Saturday afternoon at Canad Inns Stadium, in front of one of the smallest crowds since Lyle Bauer took over the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, the Bombers drilled the first-place Montreal Alouettes 41-24.
With the win, the Blue Bombers put themselves in a position to finish second in the Eastern Division. In fact, with a victory in the final game of the season, against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats at Canad Inns Stadium, the Bombers will finish second and play host to the Eastern semifinal on Nov. 15.
Incredibly, TSN had no idea that next week’s games didn’t matter one iota in terms of second-place in the East. Not one clue. They nattered on and on about the importance of next week’s games. Those games might be important in the world of the crossover, but they mean nothing in terms of second place in the East. 9-9 or 8-10, it doesn’t matter. The team that wins on Nov. 8, in the game between Hamilton and Winnipeg, makes the playoffs — guaranteed.
Meanwhile, Bomber fans are an odd lot, aren’t they? They have now clearly stated that they prefer a coach riding a Harley who loses for fun, than a hard-ass, take-no-crap football coach who has re-built a team right before their eyes. They clearly prefer a lovable loser to a guy who refuses to genuflect at the altar of the daily newspaper and even more assertively, refuses to suck up to people who know absolutely nothing about football.
Having said that, the 21,000 who attended Saturday’s game were young, smart, generally un-drunk fans who wanted to watch an improving football team win. They were into the game and didn’t care that the coach doesn’t like telephone calls from faceless, nameless, gutless whiners. They didn’t care that the coach tells the media how it’s going to be rather than vice-versa.
I love this.
The local bird-cage liners, dead trees that devote three-to-six pages almost daily to Blue Bomber coverage, have told their readers that the coach is a jerk and the team is lousy and some of their favourite players have been run-off and therefore people will (read: should) stop going to the games. Our local media is its own self-fullfilling prophecy. It has no sense of humour and believes it should run the local sports teams and when those teams don’t do as they’re told, they should be punished. All the while, they’ll continue to run three-to-six pages of coverage a day for reasons nobody quite understands.
However, to lay blame fairly, the real problem appears to be the growing feeling that the Bombers marketing department doesn’t have a Plan B. If all the free media coverage doesn’t sell tickets for them, they have no plan to sell tickets. If the media isn’t doing the job, the Bombers appear to have nowhere to turn.
Which creates an amazing dynamic for a football team that has won four of its last five, beaten a team that came in 13-2 (albeit without its starting quarterback), almost completely rebuilt itself on the fly and has become a force in the CFL’s Eastern Division.
The Bombers have a good football team. On Saturday, that team probably played well-enough to beat an Alouettes team WITH Anthony Calvillo. And yet crowds keep dwindling because the Bombers themselves don’t know how to sell the positive side of a football team that has had a major falling out with the local media.
Sadly, the world is changing. As the Free Press dumps its Sunday broadsheet and Sunday home delivery and the Sun’s circulation continues to fall, free “advertising” is going the way of the doh-doh. “Publicity” as we know it is changing and sports teams, no matter how popular they are with the media, will eventually have to learn how to actually sell their products.
Granted, the Bombers aren’t there yet and neither is Winnipeg, but the inevitable is coming. Saturday’s tiny, but nonetheless, intelligent crowd, was an example of that.