One day before the Blue Bombers blew a 10-point 4th quarter lead in their season opener against the Montreal Alouettes, Jim Chliboyko wrote up his thoughts on the 2013 CFL season in Winnipeg.
Bombers start 2013 with cracks in the foundation. Literally.
And Investors Group Field has no apostrophes
by Jim Chliboyko
It’s become part of a classy tradition in modern-day Rupert’s Land; the Blue Bombers let go of a seemingly loyal soldier mere weeks before training camp, thus ensuring that said cut player won’t be able to get any work elsewhere in the approaching season.
This is the second time in three years that this has happened in Bomberland. In 2011, utility fullback and versatile Canadian Jon Oosterhuis was released in June by Bombers GM Joe Mack, a move which was whispered to have been particularly malicious at worst, unfeeling at best. He evidently failed his physical, but there was chatter that the release was a classless move, coming after an earlier re-signing, with the failed physical (old knee injury, which had been cleared many times before) used as an excuse to cut the player.
This year, back-up quarterback Alex Brink was released in April. Evidently, this is a late point in the off-season to release a quarterback, and it followed the earlier cutting of Joey Elliott (who was then scooped up by the BC Lions), a pivot who alternately posts award-winning weeks (getting Player of the Week honours twice in a couple years), followed by an interception-laden furball the next week.
Brink did get a look from Toronto, for a quick try-out that lasted only a few weeks. So, stay classy, Winnipeg.
More after the jump.
Sure, football is a business, and it’s a cruel one at that. But it’s been remarked in a number of ways about how the local football club has been metaphorically dropping the ball, whether it’s mistreatment of players, the mishandling of how the new stadium was rolled out (a year late resulting in the loss of a championship game), or the heavy-handed mistreatment of fans by game-day security personnel, including searching people for bringing –horrors!– bottled water into the stadium.
And, now, after a 6-12 season in which it became apparent that the 2011 Eastern finalists had become one of the worst teams in the league, the city is getting restless. They have a new stadium (Investors Group Field), a bigger gift shop than before and a healthier and thinner Buck Pierce at the helm. He’s so thin, he looks like his teeth have grown.
After appearing in, and losing, the 2011 Grey Cup game against BC (an appearance made possible by a fantastic start to the season), the team floundered in 2012. The league’s schedule had the Bombers playing the first four games of the season away, to accommodate the move into the new stadium. Which never happened. By the time of the Labour Day Classic in Regina, they were 2-6. They were due for a win, and promptly lost 52-0.
Full disclosure: I was in South Dakota that weekend, checking out a rock carving of presidents, among other things, thank God, so I missed the slaughter. But I digress.
The off-season after a brutal season was marked by… no significant trades, no shocking player movement and the arrest of DB Jonathan Hefney for pot possession, who never learned the main moral from the Lost television program: if you get arrested (for anything), within weeks you will either get shot by nervous father Michael Dawson or be nailed by the Smoke Monster.
So, how did the pre-season work out for the Bombers? Can they get back on track after standing pat with the same squad that got steamrolled last year?
Not that the preseason is a barometer of anything, but they were outscored 76-6 in two games, Buck Pierce didn’t complete a pass, and they didn’t score a single touchdown. Against the B Unit of both the Ti-Cats and Argos. In fact, not one of their four quarterbacks impressed.
The new stadium? It’s cool, at least. On a personal note, Nick Moore of the BC Lions “liked” my Instagram photo of the new stadium (All Rights Reserved), I took with my new iPhone fish-eye lens. (True story.)
Perhaps the best thing about the preseason was the fact that it gave the Bombers a chance to test drive their new digs. For the non-Winnipegger readers: the new stadium is located at the University of Manitoba, the campus of which is in the southern suburbs of town, and which has approximately two or three ways in and out, not including the Red River.
So, the first pre-season game was a gong show, on and off the field. Gridlock delayed much of the fans and staff from getting to the church on time for the first game against the Argos on June 12. People reported being stuck on “express” buses for up to 90 minutes. Many people reportedly took bikes, but others thought they would chance finding a parking spot, despite the fact that authorities openly warned people, over and over, all spring, that there were only 5,000 parking spots. Busses and cars crammed south Winnipeg. The Bombers ended up being featured, next day, in non-sports sections of the local newspapers, which is never a good thing.
In turn, staff delayed meant that the concession stands were undermanned, which meant that the concourses were jammed with lineups for beer and pretzels (at least you can still watch the game from the new open-air concession area). But, by the time of the big Taylor Swift concert on June 22nd, many of the bugs had apparently, and genuinely, been ironed out and the stadium made the news again—in this case, for having everything go so smoothly.
At the very least, the Bombers scored the first points in the new stadium, a Justin Palardy field goal. But let the record show that the first touchdown scored at Investors Group Field was scored by the Argos’ Gerald Riggs Jr., son of Pro Bowler and Super Bowl ring owner Gerald Riggs.* (Though, strangely, nobody ever really counts an exhibition score as a first; Nik Antropov was credited with the first Jets’ 2.0 goal in 2011, in their first regular season goal against Montreal, even though Evander Kane/Paul Postma scored the Jets’ first pre-season goal [in two simultaneous split-squad games versus Columbus].)
But a week later, the same day the Bombers lost the second pre-season game to the Hamilton Ti-Cats, again by the score of 52-0, the other big story in the news was that cracks had non-metaphorically appeared in the stadium’s new foundation. Which apparently is still under warranty and will be repaired by the builder at no extra costs. But the optics, the optics!
Perhaps Alex Brink will have the last laugh.
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*I got this information from an online CBC box score. The league summary of the game actually does not mention Riggs at all, and TSN said that Riggs’ TD made it 7-0, when, in fact, it made it 7-3. At least, according to CBC. Folks, I know it’s just the pre-season, but, really, you’re not a 17-year-old pretzel vendor stuck on a bus. You should have your act together already.