Tag Archives: Kit Cartwright

Big changes on the way for Big Blue

Posted on November 9, 2008 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

It was all about the wind. And despite a week of guaranteed bluster, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ hopes for a 2008 Grey Cup appearance were blown right out of Canad Inns Stadium.

Blasting out of the north end zone at 30 kilometres per hour, accompanied by a deep grey sky and a bitter cold bite, a particularly nasty November prairie wind declared that the team with the ability to handle its gusts and subtle directional changes would get its ticket punched to the Eastern final. The Edmonton Eskimos got the job done, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers did not.

The Eskimos took full advantage of their time with the wind while Winnipeg, playing on its own frozen field, couldn’t muster enough offence with the wind at its back to win the Eastern semifinal. With 18 points in the second quarter and eight more in the third, the Eskimos put enough on the board to record a 29-21 victory. The Bombers, who had the wind in the first and fourth, put up only 14 points with the advantage. That wasn’t enough, even with a franchise-record 93-yard punt return from Jason Armstead — against the breeze.

For their efforts, the Eskimos became the CFL’s first last-place Western Conference team to win a crossover playoff and they also earned themselves a trip to Montreal for next weekend’s Eastern final.

However, while the Eskimos celebrated, the Blue Bombers sat quietly in their dressing room wondering what had happened.

“The wind was definitely a factor and if the offence can’t score with the wind at its back, there wasn’t a lot more the defence could do,” said Bombers defensive end Jerome Haywood. “You have to generate offence with the wind at your back. If you don’t, you aren’t going to win in those conditions.”

It was a bitter pill for the Bombers to swallow, especially after GM Brendan Taman had rebuilt the team at mid-season and turned a 2-8 mess into a solid 6-2 playoff contender down the stretch.

Still, on Saturday, the Bombers problems were obvious. 

The running game could have carried Winnipeg, even with the wind at its back, but head coach Doug Berry and offensive co-ordinator Kit Cartwright appeared to abandon the run just when Fred Reid and Joe Smith were gearing up.

The passing game was dreadful. Quarterback Kevin Glenn went 15-for-34 for 233 yards, a touchdown and an interception. The touchdown came early in the first quarter – a 78-yard bomb to Romby Bryant. Eliminate that one play and Glenn was 14-for-33 for 155 yards and a pick.

“We just didn’t get the job done on offence,” admitted wideout Arjei Franklin. “The guys played hard, but we didn’t take advantage of the wind. We didn’t do what we had to do.”

Sitting in his usual spot in the northeast corner of the locker room, Milt Stegall – who had five catches for 56 yards – didn’t want to think about next week, let alone next season. The 38-year-old lock for the Hall of Fame, and the man who had guaranteed a Bomber win as long as there was a sellout, got neither. At the end, he had no desire to discuss his future.

“I haven’t made a decision and I won’t make a decision for awhile,” he said. “To be honest, I haven’t even thought about it.”

This off-season, the Bomber brass has to make a lot of decisions. Stegall will likely call it a career and veteran players such as Matt Sheridan, Barrin Simpson and Jamie Stoddard have likely played their final games in Winnipeg.

In the meantime, will Glenn, who did not have a particularly good season, be in coach Berry’s plans and will Cartwright return in 2009? The Bombers offence struggled mightily and, no doubt, big changes will be made.

The Bomber team that lost on Saturday will look considerably different in 2009. However, like the outcome of Saturday’s Eastern semifinal, how it will look is written on the wind.  

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The end of Week 7 in the CFL: Changes must be made in Winnipeg, Saskatchewan no longer undefeated and a great running game means big wins.

Posted on August 9, 2008 by Scott Taylor| Comments Off

This week home teams split with visiting teams, the Saskatchewan Roughriders finally lost and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are so bad, it’s now time for a complete overhaul — at the top, not the bottom.

