did get the ball to the Hamilton three and did have a chance in the dying seconds to tie the game at 29 thanks to Hamilton coach Marcel Bellefeuille’s boneheaded decision to go for two instead of kicking the extra point with an almost eternal seven minutes left to play.
That’s what I still don’t understand about CFL coaches. They all seem to panic (with perhaps the exception of Montreal’s Marc Tretsman or Calgary’s John Hufnagel) in the final eight or nine minutes, but the final eight or nine minutes can take hours of real time to play. The final three minutes, in which the clock stops after EVERY play, probably allows for six possession changes.
Oh well, Bellefeuille dodged a bullet and the Bombers gassed it on the Hamilton three-yard-line and now Winnipeg and Hamilton are both 2-4 and nobody should be surprised. After all, Winnipeg knew all week — hell, they talked about it all week — that they had to shut down Arland Bruce III and yet he still caught 11 passes for 197 yards and a touchdown. C’mon people.
Of course, that’s the price you pay when you re-build a franchise every year or so. It takes time to build a winner and the Bombers often find themselves using the first eight to 10 weeks of a season to get their personnel arranged and their act in gear.
The concern this year is a more simple one, however. It’s the lousy schedule. After playing the stinky Ti-Cats this Friday night, they go to Montreal and Regina, get the Roughriders back in Winnipeg on Sept. 12, go to Toronto on the 19th and then get Montreal — on a short week — back in Winnipeg on Sept. 24. It’s conceivable this Bomber team could head into October at 3-9 and that wouldn’t be good.
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