TrueBlue4ever

Looks ready to go back in.

Streveler limping but getting a tape job.

Chris Ike with the drop. Damien Jackson would have caught that.

Well people complained last year that no new faces got training camp reps and the old boys were gifted spots. This training camp we had open competition for new guys and people unhappy the vets didn’t get reps. Pick your poison. Pre-season too short, need 4 games.

Lawler broken arm.

60-3? Winning “the hard way” again I see.

Brady O

Wow, good move to get more network eyeballs on the league, although since Bell owns both CTV and TSN, doubt there is an increase in TV rights payments. Still a step in the right direction. Keep this up and Speedflex will have to go back to complaining about Ambrosie’s scarves in lieu of anything substantive! (I kid, still plenty of legit gripes to make).

LaPo 16-28 Osh 23-31 (but he was also 16-28 through the same number of games) Glenn was not the QB in 2011. He got hurt in 2007 when Doug Berry was the head coach.

Didn’t help that he had an injured starting QB almost every year he coached. But one of his biggest flaws, self-admittedly, was that he was a micro manager as a head coach and did not put trust in his assistants to run their units, especially the offence. When he was simply the OC, whatever deficiencies with the play calling that people disliked, the results did quite often place the Bombers near the top of the league in offensive performance.

I guess look at BC’s crowds with their concert game attendance for a possible answer. How many new fans would the Headstones draw, as a comparable? Or the Tragically Hip? This is about selling one game experience and bringing in advertising dollars, not creating a new football fan based on a concert performance.

Remember when Justin Beiber played the halftime show and was booed mercilessly in stadium? That performance was the high point of the TV ratings that day, with 6.1 million eyeballs (the game itself drew 5.5 million). When Keith Urban played Calgary in 2019, the female audience at home (including all the wives at my Grey Cup party) suddenly started watching more in earnest (and they hung around for the cringe interview). As JCon noted, the show is meant to draw new eyeballs and boost ratings, which in turn means more advertising dollars.

Yeah the cable is a bit annoying. Hear you on that.

Lower deck or upper? Mine are upper deck and I love them, but now the field view is obstructed.

With the addition of the new Ring of Honour and Grey Cup Championship signage, the signs are not flush with the concrete rim but are about a foot higher. I have front row seats and instead of seeing the bench from my seat, I now can barely see the field numbers unless I lean forward. The bench and sideline hashmarks are out of my line of sight. My wife can only see half the field if she sits properly in her seat. The engineers did not think this one through when they put up the framing beams. Expect a bunch of complainant calls to the Bomber office after the game. Every fan I spoke to in the upper deck area around me is not happy. Fix should be easy enough. Lower the signage to be flush with the concrete rim, or raise every seat in the upper deck 5 inches, like they did at Canada Life Centre when the new loge seating blocked the view.

It would be a refreshing change if that was the case. I think sadly Mike has a point that winning trumps all in sports and bad behaviour gets glossed over with winning. I mean, Michael Vick killed dogs and went to jail, and even he got chances with three more teams, made the pro bowl, and was awarded NFL Comeback Player of the Year. What should be required at a minimum for Kelly to return would be a very transparent showing of the steps he took to rehabilitate and an honest and public measure of contrition for what has happened. Given that he is still involved in a civil suit where he proclaims his innocence, I don’t see that happening. If the CFL follows most other pro leagues their approach will more likely be “Come back quietly and we hope the story drifts away over time with no oxygen to feed it in the media and fan bases.” Maybe they will find an out in saying “he has not satisfactorily done with is required by him” and they extend the indefinite suspension so long as the civil suit is ongoing, the league moves on all year without him, and he has no job opportunity next year and fades away to the USFL or whatever secondary US league exists now.

I think Booch’s idea is a neat twist, maybe with a 20-30 minute run time instead of 60. If we could eliminate game delays like commercial breaks that would keep the length more reasonable, but the TV and radio folks would never sign off on that, the league isn’t going to run those game at a financial loss. Not sure what the answer is, but some nice outside the box thinking here to create a more useful pre-season.

Those games would take forever to play, wouldn’t they? Isn’t the average NFL game actually only 11 minutes of live game clock action for a 3.5 hour telecast? I’m with WBBfan, more pre-season games, not longer games. 3 minimum with a neutral site game, or 4 (having said that I remember how by the 4th pre-season game back in the 1980’s people were ready to see the real stuff, and the last game was essentially all starters anyway). But I agree that there aren’t enough reps for the new guys who come in looking to take a job, so any change is worth looking into.