 

Because there are no crossover games again until Labour Day Weekend, the West continues to dominate the East, 10-2. In terms of home teams, however, it was a split this week. Hamilton and B.C. won at home, Saskatchewan lost and Winnipeg got its collective butt handed to it. The season total is now 17-11 in favour of home teams (17-7 if you remove the West’s victories in Eastern buildings).

 

Now to the trends. Hamilton is not as bad as we think, but Toronto could be as bad as we thought. At 36, Anthony Calvillo is the best quarterback in the CFL. No team will go 18-0, but you have to give that banged-up Roughriders side some credit (Five starters have broken legs for gawd’s sake!). They don’t quit and they are very well coached. And finally, with all the injuries in Regina, it’s very likely the West will not be settled until the final week of the season. 

 

Let’s look a little more closely at what we saw in Week 7…

 

1. Call it the Curse of Troy Westwood. The bad karma in Winnipeg is wafting through a stadium that just might be in the final months of its existence. From the day Doug Berry humiliated Troy Westwood in public, the Bombers’ karma has been lost. So, too, has Barry’s locker room — despite what the players like to tell the local papers. When Berry went public in order to make Westwood look like a fool and cut him at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, the gods of football looked down on Berry and said, “Enough already!.” Berry’s hand-picked successor to Westwood, young Alexis Serna is not very good, but putting him in that situation wasn’t fair either (even Westwood conceded the kid was a good kicker, but Westwood should have been kept around to punt). Sadly, Berry’s constant berating (OK, swearing at on national TV) of the kid has made him worse. Serna is now 14-for-22 (63 per cent) in field goals and is dead last in punting at 32 yards net (the first Bomber in 35 years to be last in punting). It’s sad, but on Friday night, you could see the rest of the Bombers hang their heads every time he missed a  field goal. Meanwhile, it doesn’t help that the offence is a joke. If you don’t run the football in the CFL, you can’t win and the coach’s pal, Kit Cartwright, won’t run the football. In Winnipeg, it’s time to make substantive changes or this team has no chance. Amazingly, even at 1-6, this team still has a chance if those substantive changes are made now.

 

2. Not to belabour the Winnipeg issue, but It would also help if the Bombers hired Mike McCarthy (whom the National Post reports is selling cars in Hamilton) to assist GM Brendan Taman. His expertise is more important to the future of this team than an airlift of expensive NFL cuts. Mike McCarthy is the best unemployed CFL GM in the country. Since the Ticats gassed him, they’ve been pretty lousy. 

3. You have to love what Marc Trestman, with no CFL experience, has done with the Montreal Alouettes. The Als are 4-3 and in first place in the East. However, one thing is troubling. All four of their wins have come against Winnipeg and Hamilton. The Als have beaten 2-5 Hamilton 33-10 and 40-33 and have beaten 1-6 Winnipeg 38-24 and 39-11. The Als have lost 23-19 at home to Calgary, 41-33 in Saskatchewan and 36-34 in B.C. the first-place Als are the statistical reason why four teams from the West and only two teams from the East will make the playoffs.

4. Although Anthony Calvillo has been damn good, it’s pretty tough to think of anyone other than Saskatchewan’s Wes Cates as the CFL’s most outstanding player. In seven weeks — the seven weeks in which the Roughriders have gone 6-1 with three different starting quarterbacks — Cates has carried 110 times for 652 yards and seven touchdowns (tops in the CFL). He’s caught 24 passes for 274 yards and another touchdown. And he’s second in the league in total yards from scrimmage (behind Montreal’s Avon Cobourne) with 924. He — along with Cobourne, and Calgary’s Joffrey Reynolds — is proof that if you get the ball to your No. 1 runningback on a regular basis, you will win more often than you lose.

5. Need proof that the CFL’s offences woke up after a wonky Week 1? How ’bout this? Late Friday night, the 28-27 first-half Lions advantage over Edmonton was the highest halftime score in any Lions game since 1994. This week, the CFL office in Toronto proudly released the following numbers: Heading into Week 7, touchdowns were up 19.2 per cent from the end of Week 6 in 2007; overall scoring was up 9.8 per cent (Whatever that means?)  and total penalties are down from 542 last year to 425 this year. Now, if the league can just make challenges move faster and then find a way cut out all the four-minute commercial breaks on TSN, this game would be perfect.

