johnzo

here's a question for the football brains: does a DT ever do anything besides crush the pocket or run a stunt? is there anything more to his role than that?

So I generally remember Bombers by their best moments rather than their worst -- I remember Michael Bishop throwing laser bombs all day against the Als and I remember Ritchie Hall absolutely owning the Lions last year, and I remember Justin Goltz throwing that crazy TD to Clarence Denmark at the Skydome .... and I remember Lapo's Grey Cup 2019 game where he had the Ticats chasing smoke all day. Lapo had some frustrating moments in blue but he had his high points too.

Occasionally Matty will spotlight a little piece of the game that teaches me something. But mostly I enjoy him because I live his spirit and enthusiasm for the game, and he generally doesn't put lipstick on any pigs. The best TSN color guy for in game analysis seems to be Forde ... generally he's worth listening to. Would love to see Lapo try color, see if he can do his crisp explaining in the few seconds he's got between plays....

I have never seen anything but praise for Lapo's tv work on this site, even from the hardest lapo detractors. Dude has a gift for explaining the game that's so obvious that even mbb can't fight about it.

hell yeah, during preseason A there was a comment on Lofton having a tell that was tipping the play and it was fascinating to rewatch the drive in question with eyes on Lofton's stance. seemed very surprising that a guy could get to the pro ranks with that gap in his game.

of course, a call-in show is a terrible place to do education what with all the wastoids calling in to say "hey why don't you try to score more touchdowns?"

sometimes in the oughts he had a Q&A column on cfl.ca and I wrote in asking how the defensive signals got from the bench to the defense. In response he wrote me a little book on how the D does its job. I was super impressed that he took the time to go deep with some fan on the Internet. edit: and to follow onto the question of how to make the coach's show better, I would love more inside baseball about how the game actually works. as someone who never played the game above the city-league flag football level, I find pro football is an astonishingly fast cycle of planning, reacting, and executing and the mechanics of that are fascinating to me. like, I would love to hear our center talk about how he calls the signals at the line ... the fact that the center can take the play call, eye the D, and then call out useful blocking assignments in one or two seconds in a potentially very loud stadium ... that seems like straight-up sorcery to me. or I would love to hear our QB give an eye view talk about blitz recognition, or about how he makes his RPO decisions.

obvious punchline: Jones hears "short yardage specialist" and immediately pens Prukop in as the short-yardage nose tackle. jokes aside, I don't think this is a bad signing. a bad short yardage QB can cost you games, as Tyrell Pigrome taught the Redblacks last year....plus you keep the wear and tear off your old guy and your young thoroughbred Canuck. I just love how Woli makes teams defend the whole field. don't miss the days when we'd have some Canadian scrub way out on the field side as a theoretical distraction.

(deleted a duplicate post. i am good at computers)

does Stanback even have that dimension anymore? It seems like he's well past the time when he was right up there with Andrew Harris as the best running RB... also, is Stanback a good guy from a pass protection standpoint? The RBs they had last year did not look great to me in that regard .. at least when I watched the Lions I saw VAJ improvising a lot.

hey, it's preseason on MBB too! It's appropriate that the rosters are a little wacky...

several years? pulling colors from their skies? when the sky is obsidian green, you should run for a tornado shelter, not play football...

green on green numbers. jesus, we get it, you like green.

yeah, respect for Masoli -- dude was solid in that game and gave us a scary run. Rooting for him to have a ZC8-like comeback after all his injuries. He's still on the Redblacks roster though he's not been rostered for any preseason action. Only news I can find on him is that he's not fully recovered from his season-ender last year according to a guy on Reddit. I think people here were saying that he was uniquely vulnerable to leg injuries cause he's a thick guy and leverage is a *****. Tyrie Adams might be starting the season on the injured list too, if he doesn't get cut. He looked pretty good in his lone start last year for Ottawa -- hope he gets another shot there or elsewhere. Ottawa has really cornered the market on promising but unproven CFL QBs. Adams, Brown, Crum... poor dude wound up in karma's way -- the Blue had a Boat Game to avenge.

it's a highlight reel, though -- wouldn't a receiver's highlight reel want to show off all the contested catches where he bailed out his QB?

"One morning, when Brady Oliveira woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible cockroach."

that dude takes so much punishment. like a long-striding Buck Pierce.

Four games today. OTT @ HAM BC @ CGY SSK @ EDM TOR @ MTL All games on CFL+ : https://www.cfl.ca/2024/05/09/where-to-watch-2024-cfl-preseason-games/. The Montreal game is also on RDS. Highlights: First look at Dru Brown in a Redblacks jersey and MBT repping the Elks. BLM starts for the TiCats. Hopefully we get the Edmonton radio crew on the Riders/Elks game. That Regina radio crew is brutal.

I wonder if those guys had a spotter working with them? As far as I understand, the spotter is the guy who identifies the players involved in a play. Still, very low quality commentary, esp compared to the gold standard of Knuckles. Knuckles was a home broadcaster but he was never a homer.

Redblacks actually sounds good in French. Rouge et Noir. Kinda classy. In English, I agree, it's garbage.

I'll call 'em the Jetties. Worst team name is the Wild. Sports teams should be nouns, not verbs.

Would you expect the QBs to be behind the curve in blitz recognition since there's zero film on the D to study at this point?

oh, this is interesting. how was he tipping off the play? Always interested to hear about these little details, they make the game much more fun to watch.

Mullinder was bad. everytime I heard him say "second and short opens up the whole playbook!" I thought about replacing him with one of these: Somehow the sideline guy was worse. Is there a shallower take than "everyone's all pumped up and the veterans are leading the way!"