If the Bombers crash who will be the first to go?

Author: Scott Taylor

August 12, 2009

You can’t under appreciate Mike Kelly’s sense of humour. In the face of adversity, Kelly can still laugh at himself. Good thing, too. Adversity might last for awhile.

In Calgary on Aug. 8 Kelly’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers got off to a horrible start and despite a pretty solid second half lost 31-23 to the defending Grey Cup champion Stampeders. It dropped the Bombers to 2-4 and with five very difficult games on the horizon, Mike Kelly could have some pretty serious unfunny moments.

“Yeah, this week somebody might throw a beer at me,” Kelly told Tom, Joe and the Coach on 92-CITI-FM on Monday morning. “And I just might catch it and throw it back.” Or drink it.

During the next six weeks, the Bombers will play five football games. Each one will be against a team that has performed better than the Bombers have to this point in the season. The Bombers will play host to Montreal on Aug. 15, go to B.C. on Aug. 21, and then after their bye week, play in Regina on Sept. 6, play host to Saskatchewan on Sept. 13 and then go to Montreal on Sept. 20. By the time the Bombers get sad, old Toronto on Sept. 26, they could be 2-9. If they are, and we aren’t suggesting they will be, but if they are, what happens?

Does the team’s CEO, Lyle Bauer, fire Kelly? Can the team’s CEO, Lyle Bauer fire Kelly? Perhaps the latter question is the more appropriate one. No one will deny that Bauer has made the Bombers the most popular sports team in Winnipeg history. The Bombers own the old, traditional media in this town. Both the Free Press and Sun sports sections have evolved into little more than house organs for the football club while CJOB is given the broadcasting rights without so much as a bid process.

Young Winnipeggers love Bomber games. They flock to the park and they spend loads of dough at that Appleton’s Rum Shack (I once suggested to David Asper that he didn’t have to build a new stadium, just a second Appleton’s Rum Shack). The team is out of hock – just so long as the city and province continue to ignore the old debts – and if a new stadium is eventually constructed out at the U of M, Bauer will be remembered as the guy who sorted out the mess left first by Cal Murphy and later by Ken Bishop.

However, while a brilliant businessman, Bauer has not been quite as successful as a football man. Kelly is his fourth coach (after Dave Ritchie, Jim Daley and Doug Berry) and he’s also been through two other GMs (Ritchie and Brendan Taman) and now two player personnel guys (Taman and John Murphy). Heck, P.R. directors come and go like parking lot attendants.

If this continues, the team’s board of directors either has to make Bauer the business manager and keep him away from the football team or find someone else who can sell the product, balance the books and hire winning football people.

The Bombers are the most financially successful failure in Canadian pro sports history next, of course, to the Toronto Maple Leafs. In a small league (now eight teams) the Bombers have not won a CFL championship since 1990. Unless Mike Kelly is as brilliant as he is witty – and, frankly, I think he’s quite brilliant – this franchise will soon be celebrating 20 years of Grey Cup famine.

So does Bauer get the right to fire another coach? Maybe not. And if not, that means Mike Kelly is now trying to win for the sake of two peoples’ employment. Thank the lord for his good sense of humour.
 

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