Bombers’ steady climb leaves one remaining goal

WINNIPEG — For Mike O’Shea, there are no silver linings.

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers are coming off their best season since 2011, winning a playoff game in Regina and reaching the Western Final. But where some may see progress, the Bombers’ head coach still feels the sting of a season-ending 22-14 loss to the Calgary Stampeders.

“In our organization it would still be tough to think that way, it might be a little soon,” O’Shea, asked to put a positive spin on the team’s 2018 campaign, told CFL.ca in Mont-Tremblant. “If you were to ask the guys a week ago they’d probably still feel the same way. Losing is terrible.”

Next season will be O’Shea’s sixth as head coach, tying him with Ottawa’s Rick Campbell as the league’s longest-tenured bench boss. Since taking the job in 2014, the 48-year-old North Bay, Ont. native has been a stabilizing force in the Manitoba capital.

After missing the playoffs for four straight seasons from 2012 through 2015, they’ve made the post-season three straight years, winning 10 or more games each time. Inheriting a team that finished 3-15 in 2013, O’Shea helped change the culture in Winnipeg and created a perennial Grey Cup contender.

“It starts with Mike,” said Bombers general manager Kyle Walters. “Day in and day out Mike’s the same guy. He doesn’t get too up or too down, whether it’s a winning stretch or the stretch where we weren’t winning football games.

“His belief in the players and the way he treats them with respect and treats them like men sees you through some of those tough times when the ball doesn’t bounce your way and the turnovers end up in your end zone and things like that.”

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‘Things like that’ seemed to come in bunches in 2018, sending the Blue and Gold spiraling to a four-game losing streak through August and September. But with a 5-7 record, and their season in jeopardy, the Bombers weren’t fazed.

“The group we have in there certainly has a quiet confidence,” said O’Shea. “They understand we’re a good football team. They also have an ability to really look at the reasons we win or lose games. They don’t compound the issues of losing one game and then losing another game by calling it ‘a two-game losing skid’. I don’t believe they’re reading the headlines in there.

“I think every team has its ups and downs. To be a championship team we’ve got to have less downs. We have a group of resilient guys, I like the way they’ve responded.”

“I think even when you’re losing those games,” added Walters, “we’d watch it and go ‘we’re a pretty good football team. If we don’t turn the ball over, or even when we do turn the ball over we just tackle the guy instead of letting them score touchdowns, a couple of those games would have been different’.”

With three straight seasons of 10 or more wins, and a core that remains mostly intact, Walters and O’Shea seem to have built something sustainable. Matt Nichols, Darvin Adams and Andrew Harris aren’t going anywhere, while defensive leaders Adam Bighill and Jackson Jeffcoat have also decided to extend their stay on multi-year deals.

Now, after building the foundation one brick at a time, Walters is hoping to add the finishing touches that will lead to a championship in Winnipeg, ending a drought dating back to 1990.

“The entire organization, we took a couple of years and built slowly and acquired draft picks and tried to draft and develop players,” said Walters. “We’ve got some continuity from year to year with this team . . . we’ve tried to make the tough decisions in the off-season to keep the core group of guys together. That group’s won some football games and it’s a positive pulse, but a little bit of frustration now that we haven’t been able to get to a Grey Cup and win a Grey Cup.

“That’s not a bad thing within that locker-room,” he continued. “Over the five years we’ve been together it’s gone from getting things turned around to ‘hey, OK, we’re a playoff team now’, to ‘alright, we’ve proven we can win games in the regular season, and we’re a competitive double digit win playoff team, let’s go win a Grey Cup’.

“That’s sort of the mindset of the organization.”