JuranBoldenRules

You don't understand at all. I'm not talking about return average, we're talking about the punt teams. Every team in the league on average gained between 37-40 net yards of field position on a punt. Whether that punt went 80 yards or 38 yards before it was touched by the other team/bounced out of bounds isn't really relevant. Net is punt distance - return. They don't include penalties in the CFL league stats for special teams. You know what net income is? Same concept.

The end result is the same if you kick it 60 yards and have it returned 25 yards or kick it 42 and have it returned 7. Nobody "punts out of trouble" and basically never have in Canadian Football. That's a US thing with the narrow field to just ******* hammer one 70 yards. Julien beat everyone in the league by about 10 yards per punt and his net average is just the same as everyone else.

Well we for sure lost two games because he couldn't make pretty routine kicks. So I guess that makes up for the exceptional things he did. Yeah can blame the O for not finishing drives, but kicker needs to do his part. Also...not good at kickoffs. I wouldn't have been rushing to re-sign him, but there's not a ton of Canadian kickers around right now either. Based on this description...you don't know wtf net is.

Interesting thing in the league this year is basically every team was within a couple yards net on punts, most between 37-38 including Sheehan/Bombers. So really you'd have the same feeling with any punter in the league at the moment.

I think we're giving the personnel side a little too much credit of late. Who have we brought in the past couple years that was a big miss? All the guys we cut fade into the mist. The talent level of the past couple camps has been pretty poor. Can we not bring anyone in who is a threat to the QB off the snap? Even watching the guys this year in the most unstructured format of preseason there's no one in camp who can fire off and cause problems. The only guys we found are 300 pounds. Where's the guy who is a threat when he has the ball? We do really good at the draft and we've been doing pretty good at identifying guys off other teams of late. The US side is severely lacking basically since 2021. Our depth has been garbage.

Again though, planning….which OL did you want to spend on? It’s nice to say that but you need the player available to sign. Hardrick is beyond cooked. Gray retired. There was no impactful free agent the past couple years. Look at Sask…they’ve signed them all. I’d say this season really proved that Collaros needs a certain type of receiver to fit the offense he runs. And for some reason nearly all the guys we brought in this year were not that body type. We needed a returner too but we had like 20 rookie receivers and like 3 of them were 6’2 or more. I’d go all in on receivers if you want to win. If you can’t pass for first downs in this league you can’t win a game. OL is important too but there’s a lot less of them around. Bombers likely need to replace 3 this year.

It’s been downhill since 2021. 2022 we get Schoen but lose Lawler and Adams. No real threat on outside. 2023 get Lawler back but him and Schoen trade being out, Schoen is out for playoffs. This year we lose Bailey and don’t really replace him. Lawler and Schoen both dress for game 1 and that’s it. No threat from the slot, real low on guys the QB trusts. Wolitarsky out most of the year. The more we’ve relied (or had to rely) on Demski to be our best guy out of the slot the more our O has struggled and we’ve lost.

Which year did we win with average receivers? Maybe 2019 when we had about 4 2-3 receivers and Harris near his peak. 2021- Lawler, Bailey, Demski, Wolitarsky, Adams Our depth at receiver has got worse every year since. Especially due to injury. Our OL has also been worse every season through age, attrition and lack of positive development on guys like Dobson. I think looking at it in terms of money is a little bit silly. Who could they have paid? Hardrick? Would we be a better team with him on the sideline making $260,000 waving a towel to hype everyone up?

How about say nothing? He'll be playing somewhere. Issue with him is he's a great player when he plays 2/3 of snaps and a pretty mediocre one as an every down player. Sure the capability is there for spectacular plays like that, but down after down he's just getting ground into a pulp.

Castillo can probably take a hike too. Nice that he can hit from 60, but an American kicker can't last at sub 80%.

I think those first three. Another veteran American big body, you have the two vet Canadians filling 1 spot, Demski kind of a utility guy too. I wouldn't count on getting more than 15 games from anyone, need depth. We win and lose based on our ability to pass the ball. I have no issue having a million dollar receiving corps. Also need to sign 3 OL...preferably 2 Canadians.

Our OL has not been good since 2022, especially in pass protection.

They were the highest scoring O in the league with MBT playing and not close to that with Ford. Rushing numbers actually went down with him at QB because D knew they didn't have to cover the whole field.

