Courtesy Winnipeg Free Press:

The state of the franchise conference call for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers took place last week and the overriding sentiment at the conclusion of this call seemed to be the words “status quo,” and quite rightfully so.

The team re-signed nearly every one of its free agents, including the consensus big three, and should be returning a remarkably similar product to the playing field for 2008.

The criticism, if any, in the moments of pre-season hype and hysteria that every team embraces in the off-season, is whether doing enough to remain “status quo” is enough to take the next steps as a football team. And as was brought up by a scribe familiar with my favourite phraseologies in football, “if you aren’t getting better — you are getting worse.”

The reason I’ve adopted that mantra as the words to live by in my football experiences, is that in the course of an 11-year career you see its validity both as an individual and on a team basis when it comes to keeping up with the Jones’s in the NFL and CFL. Often, when a franchise experiences a surprising degree of success in a season and prioritizes the merit of continuity and familiarity between their players, the powers that be decide it is better to stand pat than necessarily rock the boat and incur a steep degree of change. While this is not an illogical strategy, sweeping changes often disrupt team chemistry and are counterproductive, not improving in areas of weakness can often be amplified when the following season commences.

Imagine that every off-season each team has the opportunity to study its opponents in greater detail than ever before and to devise new techniques and schemes to exploit their shortcomings. If those weaknesses don’t become strengths or change, they will become even more detrimental by the following season and be taken further advantage of. Adding to this argument is the fact that the game of football is not some stagnant entity. It is an ever changing, ever evolving game that becomes more difficult and intricate with each year that goes by. So when I tell you in this eat-or-be-eaten business that if you aren’t getting better you are getting worse, the truth is that the game will leave you in the dust if you do not evolve along with it.

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