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After the latest mess in Toronto, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are getting closer to requiring a new head coach.

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Scott Taylor| Comments Off

After Friday night’s game at Rogers Centre in Toronto, Winnipeg Blue Bombers head coach Doug Berry told reporters: “If you’ve got any good ideas, I’ll listen to you.”

 

No he won’t.

 

People around town have been giving Doug Berry advice for weeks and while he seems to be listening to some of it, he isn’t listening to the good stuff. 

 

Oh, sure, he listened to people who have never played a down of football in their lives and yet were thrilled that Troy Westwood was publicly humiliated. And he listened to the whining masses who wanted Kevin Glenn removed and then chirped like The Joker when Ryan Dinwiddie’s lame ducks found their intended targets against Calgary’s rotten defensive secondary a week ago.

 

But on Friday, as he asked for advice following a 19-11 loss to an equally-as-inept Toronto Argos outfit (two teams needed a single on the final play of the game to put up a total of 30 points in a CFL game), he continued to forget the most important piece of advice of all: “Give Charles Roberts the damn football.”

 

There will be some who will suggest that Roberts had “another lousy game” against the Argos and will say “he is still struggling.” But let’s put our thinking caps on and look closely at what Roberts did on Friday. 

 

Charles Roberts carried the ball 11 times for 66 yards. The National Post reported that “the Argos shut down Roberts.” Held him, they did. In fact, the Post wrote: “From the opening whistle the Argos focused their attention on stopping Winnipeg’s all-star running back, Charles Roberts. Toronto’s defence — the worst against the run in the Canadian Football League coming into the game — loaded up on bodies on the line of scrimmage and gave Roberts little room to operate.”

 

Trouble is the Argos didn’t shut down Roberts at all. Doug Berry and offensive co-ordinator Kit Cartwright shut down Roberts.

 

Charlie Roberts gained 66 yards on 11 carries. That’s 6.0 yards per carry. Roberts was averaging 3.7 yards per carry heading into the game. It was his best game of the year. At 6.0 yards per carry, two carries per set of downs is 12 yards. That averages out to an unstoppable march down the field. Had the Bombers given the ball to Roberts 30 times, he’d have rushed for about 180 yards.

 

Of course, TSN’s on-line headline was “Argonauts Defence Steps Up To Stymie Blue Bombers.” The only people stymied were the head coach, the offensive co-ordinator and the quarterback.

 

Certainly Toronto’s front seven did a good job harassing Dinwiddie (much better than Calgary’s worthless three-man rush a week earlier) and the defensive secondary, as we suspected, was significantly better than that awful group the Stamps trot out every week. But to suggest the Argos shut down Roberts is to have missed the game entirely.

 

“If you know Charlie, you know he gets stronger as the game goes on,” said his former quarterback Khari Jones, as we did Mike Richards’ radio program on the FAN 960 in Calgary together the other day. “The more you give Charlie the ball, the better he gets.”

 

Giving Charlie the ball 11 times a game is NOT enough. In fact, Roberts also caught one pass for 14 yards, so in total, he picked up 80 yards on 12 touches. 12 lousy touches? No wonder the Bombers are 1-5. 

 

Dinwiddie, meanwhile, went 16-for-28 for 224 yards with one touchdown (and 85-yarder to Romby Bryant) and two interceptions. The Bombers had a grand total of just 13 first downs. On Friday night, Kevin Glenn’s replacement made last week’s win over Calgary look Troy Kopp-esque.

 

The Bombers problem is clearly coaching. The coach humiliated his veteran kicker publicly and half of his locker room lost faith. His new kicker is now 14-for-20 (70 per cent) in field goals and is the first Bomber punter in 35 years to be dead last in the league in punting average after the first six games of the season and now the rest of the room is starting to wonder about the decision to chase Westwood out of the game.

