Barely beat the Bombers in the first regular season game.
Came back and the offense was worse in the last game against the Bombers with no adjustment or change by Hawkins and his many coaches.
Now they have back to back against the Stamps who have a scrambling QB.
Things do not change quickly 4 games in and they could be in real trouble.
Hawkins and his biggest coaching staff in the CFL hopefully have been watching CFL game film since Thursday.
This has nothing to do with Anthony. He's being used as a pinata back there because Miller is an imbecile. No QB would be effective under these conditions.
It appears to me that this coaching staff wants to get away from the west coast dink and dunk offense that made AC so successful. And many on here were critical of that style as last year wore on. Many teams were catching up to it. AC was getting beaten up in the latter half of 2012 as well.
They seem to want to be more vertical. That takes more time in the pocket. The line seems to be having trouble with that extra blocking time. AC is not mobile so that hinders going vertical without good line play. and while there is some talk about the stellar receiving corps I see a slow group. Richardson has really lost more than a step and Bruce is slow as well. In fact I see an overall slow footed offense.
The offensive backfield is banged up.
Its a puzzle and a mess right now. I am really curious as to what this week will bring.
Given the limited time AC has left, if I was Popp I would have brought on a coaching crew intent on keeping the 2.5 second release offense so favored by Trestman and Calvillo.
On many plays I re-watched he’s not getting 2.5 seconds anyway. The only thing they can do this week is improve communication of and/the line play. If it does not improve, I’d be tempted to replace Jourdaine or Flory by Matte, he’s ready and it would add some knarlyness to that line. We might get lucky and get Phil Blake in at some point this season, that would be a real boon.
Even when Trestman was HC it was all about contested catches and you can’t play fast when you don’t know or believe in what your doing. No question that this offense however does not favour AC and is more suited to a athletic QB like Adrian Mcpherson who can roll out and who can throw from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage or take off with the ball. The Riders beat the Stamps by running the ball down their throat and using FB Rob Cote to block and even released him for a TD grab. Get Lavoie, Bomben and on the line try Matte in there for a couple series (instead of Flory or Jourdaine) and play some smash mouth football at least if your gonna go two and out let the opponent take the bruising instead of your QB. If it does not improve over the next two weeks, I would not be surprised if AC calls Jim and delivers him some very bad news.
Last game, how many times did the Als and the BBs exchange punts? For every exchange we lost at least 10 yards of field position. That might have been acceptable last year when AC and the offense were on fire, but it's just another brick in the wall this year.
Last week they had four practice days and used 2... Choosing to do two walkthroughs. Get down to business or quit. The CFL is about putting players in position to make plays, not over-coaching this is the main difference between the CFL and the NFL.
What would you expect players to say in training camp. They gave Hawkins the benefit, but as time marches on that locker room will be divided...Does not look good for the Als this season. Toronto and Hamilton are better and Winnipeg beat them, so where does that leave them but battling for a playoff spot. They will not beat Calgary Friday so they will be 1 and 2 going into Calgary the following week. Curious as to what you will say when they are 1 and 3.
Calvillo isn’t being petulant he’s pissed off. The guy is a very fierce competitor and has always gotten visibly upset when the offense isn’t going well. You saw that a lot more last game because the offense was terrible start to finish which is unacceptable given that the personnel we have in that lineup would make for one heck of an all star team and most of these guys played together last year; they did not suddenly become terrible players ergo it must be the new system. Calvillo has played under at least 4 or 5 different head coaches before this and was consistently excellent with all of them so if he’s not succeeding now it’s a sign of really bad coaching (this is a guy that made a marcel bellefieulle offense look not terrible)
Usually when a new coach comes in it is because the previous coach was fired due to incompetence so it makes sense for the guy to bring in his own new system to shake the team up and motivate the players but Hawkins and Miller came into pretty much the opposite of that where our previous coach was so damn good at his job that he got hired by the NFL despite their preference to ignore the CFL as much as possible. That does not call for a change of systems that would require such awful growing pains. All it calls for is slight changes to essentially the same system to give the offense more variety that’s it. The defense and special teams needed a big overhaul and they got it (the defense only really needed a coordinator whos head wasn’t wedged 5 feet up his own ass but they got it none the less). The offense was the one good thing the team had going for it last year and this team decided they need to change the whole thing why?
They probably tried and the new staff couldn't understand what Trestman was doing. He was on another level when it comes to designing an offense and that I can accept but their system has to be as slant said functional, you can't expect a coach to run something he does not understand. Jim was wondering if the offense would stay the same or drop a notch, well it dropped all the way to the bottom of the barrel no one expected that with the same group of players except one upgrade. I figure they have till the by week to show some improvements that's July 25th.