Angry Bomber Fans

The Crappy Honker Award

by H.F. Salisbury

In the great tradition of recognizing “Cactus” Jack Wells and the Happy Honker Award given out on C-Job radio here in Winnipeg, I present for you yet another installment of the Happy Crappy Honker Award given to an individual(s) for a fantastic unforgivable performance directly related to the continued floundering of our once beloved Winnipeg Blue Bombers.  This award is handed out after every Winnipeg Blue Bomber loss.

Against the Toronto Argonauts, we have several potential Crappy award winners.  It could have been almost any Bomber who “played” in the first quarter of Friday night’s game after all, NOBODY showed up and the Blue spotted the Double Blue a 9 – 0 lead.  Blame it on Serna for missing a field goal… nope, too easy.  Perhaps one of the Bombers who coughed up the ball for a turnover?  All solid candidates for the award.  However….  

Picture it, the start of the 4^th quarter, Winnipeg battled back to a 27 – 24 lead, Serna lines up to kick a 45 yard field goal and I remember thinking… Well, up by six with momentum would be good, at the very least a single to make it a lead by more than a field goal.  But no, not today.  Serna missed and the ball was run back 117 yards.  I say it again… 117 YARDS!!!!  For those of you new to CFL football, you need to know the field is only 110 yards long between the end zones.  Using higher math, that means seven yards deep in his own end zone, Chad Owens burned all Bomber Special Teams Members for a touchdown.  For those counting, that’s three runbacks all for majors in two games(?!?!?).  That my friends is putrid. 

Congratulations to the Winnipeg Blue Bomber Special Teams coverage squad.  Your “performance” has earned this week’s Crappy Honker Award and was instrumental in costing us a win against a division rival.

The PacNu Report

Welcome to the 1st PacNu Report of the 2010 season. PacNu wasn’t able to submit his picks last week, but is back this year to give you the quick low down on the CFL and the WCLC.

Despite his love for the Blue & Gold, PacNu believes Toronto will cover the 10.5  spread the WCLC is giving them.

He thinks Hamilton will beat Calgary on Proline. (Win by 3.5 is all you need). Win is paying 2.60.

Know as the King of Ties (with a whopping Proline win this winter. Picture to come soon), PacNu is thinking that both Sask/BC & Montreal/Edmoton will be Proline ties.

Special World Cup pick - Netherlands on Sunday to win. Paying 3.15 on the WCLC.

Good luck!

A Fine Start

by Mike Alexander

With Hamilton Ti Cat quarterback Kevin Glenn looking like his former self back in the dismal 2008 Season in which he was run out of town last Friday night in Winnipeg, it was rewarding to sweat it out and take in a season opener last week that offered fans all sorts of promise for the 2010/11 Winnipeg Blue Bomber season.

While it’s hard to hang onto emerging factoids and to pick out any emerging patterns that might point towards a bright future for the Blue this season, it was apparent that there is a new regime both upstairs and on the field. With 300 yards in the air and 100 on the ground, newcomer Buck Pierce spent his evening having fun and showing Winnipeg that he might just have what it takes to lead his team to an interesting season using a huge playbook that had Ti Cat defenders unable to stop his cool, controlled pace, resulting in a 49-29 victory for Winnipeg.

It wasn’t all amazing. It was disappointing to see Fred Reid unable to explode in Hamilton territory despite several carries in which he would frequently only be able to gain more than one or two yards. Sure he had 98 yards rushing last week, but he will have to step up against a Toronto D that only allowed Calgary one major score in Toronto’s opening match. And while we didn’t suffer tremendously for it, taking ten penalties in a game will end up costing the team dearly should the Bombers be unable to control themselves under pressure. On the flipside, it was exciting to watch the Bombers capitalize on Hamilton’s equally penalized squad, taking advantage of fumbles and an ineffective Hamilton offence that saw Glenn violently driven into the turf enough times to keep a smile on my face for the rest of the night.

One of the main stories of the game was how the Winnipeg defensive line looked good. On one end, Odell Willis was fast and brutal and on the other end Phillip Hunt emerged as one of the fastest defensive ends in the league. Glenn was made to suffer and Hamilton never really stood a chance.

NFL flunky Cleo Lemon is new at the QB position for Toronto. Last week against Calgary, he went 16 for 28 passes for 192 yards against Calgary, throwing far too many fumbles and picks. While his numbers are not unusual for the hapless Argos, Winnipeg should be able to find success against Lemon who will likely need a couple more weeks to find his rhythm.

Look for Buck Pierce to stretch the field for guys like Edwards who will be expected to make big catches to lead an effective air game against a Toronto defense that will end up misdirected and tired if Pierce is able to successfully confuse and wear down the Toronto D.  

