The Winnipeg Blue Bombers lost to the B.C. Lions by a score of 30-6 on Thursday night in front of an announced crowd of 25,662 at IG Field. Below are my thoughts on the game.
Imperfect timing
The Blue Bombers had every reason to win on Thursday night. The Lions were coming off a short week with Dominique Rhymes and Keon Hatcher, two of the best receivers in the league, out of the lineup due to injury.
Then there’s the fact that the Blue Bombers always win at home. The club had won 18 of its last 19 home games heading into Thursday night’s clash with the only loss coming in a fluky overtime matchup against the Montreal Alouettes last summer.
The script virtually writes itself at this point, which is convenient considering most professional screenwriters are currently on strike. Winnipeg wins the battle along the line of scrimmage, limits penalties, gets a couple of takeaways on defence, makes a few big plays on offence, the crowd makes a bunch of noise, and the home team wins. Rinse and repeat.
None of that could have been further from the truth on Thursday as the Lions flipped the script on the home side, handing Winnipeg its first double-digit home loss since Sept. 27, 2019. B.C. was more physical, more disciplined, and made fewer mistakes than their West Division foes, outclassing the Blue Bombers on their home turf.
“It’s better this happens now than in November. We’ve really gotta take this, be critical, and we’ve gotta improve. It’s a good wake-up call. Not that we didn’t expect B.C. to play great, they’re a good team. We just didn’t play well enough. It’s nothing to do with us not thinking they’re a good team, they’re a good team. They’re a great team. We just didn’t play how we should play,” said veteran linebacker Adam Bighill postgame.
“You win this game with field position, turnovers, and points. It’s really that simple. We’ve just gotta not take as many penalties, we’ve gotta win the field position battle, we’ve gotta take the ball away and give it to our offence, and our offence has to do something to score with it and just keep that cycle going. That’s how you win games in this league. It’s all three phases, it’s not just one.”
As badly as Winnipeg played on Thursday night, the performance shouldn’t be cause for immediate concern. The CFL’s 18-game regular season is too long to go without at least one awful performance from each squad. There’s a reason why no team has ever gone a perfect 18-0.
This was the case even last year when the Bombers gave up 48 points to Hamilton when the Tiger-Cats were 3-9. The game was easy to forget because it didn’t affect Winnipeg’s season. They bounced back right away and made it all the way to the Grey Cup, falling one point shy of a three-peat. The pressure is now on to do the same thing in 2023.
Head coach Mike O’Shea was less bullish on using Thursday’s loss as a learning experience, pointing to similar losses the club’s veteran-laden roster has experienced during his tenure in Winnipeg.
“The guys are very experienced,” he said. “They have suffered these types of losses before, although they are rare and have been rare in the last couple years, they have happened. I don’t know that anybody looks at losing like that as being good.”
The Blue Bombers will host B.C. again on Aug. 3 before visiting Vancouver for a third and final regular season meeting on Oct. 6. The club will have to win both games to capture the season series, which could be significant depending on how the standings turn out in the West Division.
“We’ve gotta learn from this right away and take this feeling that we have right now and use it as motivation when we get into that week of preparation (against B.C. in August),” said offensive lineman Patrick Neufeld. “It’s a long season and we’ve got a lot more opponents ahead of us, so we’ll learn from this as much as we can when we move on to our next opponent.”
Always use protection
Zach Collaros faced far more pressure than he’s accustomed to on Thursday night as he was sacked seven times. Canadian defensive end Mathieu Betts was B.C.’s most effective pass-rusher as he recorded three sacks and disrupted a long throw from Collaros early in the fourth quarter.
Perhaps the most egregious play from the offensive line came midway through the third quarter when B.C. rushed only three players on second-and-20 from Winnipeg’s 27-yard line. David Menard immediately got penetration between Jermarcus Hardrick and Patrick Neufeld and sacked Collaros despite being held, a penalty that B.C. elected to decline.
Giving up a sack against three-man pressure is bad enough, but taking a holding penalty along the way? That’s flat-out embarrassing.
“Hats off to B.C., their front played awesome. We didn’t play physical enough, they had a great plan for what we did. We’ve just gotta learn from this,” said Neufeld. “They played physical, they hit us in the mouth. We just didn’t answer them. We didn’t play our style of football that we felt we should have played.”
Winnipeg had only two drives that generated more than 25 yards on the night, both of which stalled in the red zone. The offence also didn’t generate enough big plays to make up for the lack of sustained drives with a 47-yard second-quarter pass to Carlton Agudosi being the only long gain of the night.
B.C.’s defensive backs brought a level of physicality that Winnipeg hasn’t seen in some time, particularly Marcus Sayles and Quincy Mauger, the latter of whom was charged with unnecessary roughness after taking a cheap shot on Dalton Schoen.
Collaros completed 15-of-26 pass attempts for 178 yards and one interception, which was bobbled by Nic Demski before landing in the arms of Ben Hladik. He was mercifully replaced by backup Dru Brown for Winnipeg’s final two drives of the game.
Flag on the play
The Blue Bombers have been one of the league’s least-penalized teams for a number of years but the club lacked discipline on Thursday night and it cost them in a big way.
