May
Doug Brown is back talking football
Courtesy Doug Brown of the Winnipeg Free Press:
Last year, it was very evident that the 2007 Grey Cup runners-up, who were favoured in the off-season to win the 2008 championship, fell far short of expectations and underachieved all season long. As we stumbled out of the gate to an 0-4 start, many wondered how a team that could have easily won the 2007 title game were it not for the broken arm of a quarterback, fall so far short of expectations with such a talented roster the following season.
While I’m not going to be the one to draw any parallels from our 07/08 team to the 2008 Grey Cup champions, the Calgary Stampeders — mainly because they won the big game and we lost it — I can tell you from experience that when you start talking about championships to come in the off-season and opportunities to become “the best team that’s ever been in the CFL,” as exclaimed last week by who else — Nik Lewis — to Allen Cameron and the Calgary Herald, you are getting way, way, ahead of yourself this early in the game.
Looking back, I think one of the biggest psychological issues the 2008 Bomber team had was that we all felt, to some degree, that we should have won the ’07 Grey Cup, and thereby the following season — barring another catastrophic injury, we were due or entitled to a championship run because of our misfortune. Huge mistake. The thing most of us apparently had no conception of was the fact that win, lose, or draw your last game of the previous season, the most it will afford you the following off-season is the accolade of paper champion via the news press and precious little else.
No matter how easily you may have won or lost the previous year’s Grey Cup the only thing you can take with you from that place in time is experience and confidence. Experience can prove to be valuable if you find yourself in a similar environment with all the hoopla and distractions of another Grey Cup week, but the confidence that comes with being the best, or in this case, a Grey Cup champion in the course of a single season, can sometimes lead to more harm than good.
Ask any professional football coach whether he would rather have a bunch of players on his roster who felt they needed to prove themselves day in and day out to garner respect from the league and to achieve their first title, or a team that thought they were the best thing put together since peanut butter and chocolate and guess what they will tell you? The reason so few teams in pro football ever repeat as champions in consecutive years has as much to do with the obstacles of overcoming the “championship mentality” as it does with the competition.
Aside from the pitfall of freezing your championship calibre roster in the hopes of resurrecting another title and succumbing to the “if you’re not getting better you’re getting worse,” adage, motivating a roster that has allowed its repeat scenario aspirations to infiltrate individual off-season preparations is a challenge only field generals like Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots have seemingly been able to master.
When you look at any individual sport, like boxing, the ability of a champion to defend his or her title is all the more impressive because you know he/she is fighting off those who want what he/she has and are probably working harder to get there than they are to stay on top. Few people that are at the apex of their profession or in this case their sport, will continually work as hard as those who are scratching and clawing their way to get up there, so whenever a champion can successfully defend his title you know he/she either recognizes that the ante is constantly being raised by the contenders or that they possess such a large talent advantage that that degree of hunger can be overcome.
The problem with football and why so few teams ever repeat is that when you have a roster of some 50 odd players and coaches you can be assured that the trappings of the “championship mentality” will consume and ruin the work ethic and attitudes of a good number of them. Simply reading in the paper every so often that you are at the top of your profession can confuse players and coaches into thinking that they are doing enough and have set the benchmark for effort and ingenuity in their field.
“Back-to-back Grey Cups,” may be on the mind of Nik Lewis and many members of the Calgary Stampeders and they certainly have the talent to put themselves in contention for another run. But from my experiences, if they aren’t working even harder and smarter than they were in 2008, which culminated in a national championship for them, they won’t even come close to doing it again this season.
Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.
