Chris Tanouye/CFL.ca
The truth is what the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are after and they sure do hope that what they find is the truth they want.
“Truth” is a word I’ve heard Mike O’Shea say a few times this season, and the head coach used it again, this week, as he responded to a question about last Saturday’s breathtaking loss to the Ottawa REDBLACKS.
“Win or lose, good or bad, get it looked after immediately,” said O’Shea after practice earlier this week. “Find the truth. Find the reasons why you win or lose and make some corrections and move on.”
In letting a nineteen point lead slip away – sixteen points inside the final three minutes of that game – in Ottawa, and ultimately losing to what had previously been a one-win team with a first time starting quarterback, the Blue Bombers have had some hard truths to look at leading up to this week’s game against the winless Edmonton Elks.
“Same way we look at every other game,” was O’Shea’s response to a question about how he and his team would view their stunning loss.
“Never different. Why would it be?”
RELATED
» Preview: Elks, Bombers West Division showdown kicks off Week 7
» Sign up and play CFL Fantasy
» Power Rankings: Yes, this one was fun
» Get your tickets for 2023 games now
» Visit the Game Zone and play Pick ‘Em presented by Old Dutch
That’s not a surprise coming from a coach who has always preached process, instilling a methodical approach to highs and to lows.
“Part of my job is to sort of take the temperature of the guys as we enter in the next day,” said O’Shea. “You wander around and you quickly realize that they’re ready to move on. They’re ready to get goin’. But they’ve practiced that for a pile of years, right?”
A one-off? You could shake that off pretty easily, shocking as it might be. Last season, in September, the Bombers inexplicably got blown out by a lesser Hamilton Ticats team, yet marched to a third consecutive Grey Cup appearance. In August of 2019, the year of their first of two straight championships, Winnipeg somehow squandered a twenty to nothing lead against an oh-and-six Toronto Argonauts squad, losing 28-27.
This season, however, instead of one weird ‘outlier,’ the Blue Bombers have two on their account already. A Week 3 blowout loss to the BC Lions – at home, for gawd’s sake – had many of us concluding the Bombers were no longer the easy choice when it came to identifying the CFL’s elite team. Now, the Ottawa loss has brought up the question of whether this year’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers might be merely mortal.
If they should happen to come up lacking against a team that has so far shown a propensity for beating only themselves, that question will have been answered in the affirmative. That’d be a truth the Winnipeg Blue Bombers were not expecting to uncover, and I doubt they will. On the other sideline, the Elks are facing their own hard truths and seem plum out of answers, other than putting one step in front of the other. How do they get out of it?
“I don’t know,” said Edmonton head coach Chris Jones, with a wry smile, on Tuesday. Maybe it was a grimace. “If you got the answer to it let me know.”
For the Elks, even a loss could be seen as a win, this week, provided they hang tough with the Bombers and show some signs of forward progress after a terrible, oh and six start to a season that was supposed to have seen them already exhibiting those steps.
For the Bombers, it’s not just a win that they’re after.
At home, against the CFL’s basement dweller, coming off a loss in a game they all but had in the bag, they’re looking for something dominant, especially on defence, where a star-studded crew full of familiar names like Jefferson and Jeffcoat, and Bighill and Alexander, followed more than forty-five minutes of ironclad rule by inexplicably bowing to the demands of a late-surging Ottawa attack.
Winnipeg’s offence – particularly the running game – stalled last week, leading to questions (fairly or unfairly) about an aging offensive line and its abilities to continue the dominance it has seen over a number of seasons now.
For O’Shea, it matters not, he says, how the job gets done. So long as it does.
“In our room we’re like a chameleon,” O’Shea told reporters. “We’re gonna win a game any way we need to. From one week to the next. It doesn’t need to look it did the last week. It doesn’t need to look like it did last year, the year before or whatever. It just needs to look like a win.”
I’ve a suspicion that’s not exactly the truth, at least not the greater one, and not this week. A scratchy, struggle of a victory against the Elks won’t satisfy Winnipeg fans nor, I suspect, will it satisfy the Blue Bombers themselves.
If this game furnishes them with the truth they want, the truth they expect, then the Winnipeg Blue Bombers will move ahead with confirmation of what they figure they already knew.
If it’s an unwanted truth, though, it’d be one that they haven’t had to handle for a number of years now.