 

What could be worse, however, is that in a panic — or in an effort to find someone else to blame — the coach dumped his veteran starting quarterback and replaced him with a guy who admitted on Tom and Joe’s Show on 92-CITI-FM this week that he had trouble reading the extra man on defence in the Canadian game.

 

Oh, oh.

 

Doug Berry was a great assistant in Montreal. He could be a great assistant in Winnipeg. His 10-7-1 trip to last year’s Grey Cup notwithstanding, he has appeared to have lost his touch as a head coach. 

 

Working in Berry’s favour is the fact his Bombers now play two straight games at home against Montreal and Hamilton. If Winnipeg doesn’t win both, it will be the bye-week and it will be time to make a coaching change.    

 

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Week 4 in the CFL is over. So what did we learn?

Posted on July 21, 2008 by Scott Taylor| Comments Off

Indeed, what did we learn?

 

We learned that the West has dominated the East for two straight weeks and will continue to do so.

 

We learned that Eric Tillman might be the best general manager in the CFL.

 

We learned that when the Calgary Stampeders bring their A game, there aren’t many teams better.

 

We learned that a Montreal-Saskatchewan game in Regina is as exciting as it gets.

 

We learned that if you can run the football in the CFL, you’ll usually win — and the Western teams can run the football.

 

And we learned that when Blue Bomber tackle Doug Brown wrote, “If you aren’t getting better, you’re getting worse,” he was right.

 

Let’s take a closer look at Week 4…

 

1. Once again, the West owned the East and despite Toronto’s brilliant 35-31 come-from-behind victory over Edmonton at Rogers Centre on Sunday afternoon, the football played in Western Canada is far superior — and far more entertaining — than the football played East of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. After two weeks of crossover games, the West leads the East 7-1. On the bright side for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, even at 0-4, you’re still only two wins, or four points, out of first place.

 

2. When Eric Tillman dealt quarterback Kerry Joseph to the Toronto Argos during the off-season, most of the country’s football scribes thought the Roughriders GM was crazy. Tillman said, “Kerry wanted $450,000 a year to play quarterback for us and I’m not giving up 10 per cent of my salary cap to one player.” Tillman also knew Joseph played lousy football in the 2007 Grey Cup game and was lucky to beat a Blue Bomber team that didn’t have its No. 1 signal caller, Kevin Glenn. However, before the 2008 season began, not many thought Marcus Crandell had the goods to make the Riders a threat. But not only did Tillman have faith in his No. 1 guy, he also liked his No. 2 and No. 3 guys. Right now, his No. 3 guy, Derian Durant, is the most exciting young quarterback to come into the league since Joseph first played in Ottawa. Tillman has always been a great judge of talent. He might be even better than we think.

 

3. The Calgary Stampeders pounded on the Hamilton Tiger-Cats this week. Granted, the ‘Cats played without the talented Jesse Lumsden who is sadly starting to appear, once again, to be a very fragile back. However, the Stampeders played a brilliant football game and the 43-16 score might have flattered a Ticats team that just couldn’t get anything going without their power back in the lineup. Henry Burris went 26-for-33 for 345 yards and two touchdowns while Joffrey Reynolds carried 11 times for 99 yards. Without Barrin Simpson, one wonders how the Bombers will shut down the Stamps this coming Thursday.

 

4. Watched a Montreal-Saskatchewan game on Saturday night that was just about as entertaining as a football game can get. Once again, Anthony Calvillo played like the best quarterback in the East while Derian Durant just made one exciting play after another for the Roughriders. The 41-33 score was indicative of the brilliance of the two offences while Wes Cates proved once again how important a solid running game is to a successful CFL offence. Right now, Ken Miller is CFL coach of the year while Eric Tillman is CFL executive of the year.

