Arthur Ward/CFL.ca
From the second the information went out into the Twittersphere, the guessing and second-guessing began.
In the Riders’ final practice of the week before their playoff date with Winnipeg on Sunday, Brandon Bridge took a good share of first-team reps at quarterback. When coach Chris Jones got in front of the media, the questions piled up.
“Is Zach still your starter in your mind right now?”
“How’s the health of Zach right now?”
“Do you know who’s going to start and you just don’t want to tell us?”
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Jones wouldn’t answer definitively.
Instantly, the wheels started turning in the heads of CFL fans and media alike. Will Collaros not play? Is he injured? Is this just what Jones wants us to think? Is it some kind of head game?
Watching it unfold from Toronto, Jim Barker heard a familiar tune.
“That comes from Don Matthews,” Barker said. “Whether it was an advantage or not, he wanted his players to believe it was an advantage. And they did.”
When it comes to the aforementioned Matthews, the Canadian Football Hall of Fame CFL coach that passed away last year, and both parties involved in Sunday’s Western Semi-Final, Barker speaks from a place of knowledge. He’s worked with all of them.
Barker first worked with Matthews in Toronto with the Argonauts in 1997 and 1998, before joining his staff in 2002. That’s where Jones joined the team as a d-line coach. Barker and Jones of course, worked with Winnipeg head coach Mike O’Shea in Toronto. Barker ran the show and Jones was the defensive coordinator and assistant GM. O’Shea was the special teams coach.
Barker sees these will he/won’t he scenarios play out and he sees Matthews living on in a league that he won 231 games in. It’s not so much about the media and Twittersphere running through all of the what-if scenarios. That’s probably a nice bonus, but it’s not the intention.
“It’s more about your players believing that they’re getting every possible advantage and that the coach is doing everything possible so that they could have the best chance to win,” Barker said.
“And Don Matthews was the master at that and that’s where Chris learned it.”
Given their familiarity with one another, Barker figured O’Shea wouldn’t be rattled at all about the questions that came from Friday’s Riders practice.
“O’Shea knows him,” Barker said. “The bottom line is if Zach’s not playing it doesn’t matter what Winnipeg thinks.
“O’Sh, I’m positive has told his team, ‘Trust me, Collaros is playing, this is what Chris does.’
“And that’s just like Don. Don would occasionally put something out there that really makes little or no sense and he would make that happen so that people couldn’t say that stuff about him (that he was making things up all the time).”
There’s a gamesmanship that goes with these things, it’s put to him.
“I think that’s a fair word for it,” Barker said. “Gamesmanship.”
For fans trying to get to the bottom of it and for those whose jobs it is to find truth in that type of gamesmanship, it can get tricky.
“You figure out what’s best for their team, that’s probably what’s accurate,” Barker said.
“I mean, everybody has heard that Zach is going to be fine but you’re dealing with a head injury, so you just don’t know.
“(Jones is) going to put him behind closed doors as much as possible. He wants his team to believe that they have an advantage, because he’s their coach and that’s the way Don was.
“With Don, everybody believed that we were at an advantage because Don was our coach and Don was going to give us every mental advantage that we could get. That’s what Chris does, which he should. It’s what I did.”
