johnzo

the QB trades are some wizard trades but I'll always say that the opening kickoff of the modern Bomber era was Kyle Walters' first trade: Alex Hall for Paddy Neufeld (and a 4th, which became Christophe Normand) Getting a Canadian starter for a decade in exchange for a rental on an American rush end is some fine work indeed ... and the fact that it came at the expense of the Roughriders is (chef's kiss)

thanks for the explanation. multiple times I have tried to make sense of the Nationalized American rule by reading the CFL rulebook and have completely bounced off of it every time.

oh man I would love to be there. that's a lit receiving corps right there. that 84 team was formative for me. the way we demolished every team in the playoffs that year, I thought the championships would never stop coming...

yeah, until the WSF win I had the magical play mentally filed under "just another Robert Marve-style crowd pleaser." the dagger play of the WSF ... that was when I started to believe. Darvin Adams caught the winning TD for us in OT in 2021. What a great way for him to go out, he led the Bomber passing game for so many years....

then you compare it to the clutch goal-line play that Nichols made in the 2021 Grey Cup...

yeah, I think that in our recent TiCat game, Bo challenged Nichols a bit more than QBs usually do ... and he paid the price. Nichols' interception was a thing of beauty.

so I know this topic of our roster composition has been debated at some length here, but lately I've found myself thinking about the second game in the BC home-at-home. We lost Neuf and Woli for that game and we replaced them with two imports -- Lucky and Randolph -- without having to disrupt any other positions. Normally when a team loses multiple national starters at once, the ripple effect will hit other parts of the roster as the next-best-Canadians become starters regardless of what position they play, which makes injuries to national starters pretty devastating. It seems like playing a surplus of Canadians -- especially forum whipping boys like Kramdi and Thomas -- has enabled us to have the roster flexibility to deal with injuries that would have crippled the team in past years.

if I were boss of TSN and had unlimited power and budget: 1. Simulcast an all-24 view of the field. 2. Kill TSN Tempo. Broadcast needs to have a better sense for when the O is going tempo -- abort the replay and stick with live action. If you don't replay a big play right away, that's okay -- there's the spare time coming out of commercial for those highlights. 3. Personnel: On the panel, I don't think the problem is bad players, I think the problem is coaching. Whoever is responsible for setting the tone of the panel should be gone. I don't mind some jokiness and levity, I don't need the halftime to be a state funeral, but none of those folks is an actual funny person, and they should leave the funny business to actual comedians. In particular, Jim Barker is a guy who has coached professionally for decades. He should have endless freaking insight to offer but instead here he is the weakest link on a weak panel; they've got him doing this cringey loud uncle thing, made all the worse by his voice, which is more suited for silent movies than for TV commentary. Muamba stays, Sanchez stays -- we gotta have the D represented on the panel. I don't mind Milt. I don't mind Kate Beirness; I think she's fine. I don't even mind Farhan with has very strong "we don't want to pay to fly someone else out to the west coast so we'll just hire this local homer" energy. But please do cut Suitor and replace him with BLM. 4. I actually kind of like Straight Fire. I would've loved to have Milt as my hype man when I was playing touch football in Ottawa. But make it less cringey please. 5. Obvious one: Absolutely no interviews during game action. I don't care if it's the Pope or the Devil or the angry ghost of Sinead O'Connor -- if the special guest is performing / being honored at halftime, then veer away from the panel and show them doing their thing at halftime along with contextualizing remarks from the hosts. The interview of Grand Chief Settee during the Elks game was super awkward. "Today is a solemn day of remembrance and can you talk more about th---OOOOH hang on, Keric Wheatfall is gone! Touchdown!" 6. "Watch The Playoffs With Lapo" contest. I'm weird but I would love to hang with Lapo and listen to him dissect a game continuously in real time. I'll bring donuts, beer, poutine, whatever. If they're not going to have him in the booth every weekend, at least get some other significant use out of him. 7. Commentators have to be on top of substitutions and alignments. It happens all the time where someone leaves the game due to an injury and there's no remarks about who has subbed in and how it will impact the game play -- you only get that in exceptional circumstances where a team is down to its emergency OL or is juggling its secondary to hide its backups. There was a recent game with Micah Johnson playing emergency OL for the Roughriders. I really dug the iso on him and Suitor did some good work getting into how a the regular OL will try to help an emergency OL along. Do more of this please. Hell, do an iso package on a lineman every game. Let's see a closeup on how Big Stan operates, or a package of Drew Dejarlais run blocks. 8. Steal the "Block of the Game" idea from wbbfan's postgame threads. Blocks should be celebrated much more than they are. Recruit Vasectomy Manitoba as a sponsor; it's a natural. 9. obvious one 2: better balance of the game story with the game. The beauty of sports is that you discover the game story as the game is played; you don't pre-decide it.

HH: T Wilson with some gutsy TD runs. Second, third, fourth efforts, all while keeping the ball safe.

is it just me or does Chris Jones kind of look like an ugly baby? tonight I wanna see him cry.

yeah, Running was a gooder. one of those guys with a real smooth stride, reminded me of Chris Armstrong.

Youtube hero Calgary Stampeders Classics has uploaded a real interesting old Bomber game. This is the Jay Walker game from 1998 where JW looked real good beating the tar out of the Argos at the tail end of a lost season. That was the only game he ever played for the Blue, he wanted more money than Ken Bishop wanted to pay for a guy who might well have been just a one-game wonder ... but I've always wondered what might have been if Walker had been in the mix in 1999.

this one is fun to watch. Two checkdown throws go for TDs, so you can imagine how excited Lapo gets about that. Lots of superb breakdown here -- Lapo talks a lot about the recognition that enables ZC8 to find the opportunities within each play. You get to see how an offence works under absolutely ideal conditions.

Schoen has had some rough luck with injuries for sure ... I would hesitate to call him fragile because he made a ton of fearless but vulnerable catches in heavy traffic last year. Safeties and LBs were teeing up on him. I doubt that anyone would have come through that pounding unscathed.

BOLO again! that's not a touchdown, Farhan.

I wanna see the Ticats in the WSF so bad... BOLO!

what is this weird feeling? I don't think I've ever rooted for BLM before. go Tabbies.

is "The Claw" a real handle for Lawler? or did you just coin basically the perfect nickname right now?

That BC Place scoreboard is like the Green Monster of the CFL.

Gotta call out the real nice block that Lawler made to spring Brady on his TD. Just chipped his man a little bit and turned a 10 yard play into a 30 yard TD. Love to see that kind of game awareness from a star WR .

No harm done, my man. What a game!

oh man the hype machine will be firing on all sixteen cylinders if Ford puts up some numbers in garbage time.

real good move to go tempo there, don't even give 'em a chance to challenge it or make em burn their challenge badly.

holy **** Holm was out in front of Garbutt on that return. Some freakish wheels on that dude, to get from the secondary out in front of a fumble return like that.

Okay, I'm satisfied, let's see Terry Wilson and MCI out there.