Based on what I say in the first week of action, Winnipeg should walk away with this game and force the rest of the league to start paying attention to what’s going on over here on Maroons Road.

Doomed From the Start?

by Mike Alexander

It’s been a long seven months since the drama of the 2009/10 Winnipeg Blue Bomber season mercifully seemed to calm down. It took the arrest of our soon to be ex-head coach for beating the shit out of his girlfriend to bring any sense of relief over the humiliation and low quality exhibited week after week last season. While I feel bad for her, seeing Coach Mike Kelly finally pour the bleach into his own Kool Aid was a gift from Papa Smurf himself. The chatter throughout Winnipeg had become mean-spirited as angry fans huddled around their merchandise roaring away in bonfires with their eyes as blood shot and crazy looking, almost as if our pillows had been farted on for an entire season under Kelly.

Argumentative call in shows screaming at fans, the Pacman saga, the gutting of the team and the carnage that came with  public humiliations of guys like Steven LeFors, and the release of a QB that would later come back to knock Winnipeg out of the playoffs. There was an inexperienced offense that averaged only pocket change of minutes on the field per game that managed the fewest offensive plays in the CFL last year. The Bombers had a run game that ended up averaging 60 yards per outing. Did all of this actually take place? It seems so surreal now.

Enter the new coach, Paul Lapolice, a new club president and a new QB Buck Pierce. To an extent, long suffering fans have something to consider now other than utter failure with these faces that now run things in this town. Pierce, formerly a BC Lion, has a history of questionable durability, yet possesses an accurate arm and fairly decent completion averages. Thankfully, there is no longer a need to weep inconsolably at the thought of Stefan Lefors or Michael Bishop leading the team. We hear promises of shotgun formation, from a coach with experience in the offensive department. There is promise, they say. I feel the same as anyone about “promise”. Anyone actually reading this with a degree of seriousness is likely extremely patient with hopes that feel like a stiletto lodged in your back. The aspirations we have felt, the experience and depth that we’ve been promised from this team for years now, it’s all been smoke and mirrors ground up and added to an overflowing bowl of disappointment and anguish.

The fact of the matter is that Hamilton are much more stable team than the Bombers with Offensive and defensive lines that were all here last year. However the Ti Cats are far from the best that the East has to offer with an offense that can be either dynamic and dangerous, or flat and ineffective. I think it’s only fair to give the re-vamped Bombers a few games to become a cohesive unit, in spite of the fact that Coach Lapo insists that the Bombers will come out strong and early. The task is as clear as it was last season. It’s worse than spinning a broken record. We need more than 100 yards passing by the half in order to bring it to Glenn and the Ti Cats. And please, can we lose the consecutive 2 and outs? If the Offensive line is able to pressure Glenn in the pocket local fans will watch him fold just like in the not-so-good old days.

We have when we screamed for last season: new Bomber regime both on and off the field. What will these changes bring? For me, any sense of potential I feel will be the kind that will stretch out over the first three or four games. Can it possibly be worse than last year? I can’t imagine how. Can the 2010/11 Blue Bombers develop and become dynamic this season? Why not? If the Saskatchewan Roughriders can’t figure out how to count to 13, anything is possible in the CFL.

A Coward that Would Apall the Devil Is Bid Farewell.

By Mike Alexander

I had just finished putting memories of this years’ season down for a long winters’ nap when my inbox suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree yesterday around noon. I thought that Tee Martin and others might have been trying to pull a fast one on me for reasons that didn’t make very much sense. But a couple of clicks later and I almost swallowed my tongue. It was like reading the end of Macbeth for the first time. My copy of it even had a picture of Macbeth’s decapitated skull on a stake in it for good measure and intellectual enrichment. How bizarre indeed to discover that the Mike Kelly era of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers was in the process of grinding to a full stop before my very eyes.

The details will emerge and they will be brutal. Moral compasses no longer work, civilizations have literally evaporated, parents are refusing to let their children out anymore and I have never heard the expression “community owned football team” uttered so many times in my life. Very soon now, jubilant mobs will fill barstools across the city as a savage, vindicating celebration takes over, placing every car on the road in serious jeopardy of being torched tonight. There is a corpse that needs to be ripped to pieces and everyone wants a slice of the action.

Last night, Bombers chairman Ken Hildahl look like a man blacked out drunk on the blood of a murder victim as he announced that Mike Kelly had been relieved of his duties. Anyone on Maroons road must have been cowering under desk tables as a grizzly massacre took place. Long time CEO and President Lyle Bauer was the first to go and before nails could even be hammered into his coffin, word got out that Mike Kelly had been arrested outside of Philly as a result of pounding on his ex girlfriend who was in the process of getting her things out of his place.

