Winless Bombers still searching for their swagger

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers come into their Week 4 matchup in Calgary on Saturday winless at 0-3, a far cry from the dominant squad that has made it to four straight Grey Cups and not lost more than four games in a season since 2019.

The Bombers have improved since their season-opening 27-12 defeat to Montreal. Since that loss, Bombers have lost their other two contests by just a handful of points. The team’s points-per-game average has increased over each of their first three games, and the loss in Week 3 to the Lions came thanks to a Sean Whyte field goal in the final three minutes.

Quarterback Zach Collaros said the losses have come down to a lack of execution.

“Doing a better job of executing the play call, trying our best to stay ahead of the chains, on first down being efficient – all of those things,” he said, of areas the struggling offence needs to improve.

The Bombers are last in the league with 18.3 points per game and Collaros, a two-time winner of the league’s Most Outstanding Player Award, has yet to throw a touchdown pass this season. 

Collaros and the Bombers will have to find a way to start winning without one of the top receivers in the league. Head coach Mike O’Shea confirmed TSN’s Dave Naylor’s report that Dalton Schoen, who led the league with 10 receiving touchdowns in 2023, will likely miss the remainder of the season after an injury sustained in their Week 3 loss to the BC Lions.

“It’s looking like it’s gonna be the full year,” O’Shea said. “I always hate to say that because you want to give the guy hope and as much opportunity to come back.”

Receiver Kenny Lawler, another key part of the Bombers’ offence, broke his arm at the start of the season and is on the six-game injured list.

O’Shea said that he prefers elevating practice roster receivers as opposed to testing the free-agent market to replace his injured stars. The Bombers added receiver Ravi Alston to their practice roster this week. Alston was on the roster last season and was cut during training camp.

“These guys have been with us for all of training camp,” O’Shea said. “That’s a long time reading the playbooks. And if they were signed a little earlier in the off-season, they got the playbook fairly quickly and were studying it. To bring a guy in, even a vet, they’re still gonna be a couple of weeks to figure it out. The scouting department did a great job bringing in guys that we liked.”

Defensive end Willie Jefferson, who has been with the team since 2019, said that Bombers are trying to build chemistry.

“We definitely don’t have the same swagger that we’ve had in years past,” he said. “Years past, we had different guys, different personalities on the team…this year, we have a young team. A very young team. We have a lot of rookies playing, offence, defence, special teams. Right now, the whole mindset is to get those guys caught up, get them some experience, get the communication going, the lingo and things like that.”

Jefferson praised those young players for taking on key roles for a club that expects to contend for the Grey Cup. In Week 3, three of the Bombers’ five starting defensive backs were in their first or second seasons. 

“The young guys have stepped in very well, doing great things in meetings and practices and in the games when they’re getting the opportunities,” he said. “Right now, you’re trying to jell all of that together and put a good football game together – offence, defence, and special teams.”

Veteran linebacker Adam Bighill has been with the club for six seasons. He said that with those key injuries, the championship pedigree of previous seasons is that much more valuable.

“We have an underlying theme of the right people,” he said. “There is a lot of confidence in the room from the people here that have been here and [won championships]…the culture is in place for partly those reasons. When someone needs to step in, the culture’s really prepared them for that moment and not allowing them to come in super surprised and unprepared.”

Collaros pulled out a cliché from another sport to describe what the Blue Bombers are going through as they try to find the win column.

“You can’t squeeze the stick too tight, to take it from a hockey analogy,” the quarterback said. “You’ve just got to go out there and trust the process.”