Another Sunday morning and another smorgas-bored featuring opinions that might also be yours (but I doubt it)…
It was a dark and foggy night….sorry, couldn’t resist opening with that cornball lede. But, hey, it truly was a dark and foggy night when the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Calgary Stampeders gathered to grab grass and growl at Football Follies Field in Fort Garry on Friday.
I swear, twas the best Bombers game I haven’t seen since the 1962 Fog Bowl in the Republic of Tranna. Winnipeg FC won that one, too. Beat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 28-27 in the only Grey Cup game that started on a Saturday afternoon and ended after Sunday mass. We watched it but didn’t really see it. Same thing on Friday. Much of what went down in the second half was scarcely visible to my aging eyes. Fortunately, Chris Cuthbert was there in the TSN Tower of Babble On to inform me what he couldn’t see either.
Anyway, ya, the Bombers are great foggers. Not only did they overcome the pea soup that drifted into Football Follies Field to paddywhack the tobogganing Stampeders, 29-21, they also saw their way through the fog between Mike O’Shea’s ears.
Oh, yes, Coach Mikey almost got in his own way again, because he just won’t learn from his blunders.
This time, the Bombers were confronted with a third-and-one on their own 28-yard stripe. They had a two-score lead, 29-18. The clock showed four minutes and 26 ticks remaining. Thus, the prudent course of action was to have Justin Medlock hoof the football far afield and force Bo Levi Mitchell and the Stampeders offence to go to great lengths to score twice against Richie Hall’s very stingy defensive dozen.
Not Coach Mikey, though. He had a different notion. He did his riverboat gambler thing. Again. And it failed miserably. Again.
Fortunately for the home side, Stampeders head coach Dave Dickenson also had fog on his grey matter and, rather than kick a gimme three-pointer to reduce his deficit to one score, he frittered away the gift turnover with his own ill-advised third-down gamble. Game, set and on to the Canadian Football League playoffs for the Bombers.
“I won’t shy away from doing it again,” O’Shea said matter-of-factly when news snoops inquired about his decision-making.
That’s what makes me a bit of a nervous Nellie.
Coach Mikey has a history of significant risk-and-reward failures, including a brain cramp that turned an iffy West Division semifinal into a rout for the Edmonton Eskimos last November. He doesn’t do safe. He’d go all in with a fistful of nothing at a Las Vegas poker table. He’s Evel Knievel trying to leap the Snake River Canyon on a skateboard.
Well, that’s one (the main?) reason why he’ll enter next month’s Grey Cup runoff searching for his first post-season W in five years as the Bombers sideline steward.
O’Shea’s latest failed gamble isn’t much of a talking point today because it wasn’t punitive. Do it on the second, third or fourth Sunday in November, however, and it’s guaranteed that gums will be flapping in River City. There’s no backup plan for failure then.
As mentioned at the top, the Bombers have played in a thick fog before. Those of us who lived through it call it the Jeff Reinebold Era.
Winnipeg FC will be required to beat the Saskatchewan Roughriders and Stampeders—on enemy soil—to advance against the East Division survivor in the Grey Cup game in Edmonton. Tall order. But doable. After all, they laid a licking on both of their Prairie rivals and the Bytown RedBlacks during their late-season, 5-0 roll. But Coach Mikey will have to get out of his own way.
If you’re going to feel good about someone going to the Grey Cup tournament next month, make it Bombers quarterback Joe Ordinary. It wasn’t so long ago, remember, when the rabble at Football Follies Field had the bad manners to mightily boo Matt Nichols when his bearded mug appeared on the big screen in a public service announcement about the hazards of drinking and driving. The Bombers haven’t lost in five skirmishes since, and that’s due in large part to a timely September bye week that provided Nichols ample time to pull his head out of his butt and place it back on his stooped shoulders. Joe Ordinary has been extremely efficient with the football, tossing seven touchdown passes against one pick in the five Ws, and his calm cannot be measured. Good on him.
Coach Mikey, of course, gets a tip of the bonnet for his handling of the QB situation when Nichols was lower than whatever’s beneath a snake’s belly. The rabble and some news snoops were calling for change—and we can only wonder what kind of pressure he was under from his overlords in the Bombers bunker on Chancellor Matheson Road—but he didn’t flinch. Mind you, there’s a term for head football coaches who are influenced by the braying of fans and media—ex-coach.
TSN can pull the plug on its live mic broadcasts next season. It was interesting initially and I’m not offended by F-bombs from football players in the throes of combat, but the gimmick has become annoying and interrruptive. If the people in the Tower of Babble On are going to talk over the QBs and head coaches, what’s the point?
So who takes the fall in Edmonton? Eskimos volcanic head coach Jason Maas? D-coordinator Mike Benevides? General manager Brock Sunderland? Surely one of those three will be the scapegoat after a crusade that wasn’t supposed to end until the final Sunday in November at Commonwealth Stadium in E-Town. I mean, when you’re the only West Division outfit that fails to qualify for the Grey Cup runoff something has to give. Is there a Paul LaPolice in the Eskimos’ future?
It occurs to me that E-Town’s two major sports outfits are chasing a unique daily double this year. Connor McDavid, most outstanding player in the NHL—Oilers missed the playoffs.
Mike Reilly, favorite to win CFL most outstanding player award—Eskimos missed the playoffs.
Has that happened before? Anywhere?
Why is it that the Winnipeg Jets were beaten by the Tranna Maple Leafs twice in four days but I still feel like our home side is the better outfit? I know, I know. Les Jets were a no-show at The Little Hockey House On The Prairie last Wednesday, and they coughed up a hefty hair ball in a 3-2 loss Saturday night in the the Republic of Tranna. Still, when the dust settles on this National Hockey League season, I’d put my money on Winnipeg HC advancing further along the Stanley Cup trail than les Leafs.
For those of you keeping score at home (and I know you are), les Jets two PlayStation Pals—Twig Ehlers and Puck Finn—still have only four goals between them. Good thing Winnipeg HC is making a pilgrimage to Patrick Laine’s homeland later this week. Perhaps Finnish authorities can tell us who stole Puck Finn and what they did with him.
Seriously, does Laine have an evil twin brother who was switched with the real thing last summer? Do les Jets have Puck Twin instead of Puck Finn?
Couldn’t keep my eyelids open long enough to see Max Muncy of the Los Angeles Dodgers end the longest game in World Series history with an 18th-inning walkoff dinger vs. the Boston Red Sox on Friday night. The zzzzzzzs kicked in after the 14th inning. Made me yearn for the days when baseball’s championship games were played as it was meant to be—in the afternoon. Still remember being in class at St. Alphonsus School in Good Ol’ Hometown, listening to Game 7 of the 1962 World Series between the Giants and Yankees on Sister Somethingorother’s transistor radio. As I recall, it marked the first, but not the last, time the term “Damn Yankees!” escaped my lips. Fortunately, my expletive didn’t travel far enough to reach Sister Somethingorother’s ears, thus my tiny, dainty hands were spared her thick leather strap.
And, finally, I note that Donald Trump took time out from lashing out at the “enemy of the people” (journalists) to second guess manager Dave Roberts’ handling of the Dodgers pitching staff during their 9-6 loss in Game 4 of the World Series on Saturday. I have no problem with that. People second guess Trump on a daily basis. But I really think his time would be better served by second guessing laws that allow bad people to play with guns in the U.S.
The River City Renegade 
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