It’s an obvious breach of contract and the actions of a desperate failure of a man. A man who gutted a team, threw in an unqualified quarterback, who benched veterans, who was unable to find any answers offensively all season long and who fielded a team that somehow managed to fare worse than the utterly dismal 2008 season.

It was a terrible year with a terrible human being at the helm.

I gave him a chance to win my heart. For four games (maybe more), I listened to the skeptics who accused guys like me of drinking Mike Kelly’s Kool-Aid. The team almost showed promise today, I told myself. I kept looking for signs of life and if there were, it wasn’t long until the flat line could not be ignored any longer. Being that people in Philadelphia boo Santa and cheer when hockey players break their necks on the ice, I got a kick out of Kelly’s outbursts. I think local media and fans of sports in general all need to be told to eat a piece of shit from time to time. But the play on the field got worse and worse. Pre-game shows became things of dark embarrassment for your humble narrator as sportscasters took turns summing up another week of dismal failure as Winnipeg prepared to get torn to pieces and then stomped on the field. There were threats, bad feelings, and angry rogue bands of drunks with weapons in Bomber jerseys making life in this town terrible for everyone. Who could blame us? We were confused, clinically depressed and we saw no way out of this terrible leg hold trap that Mike Kelly had snapped on us. We drove around town drinking beer in the back of pickup trucks and the only answer that ever made sense to anyone was to fire Mike Kelly. It became a mantra. In their desperation, some people even had the nerve to mention Jeff Reinbold as a valid replacement to Kelly. There was no joy and no future in the hearts of Bomber faithful. We were horrible to be around because we looked so goddamned sad all the time.

People wanted him gone but I would always pipe up with the news that no one wanted to commit to their memory. Kelly had been given a three year contract and there was no way in hell he was going anywhere. We are still paying for Doug Berry’s hookers and drugs for crissakes, thanks to Lyle Bauer. Firing him just wasn’t an option.

Who could have possibly guessed that Kelly’s days here would end this way? That deep inside that useless skull, resides an angry and cowardly bully with no control? Apparently plenty of people. When they threatened to blow up Portage and Main if Kelly wasn’t fired, I thought they were over-doing it a bit. But there has been more than one voice asking aloud if Kelly was the wife beating type over the last few months. A football team does not get chewed to pieces and then thrown up on as bad as the Bombers did without a dangerous fat-headed idiot running the show.

We live in dark days. Saskatchewan has made it to the Grey Cup twice in the last three years and we don’t have a quarterback. Like Macbeth who did not have a natural propensity to murder, Mike Kelly had bold ambitions for the club. They were strange and wrong and for reasons unknown to me, his evil actions placed him in a downward spiral of evil that could only be resolved with him finding himself with his skull now removed from his body and placed on a stake, hopefully in place of the Christmas tree outside of city hall. But we can finally rest a bit now that the king is dead. Another board meeting has been scheduled for Saturday on Maroons Road and there are many more sharp turns on this lonely, savage road for Bomber brass in the days ahead. Still, for those long suffering few that are reading this, who are somehow still walking after bearing witness to this terrible year, raise a toast to Hildahl and 2010 and enjoy the moment.

And Merry Christmas.

BREAKING NEWS: Mike Kelly Arrested

Winnipeg Blue Bombers head coach Mike Kelly was arrested this morning and charged with assault and harrassment following a domestic dispute.

Police in Bridgeport, Penn., responded to Kelly’s home in the Philadelphia area at 11:03 a.m.

The other person involved in the incident is Andrea Peterson, Kelly’s former girlfriend.

Police said she had a cut on her lip, redness on her neck and a small cut on her finger. Police said Kelly also had some bruising on his face.

Kelly was released on his own recognizance.

Kelly was reached by the Free Press on his cell phone but did not offer comment simply saying, “I can’t talk right now,” before hanging up.

Blue Bombers chairman Ken Hildahl learned of the incident minutes after he ended a press conference announcing the resignation of CEO Lyle Bauer.

“At this point, what we’ll be looking to do is get all the facts surrounding the incident in Philadelphia,” said Hildahl. “We’’ll deal with it at that point. We’ve heard a lot of rumours, a lot of innuendo over the last hour. These are issues that this football club and this board are obviously very concerned with. Any incidents that involve violence, and at this point they are allegations, it’s something we will and do take seriously.”

- with files from Aldo Santin and Jason Bell

via: Winnipeg Free Press

The Final PacNu Report of 2009 - Grey Cup

Like a lot of diehard CFL fans, PacNu thinks Montreal is a strong team, but that the Roughriders have more heart. Montreal might be the better team on paper, but PacNu and Ridernation are hoping they can pull off the big upset.

See you next season.

Go Riders.

(this is the only time you will read about any Angry Bomber Fans cheering for any time other than the Blue & Gold…unless we have a big Sport Select ticket on the go)