It didn’t take long for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to find someone to blame for their 34-23 loss in the 2011 Grey Cup game.
Jamie Barresi
It seems as if only moments after Bombers GM Joe Mack came back from Vancouver and railed about his offense, he fired offensive coordinator Jamie Barresi.
To be fair, it was a move that most Bomber fans expected. After all, while the Bombers defense was, for most of the season, quite worthy of its self-imposed nickname/state-of-being “Swaggerville,” the offense should have been called “Anemia City.” It was short blood, guts and, in the end, glory.
And when the team arrived back in Winnipeg, Mack made it clear that the offense would change (sure he was cryptic, but what else could the following comments have meant?)
“And there will be probably some changes made because they have to be made to get where we need to go,” Mack said. “I’m aware of what I want to do in that regard, and hopefully we’ll be able to execute that in the off-season.
“But we will never be complacent as long as I’m here. We’re always going to be on the razor’s edge trying to get better, because if not you’re going backwards.”
I remember when Doug Brown said that a couple of years ago. It was after another off-season in which the Bombers did little or nothing, just like the most recent off-season. Now in their favor in 2011, some good young defensive players improved dramatically and Winnipeg won, what turned out to be, and extremely weak CFL East — the Montreal defense was brutal, Kevin Glenn was 8-10 and the Argos were an embarrassment to the league (even though they beat the Bombers twice).
Now I won’t criticize the firing of Barresi. Mack was NOT going to fire Paul LaPolice who turned a 4-14 team into a 10-8 team and got to the Grey Cup by beating a horrid Hamilton team (that had beaten a horrid Montreal defense in the Eastern semi) in the Eastern final. But even when Winnipeg won the Eastern final, they only put up 19 points at home. The offense was bad this year and it wasn’t bad because Buck Pierce was occasionally out of the lineup.
It was bad because the offensive line, which was eaten alive in the Grey Cup game, wasn’t very good and because the play-calling was often vomit-inducing. How do you come off a 190-yard rushing game by Chris Garrett in the Eastern final and then don’t even try to establish a running game in the Grey Cup? Anyone with a brain knew somebody was going to get fired for that — al by itself.
It will be interesting to see what Mack does this winter because, as he says himself: “We’re always going to be on the razor’s edge trying to get better.”
Bet that hurts.
Here are a couple of questions I had this week…
Browns-Bengals
1. Is the NFL fixed?
Watching the Cleveland-Cincinnati game on Sunday and the officials made a half-a-dozen questionable calls in favor of the Bengals. The game didn’t matter, except for the players’ pride and their jobs, but it still looked fishy.
I know, I get all obsessive about officiating, but goodness, gracious, it’s awful. Don’t these sports have rules? Did you watch the Grey Cup? Brutal. They can’t even get replay right.
Just sayin’.
Victoria's Secret Ad
2. Why hasn’t in-store advertising kept up with our multi-racial community?
My wife’s a mall-walker and I joined her on Sunday. Didn’t realize ‘till that moment how hard she walks and for how long. Heck of a workout.
Anyway, mall walking for more than an hour can get boring so we both started counting those big advertising pictures in department, clothing, make-up, shoe and accessory stores. There are hundreds of them in the windows of high-end mall shops and there was one aspect of them that was unmistakable.
The women in the photos are almost all Caucasian. In fact, there was one Asian model in a photo in the window of an accessory store, but every other female model was white.
We counted four African-American men and three Asian men, but there were dozens of female models and all but one of them was white.
Just an observation, but considering there were as many Asian mall-walkers as there were Caucasian mall walkers and that many of the stores’ employees are First Nation, Asian or African-American (or would Caribbean-Canadian be more appropriate?) it just seems reasonable to think that the advertising community might want to take notice.
Dustin Byfuglien
3. Why is Dustin Byfuglien a defenseman?
OK, OK, I know why. It’s because Craig Ramsay, the coach in Atlanta, decided last year that he was going to move Byfuglien from a forward position (where he helped Chicago win the 2009 Stanley Cup) back to defense because he was big, tough, skilled, fast and Ramsay wanted him on the ice 25 minutes a game. And what the hell? If it’s good enough for the guy True North wouldn’t keep on as head coach, it’s gotta be good enough for the guy they hired.
But that still doesn’t make it a good idea.
Tuesday night, Byfuglien had 12 shots on goal, the most in a single game by an NHL defenseman since Sergei Gonchar — another guy no one would call a pillar of defensive hockey — took 12 shots in a game in 2006. He also played 25 minutes and 53 seconds and, of course, Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff wants him to be on the at least 25 minutes a game.
But he was also a minus-one despite dishing out an assist and while he has five goals and 12 assists so far this season — sixth among NHL defensemen in scoring — he’s also a minus-10, the worst plus-minus in the league for the top 29 scorers among defensemen in the NHL (Anaheim’s shaky, young Cam Fowler, No. 30 in scoring, is minus-13).
Dustin Byfuglien turns over the puck too often and makes too many mistakes in the neutral and attacking zones, simply because he’s more interested in scoring than stopping the opposition from scoring and, to be fair, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For a forward.
And at 6-foot-5, 265 pounds, Dustin Byfuglien would make a GREAT forward.