 

5. When teams run the football, they win. In the pass-crazy CFL, a running game might not seem to be too important to some coaches (see Winnipeg Blue Bombers offensive co-ordinator, Kit Cartwright), but clearly people such as Wes Cates, Joffrey Reynolds and Jesse Lumsden are proof that great running games create even greater passing attacks. When Lumsden runs the football, Hamilton wins. Watching Cates and Reynolds help their teams put up 41 and 47 points respectively this week was a clear indication that running the football in the CFL is just as important now as it was when George Reed, Johnny Bright, Normie Kwong, Earl Lunsford, Leo Lewis and Ronny Stewart ran the ball 40-odd years ago.

 

6. On Friday night, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers were beaten 27-18 at B.C. Place Stadium by a Lions team that didn’t seem to have the same commitment to excellence as it did a week earlier at Canad Inns Stadium in Winnipeg. Still, the Lions were good enough to beat a Blue Bomber team that is banged-up, beaten-down and as close to imploding as any Bombers’ team in recent memory. As a result of Friday night’s loss, the 0-4 Bombers benched quarterback Kevin Glenn and replaced him with Ryan Dinwiddie. Sadly, head coach Doug Berry is running out of scapegoats. He ran Troy Westwood off the team and his players responded with a “Well, if the coach can humiliate that guy after 17 years, it’s likely he’ll do the same to me,” attitude. The Bombers, who did not improve in the off-season — in fact with the loss of safety Kyries Hebert and cornerback Juran Bolden, they got significantly worse on defence — are now winless in four tries and yet not out of it in the talent-starved Eastern Conference. However, the Bombers plight might not be the fault of Kevin Glenn (see my Monday column in the National Post). The league’s best runningback, Charles Roberts has only 161 yards on 39 carries and if Roberts isn’t running the football, the Bombers aren’t winning. Since Kevin Glenn doesn’t call his own plays, the Bombers coaching staff must take responsibility for the team’s offensive woes. Of course, with middle linebacker Barrin Simpson now out indefinitely with a pectoral-muscle-tear, the team’s real problem might be on defence, not offence.  

 

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Won’t wait for the Riders and Hamilton. I’ll do some “splainin’” now…

Posted on July 12, 2008 by Scott Taylor| Comments Off

Saturday, July 12, 2008, 10:15 a.m.

 

I was wrong about Montreal and I was wrong about Winnipeg, but one thing I won’t allow myself to do: Be wrong about the West.

 

Clearly — and we’re only three weeks into the CFL season — the West is a dominant force and might just make the Eastern champion look pretty mediocre when Grey Cup time rolls around.

 

It became quite obvious on Thursday night, when the Calgary Stampeders went on the road, fell behind 11-0 after the first quarter, and then quietly and methodically altered their game plan and came back to beat what most people thought was a pretty good Montreal Alouettes team, 23-19.

 

Later on Thursday, the new-look Edmonton Eskimos, a team that improved dramatically in the off-season, eviscerated the Toronto Argos 47-28 and left the bumbling Argos stumbling out of Northern Alberta.

 

Friday night, came the old coup de grace. The B.C. Lions arrived at Canad Inns Stadium in Winnipeg and demolished the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 42-24. It was actually 42-8 before B.C. went into prevent and let Ryan Dinwiddie come off the bench to fool the Winnipeg fans into thinking he was some kind of saviour (Troy Kopp did that once, too). 

 

Evidently, Winnipeg is awful. Who knew? It’s a team that didn’t get better in the off-season, made some bad decisions in the pre-season (Where are you now, Troy Westwood?) and has a head coach who believes it’s everybody else’s fault but his own. Doug Berry has lost his room and after Frday night’s debacle, it doesn’t look like he’s getting it back.

 

Of course, it hasn’t helped that he ignores Charles Roberts in the offensive scheme, allows Kit Cartwright to call the plays and couldn’t replace Juran Bolden on the corner or Kyries Hebert at safety. Forget the punting game (Serna had a shaky 36.1 yard average), that horse has left the barn. Two things have contributed to Winnipeg’s 0-3 start — the team did not get better in the off-season and the head coach tends to throw the people who work for him under the bus — with far too much ease.

