GCn20

I agree Pierce, and to a lesser extent Mace, are both very solid up and coming coaches in this league. That's the pool to choose from.

For sure. Contract negs have to be very taxing on these guys and getting a deal done a huge relief.

Pretty much every connected media person in-the-know had said so. I'm not buying that Mace was necessarily their first choice. I think Buck was with conditions attached by O'Day that ultimately Buck couldn't get behind. Buck is happy here though and if you read his interview from last year when he turned down Ottawa, it is very clear he is in no rush, The situation for him to go to HC has to be just right and there would be nothing he would love more than being HC here. We all know that. I agree that the media is notoriously unreliable, but in this case everyone seemed to be in agreement on what they were hearing...and that is rare. I do agree that the HC in waiting angle by Ball seems like a long shot though.

There was a tweet yesterday by a Rider media person that Buck was the choice and that the Bombers were making a pitch to keep him by promising him HC in waiting. It was pulled down an hour later but there are screenshots of it online. My personal belief is that Buck wanted Brown, and O'Day was squeamish to stake his job on a rookie starter.

I feel that in the end O'Day was not comfortable with Buck's plan to scrap Harris and go with Brown. Stronson can scream from the rooftops that Pierce loved Harris, but that is just purely spin and meat shielding Mace for agreeing to go with Harris to get the job. Buck would have brought Brown to the Riders with him. He LOVES Brown and Brown looks to be ready. Any noise about Buck doing cartwheels over a 38 year old has been coming off an achilles injury is just absolute nonsense, and quite frankly an insult to everyone's intelligence.

Problem is for them they need OTs and those are very tough to find these days. NFL hords them like they are a leprechaun protecting their pot of gold. If you believe that nonsense from Stronson then I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Buck never said a public word to anybody about Harris. Purely Riderfan fiction. I can bet big dollars Buck's plan was to bring Brown with him, and at the end of the day O'Day was the one betting on Harris by hiring Mace. This will likely cost O'Day his job after this year.

Our O basically stopped using Brady in the 2nd half, and we had 3 drives into the red zone resulting in ZERO points. That's basically what lost us this game. BC was in max protection for most of the game and we were still dialling up blitzes. Hall and Buck were outcoached. LMAO. I will give you the same challenge as SpeedFlex. Show me one instance, one indicator in the footage that shows our defence being gassed. I've watched it 4x and do not see any indication of it. In fact I was very impressed with the motor of Jeffcoat and Jefferson still at the end.

Then you haven't read every post. There were people on here suggesting that Walters either dictates roster usage to MOS or fire him.

You seem OK with our QB and running back turning the ball over 3x in the red zone, you seem OK with our coordinators calling an atrocious game. Sounds pretty frikken stupid right....I am not ok with us aging out. I just have seen no proof of that happening yet, I haven't seen us losing anything year to year either. Our last 2 years we have been pretty dominant imo.

Please tell me where you saw any of our guys out of gas in the GC. I didn't see it and I watched the game 4 times. High motor right till the end is what I saw. You can go back and look and if you see one guy with his hands on his hips or showing signs of fatigue let me know and I will rewatch it for a 5th time.

That's weird because we ranked 2nd overall in sacks and QB pressures, and tops in the league in passing yardage against. Your argument does not hold up to the stats. Obtuse....not at all. Was roster management a problem in our defensive decimation of BC in the WF? What was different that game do you suppose? Was it in 14 out of 18 games this year. No. Obtuse...you are the one being obtuse by measuring roster management impact solely on 5 out of 20 games. Look at the whole damn picture before you call me obtuse. Our defence led the league all year in just about every meaningful category despite the roster management. So if it was that problematic...I'm just not sure where that showed up. Look, I'm not defending the roster management quirks of MOS. I'd love to see him change that. However, I'm not ready to run him out of town with a pitch fork either. It's odd roster usage but minimally damaging imo and it is being vastly oversold here as some kind of huge problem.

That's not grinding tho. That's doing your job. If you are going 2 and out as you should, then your defence is fresh as a daisy all game long without needing a huge rotation and roster management is a moot point. That's what I'm getting at. The games we lost this year is because of one of two reasons, our offence was going 2 and out, and our defence was allowing long drives. Sometimes it was both. Did not having fresh bodies complicate things...yea....I have never suggested it didn't however only after we shat the bed.

Who grinds out wins on defence? We grind out wins on offence or we are probably not going to win regardless of lineup. The biggest part of a defence getting tired late in the game is because they were on the field longer than they should have been, meaning they are not playing well. It is my belief that if we win TOP, as we should with our offence more times than not, and our defence is playing to their level that roster management is a completely moot point. If we are in trouble because the defence is getting gassed the game was lost even before that.

Yea..it's kind of strange for sure.

It's actually true. Only the 46 man goes on the cup.

Right? I hated that Grey Cup loss as much as anyone but we lost that game a heckuva lot more than the Als won it with the roster, depth, and age that we dressed. I firmly believe that 95 times out of a hundred the roster we dressed and played that day wins that game. No one will ever convince me otherwise. The keys to victory that I stated somewhere in the week before the game were. 1. Protect the football - FAILED 2. Score when the opportunity is there against their tough defence. FAILED 3. Don't let Fajardo get flukey. FAILED. (and yes, I do very much believe there were a number of over thrown and under thrown balls that if our DB has proper position would have been incomplete or intercepted.)

