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August 25, 2021

“You have to really snap and clear”

It’s been the mantra of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers for the better part of five years now and certainly since Mike O’Shea arrived to lead the rebuild back in 2014.

The goals each week are simple: win the turnover battle, play complimentary football and own the line of scrimmage. In short, it’s old school or ‘smash-mouth’ football and critical to making it work is to deliver more shots to the chops of each week’s opponent than you take – better to give than to receive, so to speak.

Well, the Bombers were back on the practice field Wednesday for the first time since suffering their first defeat of 2021 in last Saturday’s 30-23 loss to the Toronto Argonauts with two objectives after taking more shots than delivering. First, get back to playing the trademark Bombers brand of football – finishing blocks and pounding the football along the ground, coupled with a nasty gang-tackling approach on defence. And, second, to make corrections and then flush what happened in Toronto to get ready for Sunday’s home date with the Calgary Stampeders. ‘Snap and clear’ is how Bombers quarterback Zach Collaros put it on Wednesday.

“You want to do everything you can to help your team win,” he said. “And it’s never a good feeling when you feel like you’re leaving points out there, when you feel that you’re not pulling your weight to help the other parts of the team.

“At the same time, we had a good talk – a lot of us one-on-one, too – about how to deal with situations like that. I struggle with that as well. You can’t get down. You can’t get too frustrated. You have to really snap and clear. It’s something we talked about in camp – you can’t let those things compound into something worse.”

Collaros, as he did in the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s loss, talked about the team’s inefficiency on first down which led to half of the team’s 14 possessions being two-and-outs and a dramatic discrepancy in time of possession, with Toronto having the ball for 39 minutes and 46 seconds to Winnipeg’s 20:14.

“It’s something we’ll learn from. Obviously you never want to start the game with three or four two-and-outs and have as many two-and-outs as we did,” said Collaros. “If that does happen and we start two and out this week we can’t get frustrated about it. We have to get back to the bench and it’s ‘What’s our next first-down call? What’s our-second-and medium call? What’s our second and long if we’re in that situation?’ and then just execute.

“This game is simple: you have to execute the play that’s being called and hope you get the right plan.”

Prior to Saturday, the Bombers had last lost a game back on October 19, 2019 in a 37-33 loss to the Stampeders in Calgary. The club then won its regular season finale against the same Stamps, before reeling of three straight to win the Grey Cup and opening 2021 with two more wins. That six-game win streak, coupled with the pandemic and the cancellation of the 2020 Canadian Football League, covered a span of 672 days.

Asked if the loss on Saturday might have allowed any doubt to creep in to Bomberland, Collaros said:

“We have to have that snap and clear mentality. Even last week we came in after the game, we were critical about the film and like I’ve said in weeks prior to this, Coach O’Shea does such a great job of showing where the physicality was in the game – or lack thereof – the football IQ things and some of the plays where if we would have executed better we probably would have won the football game. We were critical of it, we learned from it. The last few days a lot of us have been in the building preparing for this week. We’re on to Calgary.

“Since we were kids the No. 1 thing is you want to show the other team that you’re a physical football team. You want to out-physical them, you want to out-condition them. It’s the oldest thing in the book. It’s in our DNA here in this organization and it’s no surprise that guys say the game thing because it’s something we talk about often and coach O’Shea really preaches.”