 

Let’s be honest, people are generally horrible to each other and coaches of sports teams tend to be more horrible than most, but when you need somebody to go to war for you, respect is a much better motivator than blame. 

 

In the meantime, the West is quite superior to the East in the CFL and only Hamilton, at home this afternoon, has a chance to stop what could be a most impressive Week 3 sweep. 

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Week 2 in the CFL: Now that the old four-game pre-season is over, do the offences start to pick it up?

Posted on July 5, 2008 by Scott Taylor| 1 Comment

Back in the day, long before TSN saved the Canadian Football League with its slick, entertaining Friday Night Football package, a package that made the league young and hip (like that word, kids?) again, each CFL team played four pre-season games. Just like the NFL.

 

By the end of this four-week stretch, teams were pretty good. Especially the offences. Granted, it didn’t do the clubs much good at the gate and ultimately, that’s why the final two exhibition games were eliminated and the schedule went from four pre-season and 16 regular season games to two pre-season and 18 regular season games. Teams still lost money. Just not as much.

 

So Week 2 in the 2008 CFL schedule ended Friday night and what we got for the first two weeks of the schedule was, pretty much, two extra pre-season games.

 

So if you were coaching, what did you learn?

 

1. Toronto is still trying to figure out who its No. 1 quarterback is. After losing 32-13 at home to Hamilton, a team that lost 33-10 to Montreal at  Ivor Wynne Stadium a week earlier, one wonders if Kerry Joseph is the answer. Interestingly, a day after the loss, the National Post reported that head coach Rich Stubler kind of laid the blame at the feet of offensive co-ordinator Steve Buratto. The Argos have scored 36 points in their first two games and that’s not much considering all the offensive weapons they possess. Maybe Joseph is done and its time to get serious about Michael Bishop again.

 

2. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are probably better than anyone — including themselves — thought. If Jesse Lumsden stays healthy and the offensive line continues to run-block the way it did in that 32-13 win over Toronto on Thursday, the Ti-Cats should be a threat in the East. 

 

3.  Montreal is clearly the best team in the East, Anthony Calvillo is obviously healthy again and head coach Marc Trestman is not having any problem with the Canadian game. The Alouettes two-touchdown blistering of Winnipeg on Friday night was testimony to a great offence, a pretty fair defence and sharp special teams.

 

4. The Blue Bomber offence isn’t very good. Although the scoreboard will tell the Bombers they lost 38-24 in Montreal, Winnipeg did get an outstanding 80-yard interception return for a touchdown by Javon Johnson. That means the Bombers put up only 17 points on offence. That’s six consecutive games (including two pre-season and two regular season games this year) in which the Bomber offence has not scored 20 points. Of course, this little nugget might have something to do with Winnipeg’s woes: Charles Roberts, six carries, 11 yards, one touchdown. Six carries? No wonder they can’t score. So do you blame Kevin Glenn or Kit Cartwright? We know who Rich Stubler would blame. With back-to-back games against B.C., then Calgary, Toronto and Montreal on the schedule, the Bombers had better pick it up on offence. Of course, in the CFL of 2008, allowing 38 points in a single game is pretty worrisome, too.

 

5. Despite all the gnashing of teeth, despite all the people who worried about the things GM Eric Tillman was doing in the off-season, the Saskatchewan Roughriders have now started with a 34-14 home win over Edmonton and a 26-16 road win in B.C. The Riders lost Kerry Joseph and Kent Austin and they still have a legitimate Grey Cup contender. It’s called defence. No team has yet to score 20 points against them.

 

6. The combination of Buck Pierce and Jarious Jackson in B.C. is not as good as the mainstream media might have you believe. The Lions have yet to score 20 points in a game this season.

 

7. The best game of the week was that 34-31 seesaw battle in Edmonton between the Eskimos and Calgary Stampeders. One senses it won’t be that close when the two teams return to Calgary, but nonethless, Thursday night’s matchup was a dandy. 

