Official Game Day Thread - Winnipeg at Calgary, August 9, 2025

[Jesse]

Birthday means nothing.  BLM & Trevor & and R.Ray are/were lighting it up around Zach's age.  Tom Brady...

As for last 1.5 seasons: how good has the OL been?  Hint: pretty bad.  Zach's best seasons had him behind the league top OL.  Remember '21-'22?  My word those guys were good.  Downhill ever since Desjar bailed.

When is the last time booth guys said "Zach has all day to throw back there"... even for one snap.  I haven't heard that once this season.  The heat is on Zach straight from the snap, every single down.  Not only can't the OL give him 3.5s back there, or the magic 2.7s: they can't even give him 2.0s most snaps.

The ONLY QB that could be good behind our OL is a young runner like Alexander.  Even VAJ wouldn't do well.

Look at the powerhouse teams like CGY.  How many times in our 3 games did we say "VAJ has all day to throw back there" even with 4 or 5 man pass rush.  How many times did he get 4, 5, 6s.  Ya, a lot.

Give Zach the '21 OL today and Zach would be lighting up 350Y and 3TD every game.  The problem is not Zach.  The problem is our bottom-3 OL performance.  (It's hurting our run game too...)

I agree with you, but birthday means a lot. There's a reason you can name the guys who were slinging it at that age, because they are the only ones who were ever able to do it.

[Blue In BC]

Last season IIRC 3 teams went over by $50-$100k+.  This year I bet it'll be even more (excluding the $400k, so it will be hard to tell).  The number of teams going over seems to be going UP each season, not DOWN.  And the average overage seems to be increasing.

Well, personally I think HAM did know (tinfoil).  But it doesn't matter, let's say HAM didn't know and just decided they wanted to go $200k over the cap in FA and pay the punishments.  The magic $400k showing up then effectively bailed them out.  And then they went ON TOP of that and spent the other $200k.  They came out and said it: "we spent the $400k".

And you make it sound like the $400k was announced in TC or something.  It wasn't, it was still the middle of FA.  Many holdouts were still available, waiting for big paydays.  The $400k allowed teams to suddenly have space for the top vet holdouts!

They told us precisely this.  KW said outright he was not spending a dime of the $400k and made zero changes to his decisions because of it.  No other team said this AFAIK.  We may be the only team in the entire league not have spent the $400k on better talent.

This may help us in '26 because we can prepay a ton of players a ton of $ from the '25 $400k bonus.  But who cares about '26.  We want to be in the cup NOW!

Ya, because we'd suck right now if our OL was:

Stan-Desjar-Couture-Neuf-Yoshi

and our RECs were:

Gino-Kenny-Demski-Schoen-Philpot

and our DBs were:

Milligan-Nichols-Holm-Ford

eh?  Money would guarantee a good season, all else being equal.  Before anyone says "that's impossible!", we could with our "real world $" buy every single one of those guys by overbidding by $50k, go $1M over the SMS each year, lose all DPs and pay fines (only "real world $" so who cares), and win basically every game.  Change my mind.

Tinfoil hat. Most of the good free agents are gone in the 1st few days, perhaps even hours  Planning a roster and SMS budget happens long before that.

Bombers were 1 of 3 teams that went over and IIRC that was about $28K and they were the 2nd highest. The Lions situation has been covered extensively as an unusual situation with 2 Canadian starters returning.

You mention signing free agents that weren't free agents like Desjarlais and Hardrick. I don't think either Philpot brothers were either.  It's easy to come up with players we'd like on our roster.

We weren't going to have any chance at re-signing Ford and wouldn't have paid that price even if we had the extra money.

I already mentioned how we thought the Elks seemed to spending recklessly ( over SMS ) and where they are in the standings. That alone blows your idea out of the water.