It’s not so common a narrative that it has become cliché, but it is a theme that often follows around every Canadian Football League team at this time of year – and especially so in a rivalry game with win-or-start-packing consequences. Throughout this past week, Winnipeg Blue Bombers coaches and players were asked to take the temperature of their squad in the days leading up to Sunday’s Western Final against the Saskatchewan Roughriders at IG Field.
It was a natural line of questioning, especially given the Bombers clinched first place in the West Division way back on October 23rd and have been gearing down and then back up again for this game for the better part of six weeks. On the whole vibe thing… well, no one does big-picture takes better than Drew Wolitarsky, and so we begin with the veteran receiver.
“It’s a good feeling, man. Good vibrations, as The Beach Boys would say,” he said earlier this week “It’s a testament to the team. We just love to work and play football.
“We aren’t front-runners, we aren’t people who give up if we’re behind. We just play consistent football and that’s been something that’s helped us get here and it’s something Coach O’Shea preaches: consistency and showing up to work every day with the same energy and focus. That’s what we have and that’s what we’re going to keep using. It’s not a science necessarily, it’s just the work ethic that we have.”
If there’s any way to best sum up the practice week that was, that might be it. Essentially, it looked no different than most of the others this season, and that speaks to a couple of things: First, it reinforces the club’s decision to return as many core veterans as possible from the 2019 Grey Cup championship side; and second, it validates the template they began to master at the end of ’19 and through into this season.
“We’re a team that’s been together for a long time,” said veteran guard Pat Neufeld. “We’ve seen a lot of different things – new things, old things – and having the ability to bring the new guys up to where a lot of the vets are is huge for us.
“We know how big a game this is. But if this makes sense, we won’t make it bigger than it has to be. There’s all this hype around it, but for us it really is the next game on our schedule. This team really relies on its preparation and our day-to-day process. There’s no secrets, no shortcuts to being successful, especially against Saskatchewan.”
“We know it’s going to be a physical, gritty battle. It’s just a blueprint, but it doesn’t guarantee anything,” added right tackle Jermarcus Hardrick. “It lets us know what we can achieve if we work hard, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. I know there’s a team over there working hard and they’re ready to come over here and hit us in the mouth.”
The Bombers swept the season series with the Riders, led the CFL in scoring, surrendered the fewest points, were the least-penalized team, authored the best turnover ratio, surrendered the fewest sacks and were unbeaten at home this year. All that makes the circumstances under which the Bombers enter this year’s playoffs so much different than in 2019, when they rolled into the postseason as a third-place squad and with Zach Collaros having just one start under his belt with his new team.
There’s also this: that big, black cloud which hovered over this franchise for eons – a championship drought that had dated back to 1990 – is now long gone.
“It’s like anything else, once you know how to do something you know what work is required to do it again,” said Wolitarsky. “The drought… we all felt like it was this curse. People were talking about it; fans were talking about it. But I don’t think it’s a curse, I think it’s just like an inability to see or believe you can. That culture’s been changed. We can and we will.
“And so, to win (in 2019) that is like, ‘OK, it doesn’t take a miracle, it doesn’t take a curse to be broken. It just takes this, this and this. Let’s just consistently keep doing this. This is winning football, and this will help us to continue to do that.’ Everyone’s bought into that and that’s a big thing, too. We’ve bought into that. We’ve put the work into that and we’re reaping the rewards. We have to continue to do that to continue to win.”
