Well, today is the day.
I do think
@Holden Caulfield and
@WPGChief broke it down expertly the other day, but I’ll add in my two cents.
I’d emphasize what Holden said about Arbuckle. Who cares that it’s him. Arbuckle is not much of a downgrade from Kelly. The Argos beat Montreal last week with Kelly not really doing anything, and he only scored 14 points against us in our last meeting. It will be hard for the Bombers D to improve on that, Arbuckle might even be an upgrade in that spot for TO. He put up nearly 400 yards against Edmonton a few weeks ago.
What concerns me most, most Grey Cup games are super close, and in a one-score winner-takes-all game, I have more faith in Toronto’s gamebreakers to make that one extra play.
Pierce will have to scheme up something to mitigate Toronto’s pass-rush because our offence HAS to get going. If we can score a couple of TDs and get up on the Argos by a couple of scores, that should force Arbuckle to have to open it up, which I think is an advantage for us. If we can get into the second half and allow Brady to bully and wear down the Argos’ D, then we’ll start killing the clock and Arbuckle will panic and we should be able to get to him. We can’t allow this game to come down to one make-or-break play like the last three Grey Cups did. The offence will need to be scoring majors because I have a feeling Grant is gonna break one against us. Bombers cover teams were the best in the league this season and didn’t allow a return TD all year but I bet Grant breaks one for them.
Like Holden, I also think playing in the dome is an advantage for us. As mentioned, Collaros seems to struggle in the cold — although I guess we’re about to see if he struggles in the cold or if he struggles in the big game — but theoretically playing indoors shouldn’t hamper our offence. Collaros’s Grey Cup stats are awful. You can’t win with how he’s played in the past few years. He doesn’t have to do anything special. Protect the ball, don’t turn it over, and score majors. We should be able to win this if he just plays as a game-manager. We just can’t get to a point where their defence completely stifles our offence, we need to press, and Zach starts making big mistakes (INTs and the like).
Given how our O has played Toronto recently, I’m not confident we have any answers to their pass rush. They seem to be our Kryptonite. That said, I also wasn’t confident we would have a plan to prevent Harris from dinking and dunking us all the way down the field last week and I was very wrong about that.
Most of the pundits are picking us. Everyone on the 3downnation podcast picked us, and the majority picked us to cover the spread. As we know, that doesn’t matter.
It’s time. Do you want your legacy to be a championship-winning dynasty? Or do you want the legacy to be another choke in the Grey Cup, this one to a journeyman backup QB who was almost out of the league? This game will say a lot about how we look back on this era. How people across the league look back on this era.
I’m super pumped. Let’s hope the Bombers don’t come out flat.