johnzo

Really curious to see if Flanders sees the field vs. Toronto, and what import gets benched if he does.

Montreal settling for field goals -- if they were a little better in the red zone, this'd be a one-score game.

c'mon Als, let's see a big defensive play early, get the momentum back...

Gotta be impressed with Khari Jones' work here.

Always a good sign when your star receiver and your inexperienced QB are fighting in the huddle.

aww yeah Terrance Frederick.

And yeah, it's a bummer to think that Ray might be at the end of the line. Him vs. Calvillo in the 2005 Grey Cup was the best CFL game I've ever seen live.

If Jones moves on from Durant then the Mike Kelly-fication of the Riders will be complete. Getting rid of your established starter without a proven guy in the wings, that's a move that will change the Riders from a losing but semi-competitive team into a team that's unwatchably brutal. (I don't think the Riders are as far away as others may think ... they've got a QB and some Canadian talent, on paper they're way ahead of where the bombers were in 2014.)

Burying the lede a bit here .. in the linked tweet, HZ in Montreal is reporting that Ricky Ray has a punctured lung -- which definitely pushes Toronto into the lower, non-playoff tier of the the CFL along with Montreal and the Riders, which (if those teams continue to struggle) means playoffs for us for sure.

Oh man, that 2014 season opener against Toronto, when 5to19 looked like the new hotness. Such a great game, reminds me of Buck Pierce's debut in 2010 when he and Terrance Edwards were unstoppable. You also see some good pocket presence in those clips, Willy crisply moving away from pressure with eyes downfield, then making the throw. He was never a speedster or a magician like Durant but at his best the guy could really keep an extended play alive. I'm happy that Nichols has us on a roll, but I sure would like to see the 2014 Willy again, especially since our receiving talent is 200% better than it was in 2014. Bummer to think that maybe we've ruined yet another QB.

In that same game, he hit McDuffie and Dressler perfectly in stride down the right sideline with coverage lurking, and those plays weren't much deeper than the Sheppard / Dressler endzone misses. So he can definitely do it.

After everything that went down in 1983, it's kinda astonishing that Brock and Winnipeg weren't permanently estranged.

Fun/sad Banjo Bowl trivia: this is the first time in eight years that the Bombers have started the same QB in two consecutive Banjo Bowls.

yeah, when I've gone to Bomber games in Vancouver I've met my share of good-natured ****-talkers but I've also met a few ******* drunks who want to top off a Bomber loss by getting aggro on me and my wife. Stay classy everyone.

Some stuff I noticed on the rewatch: Suitor is on drugs when he says that the good teams are at 70% or above in terms of red zone percentage. The best red zone team in the league is Toronto at 72% and the best teams in the league are around 50%. Is anyone making donations to Variety in memory of Jerry Maslowski? (here's some youtube embeds, they go straight to the play in question, even though they all have the same preview) Josh Bartel is gonna eat it in the film room when everyone watches him totally whiff on this block: People were talking about our endzone troubles, with Dressler and Sheppard both dropping touchdown passes. Interesting that Nichols threw inside on this play even though Dressler was looking for the ball outside: The Sheppard miss, on first watch I thought it would have been a heroic catch but it seems like a pro receiver ought to be able to catch a ball they can get both hands on, even when they're laying out like that: What on earth was Durant thinking throwing this lazy rainbow to the wide side? Watching the ball crawl out there, I knew it was a pick. Huge turnaround play in the game and a big blemish on an otherwise fine day for DD: And finally, everyone's favourite PI call:

Ottawa Rough Rider season ticket holder here, from 1995-1996. I will take a decade of Jones over a single season of Horn Chen.

It's hard to figure out where Glenn is going to land next because the team that needs him most just demoted him.

I think a team can turn it around quickly if their Canadian talent and QB are set. Durant will still be a decent starter next year (tho who knows what happens if Jones throws him away for Franklin) and they have some national pieces (St. John, LaBatte, Chambers, Clark, Walters, Capicotti if he emerges from whatever black hole he's disappeared into.) On paper, the Riders' national lineup looks way better than what the Bombers had at the start of the 2014 rebuild. Kohlert is the only starting seven guy from 2014 who's still with the BB, and Sorensen is the only guy whose dismissal I'd call a mistake. Murphy has found a lot of American talent in his time, and will find more for them. And I still think that Jones could be an effective head coach, he didn't suddenly take stupid pills in 2016, he's just out of his depth, trying to do too much.

That Bagg call on 3rd down was such a brutal call (and that was a quick pass if I remember correctly, so Bagg must have been the first read on that play.) Robb Bagg's a fine football player but expecting him to yac his way to a first down against a secondary that's playing short-yardage tight doesn't seem like a high-percentage play. (we hung Kohlert out to dry a couple weeks ago in a similar fashion, tossed him a short pass behind the line of scrimmage on a second-and-long and he just got buried.)

Seems like a decent move to keep a decent game-ready import kicker hanging around to see if a market develops for him or in case of Medlock disaster. Castillo was on the 6-game for a bunch of time this season so he was drawing his full salary, maybe the Bombers didn't want to spend the money on him anymore and maybe he wasn't interested in a practice roster spot. Good luck to him, he had some good stretches in Blue.

Hmm, what happened to the last coach to sideline Glenn prematurely? Mike Kelly echoes all over the league this week. Hope Cato plays well, though, we gotta keep the good young QBs coming into the league.

Red zone percentages (before this week's games) courtesy of cflmedia.ca: TOR: 72% (13/18) MON: 67% (16/24) HAM: 56% (13/23) CAL: 55% (18/33) EDM: 55% (16/29) BC: 53% (18/34) WPG: 50% (13/26) OTT: 46% (12/28) SSK: 41% (9/22) Interesting that, aside from the Roughriders, there isn't a super strong correlation between record and red zone percentage. The top three red zone teams are all under .500. Meanwhile, Calgary and BC and Ottawa have middling red zone percentage, but they get there more often than the teams that trail them,so they don't have to convert as often and can still be successful. Also interesting, the Blue Bombers' opponents' red zone success (before this week) was a whopping 73.7% (14/19). But teams so rarely get into our red zone that their success rate isn't so important.

Jones = Mike Kelly attitude + Tim Burke's onfield results. Etch turning up this week as a Rider defensive "consultant" was yet another Jones/Kelly parallel. Kelly tried to be a GM, head coach, and unit coordinator as well, but eventually he figured out he couldn't do it and Manny Matsakis parachuted in to run the O. Be interesting to see if Etch hangs around or moves into a full-time role with them. Has anyone ever been GM, head coach, and a unit coordinator successfully in the CFL? Maybe Pinball Clemons? I think he was both president of the Argos and its starting tailback at one point...

We've been talking a lot about Darian Durant in the Willy trade value thread and I think we caught a glimpse of Durant Prime this afternoon. He moved crisply in the pocket, stepped away from the rush calmly, threw bullet passes and a couple real nice long balls, made some opportunistic yards with his feet, and faked Leggett out of his adidas with an option play in the red zone. I don't think you can put either of his two picks on him, and he absolutely destroyed Adams after that first pick anyway. (tho he did get kinda lucky when Cole let that easy one clank off his hands early.) But for some crappy kicking and some marginal penalties and some terrible coaching he'd be 7-0 on Labour Day. Looks like he's still got some in the tank, if he didn't play for a dumpster fire of a team I think people would be talking about this being a comeback season for him. I wonder if he lands in Toronto or Montreal next year...