Your post yesterday seemed to say that though. Now maybe your words don’t mean what your words mean, and this opinion is misunderstood. But I just wanted to quote your post directly and not be seen as twisting anything or misrepresenting you.

OK, but that’s what I am asking. Who? Pigrome is the only notable name that jumps to mind. And he wasn’t going to beat out Collaros or Brown, and he failed at his chance to be the short yardage WB and was replaced by the veteran incumbent Prukop who did a much better job at the sneaks. And then when he went to Ottawa he did nothing special there. I’m trying to recall a cut who went somewhere else and made an impact and was an obvious mistake in being cut. We hold on to vets for sure, but do we really know that better options have been ignored? Only proof would be if they got scooped and outperformed elsewhere. Otherwise maybe the lack of better newer recruits who should bump the old guard falls on the scouts who aren’t finding better talent.

I imagine if a team today said “we are calling ourselves the Penguins or the Maple Leafs” there would be a ton of scorn online, yet we don’t really hear how goofy it is. Don Cheery pointed this out when the Ducks branded themselves. A name is just a name at the end of the day.

So in the last 5 years, which newbie player cut in training camp by the Bombers has gone elsewhere and become an impact player?

Thank you. This is an argument I can accept. I have never said O’Shea is infallible, so making that assumption about my post is inaccurate and unfair. But I have found more than a bit of the criticism of him to lack perspective and be so inflammatory as to border on the absurd. His roster has been called garbage, putrid, a joke, and other over the top things. And it has been even stated that O’Shea should be shown the door by the club if he can’t smarten up and be better. And when you suggest that he has given away our competitive advantage, a quick check of the team’s results shows just how competitive we have in fact been, as to underlie the lack of perspective on the big picture, that he and the players have put themselves in position to win 4 straight Grey Cups because of the strength of the roster some claim is so flawed. Just as you say he did not set the team up in the best way to succeed, I could say that some players did not perform like they should have in spite of the coaching, critical mental and physical errors cost us as much as if not more than coaching or roster strategy did, and just plain luck played a big hand in determining the outcome. Neither of us is 100% right or wrong with our assessment. Where the “bad roster” argument gets out of hand for me is where it is suggested it is all part of an O’Shea agenda to deliberately undermine the team (and his own job) with a weaker roster (which is only based on opinions by certain posters who claim without hard evidence that player X who we haven’t seen play is clearly better than player B who has been on the roster) in an effort to get on a soapbox and proclaim, what exactly? And that he needs to be called out and explain himself to justify his decisions, and the media are cowards with no balls for not doing so. Well forgive me for saying I don’t think he really needs to say too much to defend himself on this issue, since his job is to win games and field the most competitive team he can, whether someone likes the way in which he does it or not. And by that measure alone he is about as unassailable as any coach we have ever had here, on par with Grant and maybe ahead of Murphy in terms of winning and success. I would love a good measured debate on it, but just like some deal in absolutes, some deal on hyperbole and unrealistic expectations. People say we are good but not good enough, I would say that we are much better than merely “good”, that those people think that anything short of absolute perfection is mediocre, and wrongly feel he deserves to be called to the carpet for not achieving an essentially impossible standard. Just the way I see it.

“Coach O’Shea, you turned around a club that had missed the playoffs in 5 of the previous 6 years and was an all-time worst 3-15 before your arrival. You’ve had 7 straight 10+win seasons in a row, an all-time club record, and 7 straight playoff appearances, and you’ve been coach of the year more than any other coach since you started 9 years ago. In that time your roster has featured 15 CFL award winners and 43 CFL all-stars, which is tops in the league. No team has won more in the last 7 years, and other than the Stanps, no team has won more since you started your head coaching gig. You coached the team to back-to-back Grey Cup victories. You’re the 4 time defending Western Division champions, something this league hasn’t seen in over 40 years. No other team has more playoff wins, Grey Cup appearances or Championships during your tenure. You are on track this season to become the all-time winningest coach in the club’s 93 year history. It’s obvious that you are failing at putting out the most optimum roster to smugly satisfy a personal Canada-first agenda that is failing us competitively. Explain yourself! Asking on behalf of fans who know better”

Is he also selling gold running shoes, bibles, and self portrait trading cards as payment for his private e-mail access? I’ve heard rumours.