At no point did I say it wasnt. I stated that it was way, way down the list of reasons why we lost and I stand by that. FACT: That was a winnable game with the roster we had dressed. FACT: Our own mistakes cost us that game. FACT: Buck and RIchie Hall did not have very good game plans. FACT: 3 red zone turnovers took a potential 21 points, and a guaranteed 9 points off the board that would have secured us victory easily. When you add all that up, where does roster management stand in all of that. Very low in the order of importance. It would be different if the Jeffs looked gassed, or Biggie was completely ineffectual, or we were not able to drive on the ALs...which we did...just turnovers cost us points. However, we did all that and made some key mental and ball security mistakes and it cost us the game. I get that some of you guys really want to pin this on the roster management boogeyman that we have been hearing ad nauseum about all year, but it simply was not the case in the Grey Cup. A very small contributing factor....MAYBE...can not even say that for sure. What I can tell you for sure is that when you turn the ball over 3 times in the red zone against a D like the ALs...you stand a very good chance of losing that game and we did. Not sure why everyone is so myopically fixed on the whole roster management thing that you are forgetting football 101.

Nor should be take a cut. Or anyone else for that matter.

One injury can cause that ripple effect at any point, even with depth dressed. You can't possibly cover off for every possible in game injury. Of course, moving people around can cause problems, No doubt about it. However, on two of the busts the person who busted coverage was in their proper spot. Only the Bighill/Alexander bust was roster related...MAYBE. I get it just fine. I just don't agree with you. There is a difference. I absolutely concede, and have all year, that roster management in some areas needs improvement. What you will never get me to concede, because I know it not to be true, is that roster management cost us any game this year. I cannot think of a single game where roster management was a deciding factor. Not one. We had a 10 point half time lead in the Grey Cup, and it went in the shitter when we tried to protect that lead instead of playing to win. We lost that game on lousy play calling, and mental errors by players. If you want to attribute 5% of the blame to roster managment....OK...that would be about right.

Not hanging off his nutsac. That's just gaslighting. Because someone disagrees with your damage assessment does not mean they are hanging off Osh's nutsac. You think his roster management cost us the Grey Cup, I disagree. I do not believe that Haba, Fox, and Rose on the roster gets us over the hump in that game. There were numerous opportunities for our team that we fielded to win that game easily and our mistakes cost us, not roster management...and no I do not for one second believe the mistakes I am referring to were because of roster management. Mental errors mostly. Blown coverages is not a function of roster management, red zone turnovers are not a function of roster management, wonky playcalling is not roster management. You can scream until you are blue in the face about roster management, that HAS been the axe you are grinding all year, but the Grey Cup was not lost because of it as much as you and Mike would like to have your AHA moment. I think you can dress the receivers we did, but Buck needs a better gameplan and you gotta sprinkle in some of the backups. None of that happened. Bighill did not have the game of his life, but he wasn't a liability either.

Sure...and the criticism in and of itself is warranted. It's some of the hyperbole that is going with it that I have an issue with. Some guys are going over the top even suggesting we move on from MOS. Like WTF? And none of them would do it as well as MOS. Not saying we would fall apart, but losing him would be a big blow to our franchise.

Totally agree that Biggie, Schoen, and Bailey should not have been playing in hindsight. I just don't think it was an egregious decision. Just one that didn't go our way. Who is playing on the 46 is not roster management. Roster management is who is on/off the roster. Once you are on the 46 whether you play or not is not a roster issue anymore, or at least not in the definition we have been hearing all year long here. The criticism was that we dressed injured guys with no one to back them up. Untrue. When Biggie sat on the turf stretching out his calf in the first Q, he should have been sat for the rest of the game and Clements take over. When the offence dried up in the 3rd Q, we should have done more mixing in with McCrae, BOLO, and Grant on offence. Again not roster issues, those guys were there ready to play.

Exactly right....and every single guy in that locker room and organization knows who he is and what he does and that is why he gets buy in at a rate no other CFL team's coaches can match. I will take a coach whose players will run through brick walls for him over a technically proficient one any day of the week and twice on Sunday. MOS plays by his gut, and sometimes he is wrong, but there can be no questioning that the mistakes he makes do not outweigh the total package of his coaching and I guess that's my biggest issue with the year long MOS witch hunt some posters have been having this past year. We can talk about his roster decisions in the Grey Cup, but I am convinced we aren't even in that game without MOS as our coach.

Of course we had depth alternatives for each of them. That's just a flat out falsehood. We just chose not to go with that depth and dress 3 of our top players because our coach and these players felt they could play through that. Wrong decision in hindsight...definitely. Wrong decision to keep them in the game when we could have pulled them out. Definitely. But that's not a roster management issue, that's a starting lineup issue. We had our best possible replacements available and on the roster to replace them.

I understand it perfectly fine. I, also, understand that our passing game constitutes 60-70% of our play calls in any given game. IDK how you manage to not understand that. Not a joke at all. I just have no axe to grind.