For starters, no one can know the "reality" of the future. One can only speculate about the future, therefore, this thread should have been titled "My (the OP) speculations for the rest of the season."
Secondly, if in 2011 BC can go 1-6 and finish by compiling a stunning 10-1 record, why can't the Cats run the table to finish out this year? I'm sure the doomsdayers in BC were going on just like this thread prior to week 8 last year and look what happened. That's my "reality" of the rest of the season.
During the offseason the DL and OL were the only question marks to me. I liked our secondary quite a bit with Turrenne, Means, Collins, Webb, and Hinds. Then after training camp, and I’ve mentioned this in another thread, Turrenne, Collins, and Means were all released and the secondary became a big concern for me.
I agree with you that my post was mostly opinion and speculation. But the reality comes from the first paragraph and I thought I’d post it because it really hit me hard that after the Montreal lost I realized we would then have to finish 7-3 to have a winning record and that just doesn’t seem like something this team can do. After that I went off on my own tangent and now the thread title looks like I’m stating my opinion as fact. My apologies.
When it was revealed that Creehan would run a man-to-man scheme with four man pressure I posted either here or the scratching post wondering what kind of plays we would expect to see out of this very basic scheme. To me it doesn’t seem like you can run a wide variety of plays in that scheme because you’d be rushing with four and covering man-to-man with six, leaving two players up to zone (I knew there wouldn’t be much blitzing). I said something like “are we just gonna see cover 1 run the whole game?” A few days later Drew confirmed that it would be mostly cover 1. I believe that is why the defence is so predictable and I’m not surprised. With zone you can do a bunch of different and confusing things, but man-to-man and no blitzing is about as vanilla as you can get and it’s the same thing all the time. Creehan has even said a few weeks ago on the CHML Ticats show that his scheme is very vanilla for now so that the players can learn it first. Well guess what Creehan? First of all it sounds like your scheme will always be vanilla, second I’m pretty sure the players can play a base cover 1 by now, and third if you’re going to make changes you’d better do them now because what you’ve been doing is not working and is very predictable.
Just remember guys, it's not just about how well we do, it's about how the other teams do. If Ray gets injured for example, the Argos season is done. Winnipeg is still in a skid, as is Saskachewan. Still plenty of Football to play.
Creehan had training camp to install his system, so I'm not sure why he's making them play so vanilla. It's not so much that there's anything wrong per se with cover 2 (dropping two into deep zone coverage is basic cover 2 to me; cover 1 would actually mean an extra pass-rusher at the line), but rather that any coverage shell is going to be ineffective if you're running it the majority of the time.
Going 6 - 0 to start the second half wont be easy but as you said we do look better than those teams so its not that crazy to say we can beat them. Right now we have the worst D in the league and that is really hurting us, if they can pick it up just a tiny bit though we can put up the points to win games.
Would be nice. I noticed last year that Hamilton had the same “unfair” disadvantage against Toronto in both 2010 and 2011. I had assumed before then that if they had the disadvantage one year, they’d either have a 4 game balanced series or advantage against that team in the following year.
I worked it out, though, and concluded that no matter what the league does, either some pair of teams is going to have the same “unfair” advantage as the previous season, or the same pairs of teams are going to have the 4 game series as the year before. The best they can do is set up the schedules so that over the course of 6 seasons, any pair of teams will have a balanced series twice, a 3 game series favouring the first team twice, and a 3 game series favouring the second team twice.
Sure, but the Argos could say the same thing of Hamilton. If Burris gets injured, Hamilton’s season is done, even more so because the Cats’ defense is suspect at the moment. In Edmonton, you could dress a tackling dummy at QB and the game would probably still be close because of Edmonton’s defense.
Hey Blogskee, you’re usually spot on with most of your comments and analysis. But your prediction of sweeping the Argos completely missed the mark. I’d like to here your commentary of what happened here.
Personally, I’ve reserved my predictions because the team was so unpredictable. It seems that the games we SHOULD win end up being losses and then we do something strange and knock off the Als in a convincing victory. It seems though that we have finally turned a corner in consistency. That being losers.
What happen was I judged this team on the Bellefeuille model (which they employed to perfection in July: lose two, win three) to a team that wasn’t coached by Bellefeuille. Despite his .500-ish record in three seasons, he always kept the team pretty close to the even mark (hence his .500-ish record as head coach). So I assumed that Cortez could, at worst, follow the same script. Boy was I wrong. Very, very, very wrong. I can’t believe how bad this team is right now.