Zach needs to step up and call timeout there on 1st and 10. Issues with helmet communication, muck up the play call, lose a down basically. Yeah only a 4 point difference but like you said, huge difference in momentum when it's more than a 1 score game.

Yeah if you're playing Toronto in a Grey Cup you better blow them out.

I still can't believe how offside 32 was on the first pick six and that it wasn't overturned.

I think he's actually the right kind of guy to check Collaros a bit. Worst thing about our O in this era is the complete lack of willingness to run a quicker tempo and more of a ball control style offense when it is dictated by the opponent. Buck is kind of a "**** yeah, attack it" kind of mentality. But we don't have the D to support that by turning the ball over and haven't for at least 2 seasons.

Yeah in all honestly if they had any doubts about his ability to throw I don't know why you don't just roll with Wilson. He looked fine confidence wise when he was out there. As much as I'll defend the coaching here, there's a "go down with the ship" culture with the vet players where if you questioned O'Shea on that he'd be like "but that's our QB." And then you'd be like, but he doesn't have a throwing hand...but it doesn't seem to matter. We're just going to lose the game with that guy throwing 3 more pick sixes because he's the guy. And that is completely bonkers. There's no adjustment to "what's our best chance to win the game based on the current reality."

Lapo has succeeded as a play caller when he's had a head coach prodding him to be aggressive. He's 1000% not the guy you want deciding to go for it or not, but he can design and call the plays just fine. Wouldn't say he has a "system." Obviously everyone has tendencies but as someone designing an offense he is one of the best at matching scheme to talent he has. All time bad head coach though.

For all the people shitting on punt team...Argos were actually way underwater on their punt return team tonight with a lot of tiny returns and a bunch of penalties. We could have Jake Julien booming 60 yard punts with a 27 yard return average against to make us feel better though.

That was from the first snap of the game. And yeah, our other receivers **** the bed which is the story of most of our season with 2-3 of our top 4 guys being down the entire season. Not going to win in this league if you can't pass for first downs.

Maybe. Biggest issue is guy drops a punt and then we're chasing the game instead of controlling it. Not really an adjustment aside from the fact Whitehead shouldn't be anywhere near a CFL roster in 2024. You talked about margin of error to win the game all week. We made that margin smaller and smaller with stupid mistakes mostly related to catching the ball. I think Dinwiddie trusted his QB and our D schemed like he wouldn't. We defended the big play, and Arbuckle just took what was there to manage the game. We lose our QB and it's basically game over especially since Wheatfall can't play pitch and catch with Wilson. I don't know what adjustment Dinwiddie made at half to break Collaros finger and have Whitehead drop a punt at our endzone. Dinwiddie had a great game plan and stayed patient. He knew it would be a classic CFL game down to the wire either way, gotta be in it at the end then the floodgates opened up for him with our mistakes and Collaros getting dinger.

Gameplan on O was perfect in first half. Too many plays and drives killed by receiver mistakes. Missed opportunities to extend drives and score points, so kept it close. D was very passive and kept your O out there, no impactful turnovers which we needed to dominate the game. 3rd Q our O was barely on the field and that's where the game really turned. Our punt returner handed you 7, when we got the play to get it back it was taken away on a ticky-tack call. Our backup QB throws a TD pass that a rookie receiver makes an attempt at like he's looking into a full ******* eclipse trying to track it.

One thing the culture has lost...D and special teams used to be all about attacking the ball. Turning over the ball. Maybe specials still kind of is because we're one of the better teams at blocking punts, but how many games did we have 0 or 1 INT's/fumbles out of the D this year? We're pretty consistently losing the turnover battle and margin to win is a lot less. Seems like we got loaded up with star players and forgot how to win games, just leave it in their hands.

I don't think it would be much different. Wallace seems pretty raw to me. Like his aggression level, but he's pretty stiff. I think it was borderline negligent to not stick with 3 import OL in the second half of this season. Things got a bit jumbled on O when Wolitarsky got hurt, but with the amount of snaps we had on D with Canadians we could have easily rolled with Randolph and one of Dobson/Neufeld in. Keep Chris-Ike in, rep him some at slot, Augustine if you need, bunch of fringe guys you could sign as an extra Canadian receiver too. Then you get Dobson as the extra guy most likely, Eli probably stays on as the 7th since he can play center and Wallace would be in the lab.