 

8. There are still too many teams in the CFL that can’t put up 20 points in a game. There are too many weak, unimaginative offences. Of course, the final “pre-season” game was this past weak. The 16-game schedule starts this coming Thursday night. One would expect the offences are now ready to go

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What we learned in two days: Hamilton, B.C. and Winnipeg aren’t as good as we thought and the CFL is dull.

Posted on June 28, 2008 by Scott Taylor| 2 Comments

I had one day of TV-watching and one day at Canada Inns Stadium, and now I’m lost.

 

First of all, I have to admit, I really believed the pre-season hype.

 

I thought, with a healthy Casey Printers around for the full six months and a healthy Jesse Lumsden just, well, kind of around, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats would be a pretty good football team. Boy was I delusional. The Tiger-Cat outfit that was drilled 33-10 in their home opener Thursday night against Montreal, was as dismal a football team as I’ve seen since the Jeff Reinebold-era Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

 

I believed, after the Tiger-Cats beat Toronto in the final pre-season game of 2008 that maybe, just maybe, Charlie Taafe had this thing figured out. Man, was I wrong. Poor ol’ Charlie couldn’t coach a dog in from a snowstorm with a pork chop. 

 

I watched Montreal in the pre-season and they were wonky at best. How Hamilton could lose at home to a much-too-old Anthony Calvillo and a head coach with no experience in 12-man football says a lot of bad things about the Tiger-Cats.

 

Later on Thursday night, I suspected the B.C. Lions would be better, but I wasn’t surprised when Calgary beat them 28-18. On Thursday morning on the Mike Richards Show on Calgary’s The FAN 960, I picked the Stamps to win simply because the combination of Henry Burris and Dave Dickenson at quarterback just seemed so much more skilled and experienced than the combination of Buck Pierce and Jarious Jackson. I was right. 

 

We were told B.C. was the best team in the West. Sorry, but I’m not convinced they’re even a playoff-worthy team.

 

(OK, yeah, yeah, so Danny Maciocia’s coaching in Edmonton so the Lions will make the playoffs.) 

 

Meanwhile, on Friday night in the press box at Canad Inns Stadium, Harvey Rosen of Broadcast News and I, sensed something ugly was about to take place by about the third minute of the fourth quarter of the Winnipeg-Toronto snooze-fest.

 

Two teams with spectacular offensive weapons put up a grand total of 39 points. Zzzzzzzzz! 23-16 is an ugly score in a Canadian Football League game between two teams with players such as Charles Roberts, Kerry Joseph, David Boston, Bethel Johnson, Derrick Armstrong, Jamal Robertson, Mike Vanderjagt, Kevin Glenn, Michael Bishop, Dominique Dorsey and Terrence Edwards.  

 

I don’t get it. Either Steve Buratto and Kit Cartwright, the two offensive co-ordinators, are really lousy at their jobs, or the CFL has become an offensive wasteland where great players go to whither and die.

 

How these two teams, with all that talent, play a 23-16 game on a very nice night for football, is a mystery. I hate pulling out this old chestnut, but 15-to-20 years ago, when the likes of Dunigan, Ham, Hufnagel, Burgess, Clements, Brock, Allen, Flutie, and on and on, played quarterback in this league, the game was thrilling from start to finish. If you didn’t score 30 points, you didn’t have a chance. And often, if you didn’t get to 40, you’d get drilled.

 

Now, if a team can scuffle around and score 20, it can win enough games to reach the Grey Cup.

 

The CFL used to be the most spectacular game in the football world. Now, it pales in comparison to the four-down game where Peyton Manning and Tom Brady play 37-35 extravaganzas. It’s kind of sad. 

 

Winnipeg is not very good offensively. Toronto is only slightly better. And clearly, those are the two best teams in the East. 

 

It’s time for a federal government study on why the CFL has become so boring. Maybe that idiot Senator Larry Campbell could conduct it. 

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