Abu Daramy-Swaray made his first career CFL start, filling in at boundary cornerback for Demerio Houston. He was isolated in coverage on Alexander Hollins on B.C.’s first possession of the game when the receiver came open on a deep post route. With no help from the safety, Daramy-Swaray panicked and grabbed Hollins before the ball arrived, drawing a 42-yard pass interference penalty.
In the second quarter, Anthony Bennett, the club’s first-round pick out of the University of Regina, took a roughing-the-passer penalty. The rookie beat left tackle Jarell Broxton quickly but took multiple steps to reach the quarterback after the ball was gone. It was an obvious penalty and one that helped B.C. get out of poor field position after starting a drive at their own 22-yard line.
Winnipeg finished the night with a bunch of penalties, though it’s impossible to say exactly how many given that the league’s statistics system is in shambles (more on that in a moment). Regardless, it was a bad night for the club when it came to discipline.
Haba-out that?
Celestin Haba continues to make sensational plays coming off the edge, this time bull-rushing right tackle Kent Perkins into the lap of Vernon Adams Jr. before finishing the play with a sack early in the third quarter. The 23-year-old has to be considered the early front-runner to be named the league’s Most Outstanding Rookie. He’s less than a month into his professional career but he’s been one of the league’s best edge-rushers so far this season.
Holm run
The standout in Winnipeg’s secondary — aside from Deatrick Nichols, who goes unchallenged for quarters at a time — continues to be Evan Holm at field-side halfback, who had another impressive knockdown as he climbed over six-foot-five, 210-pound target Justin McInnis to bat the ball away.
There seemed to be some confusion between Holm and Desmond Lawrence late in the first half on Vernon Adams Jr.’s two-yard touchdown pass to Alexander Hollins. Lawrence was matched up against Hollins, whose route broke inside while Jevon Cottoy’s route broke outward from the slot.
“(Switching was) something we hadn’t talked about. We were man-to-man and (Lawrence) just got picked (by Cottoy),” said Holm. “I think it’s something we’ll trade-off in the future.”
Brady’s bunch
Brady Oliveira was listed as doubtful for Thursday’s game due to a thorax injury he sustained late in last week’s victory over the Saskatchewan Roughriders. He didn’t look worse for wear as he got four touches for 31 yards on Winnipeg’s opening drive, plus an 11-yard reception that was negated by penalty.
As an aside, am I the only one who’d never heard of the thorax until Winnipeg released its first injury report on Monday? A week ago, I would have guessed that the thorax was either that little Dr. Seuss character who speaks for the trees or one of those aliens who fights Iron Man.
Milestones
Zach Collaros started his 100th CFL game on Thursday night and became the 22nd player in league history to reach 25,000 career passing yards. He’s just 21 yards shy of Condredge Holloway for 21st on the all-time list, though he has a ways to go before he can catch Kerry Joseph at 28,097 to crack the top 20.
Adam Bighill recorded six defensive tackles against the Lions, improving his career total to 832. He remains one shy of tying former teammate and Canadian Football Hall of Fame linebacker Solomon Elimimian for sixth-most all-time in CFL history.
On the air
TSN’s television ratings for the first two Thursday night games of the season were underwhelming with an average audience of 250,000. For context, the average audience for Friday and Saturday night broadcasts have been twice that number.
The relatively low viewership for the two Thursday games could simply be chalked up to underwhelming matchups, as neither game featured teams that typically draw well. The first Thursday game between the B.C. Lions and Calgary Stampeders also competed head-to-head against Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final.
It’ll be interesting to see what type of audience Thursday’s game between the Lions and Blue Bombers drew when 3DownNation reports the ratings next week. It’ll be a good barometer of exactly how much Winnipeg’s team is able to attract eyeballs to television screens across the country.
Stats still suck
CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie spoke to the media before Thursday’s game and was asked about the ongoing problems with the league’s statistics system. He indicated that he’s expecting a “reasonably good performance” from the game-day system this week, though it remains somewhat unstable due to the new technology that’s being used.
He believes the game-day system should be working well by early July with player profiles and league-wide statistics being made available later in the month. He rejected the notion that the league’s current lack of statistics should be viewed as a failure, instead suggesting it should be viewed as an investment in the future of the game.
The new system will make use of a computer chip in the football, creating the possibility of generating new statistics the old system never could, such as the velocity of the ball on a pass. This new technology sounds pretty slick, though fans around the league would probably be satisfied with simply knowing how yards their favourite receivers have on the year.
For the record, the live stats weren’t remotely good on Thursday, let alone “reasonably good.” At halftime, the system indicated that Winnipeg took six penalties for 15 yards when in reality, the flags had to have cost them close to 100. There were also entire plays missing from the play list, including Daramy-Swaray’s pass interference penalty from the first quarter.
Next up
The Winnipeg Blue Bombers (2-1) will visit the Montreal Alouettes (1-0) on Saturday, July 1 with kickoff slated for 7:00 p.m. EDT. This will be the first of two meetings between the teams this season, the latter of which will take place at IG Field on Aug. 24.
The Alouettes narrowly won their season-opener over the Ottawa Redblacks ahead of a Week 2 bye. The club will play its second game of the season on Friday night when they visit the Hamilton Tiger-Cats (0-2).
