Working to beat Grey Cup hangover
Back- to- back Grey Cup wins have been rare, so focus is on injecting edge to remain hungry
Iain MacIntyre says the B. C. Lions have been scrambling early in training camp to ensure they won’t experience the same kind of hangover that made life tough for the Vancouver Canucks.
HKAMLOOPS ollywood’s formulaic comedy The Hangover: Part II played everywhere last year. The B. C. Lions hope the sequel to Vancouver’s 2012 hockey hangover doesn’t screen at all this season.
Of all the reasons Wally Buono chose last winter to retire from coaching, one of the most interesting is this: he wants the Lions to avoid the hangover that killed the Vancouver Canucks and one of the best ways of doing that was to promote Mike Benevides to head coach so players tempted to stare lovingly at their Grey Cup rings will instead have to focus on a new voice this season.
And that new voice has the Lions, in their first week of their Canadian Football League training camp, practising with more intensity and physical ferocity than last year.
“I just think there’s a complacency issue,” general manager Buono said Wednesday of winning the Grey Cup, which he did five times as a head coach. “It’s always something you have to fight. Coaches, players, the organization, there is a point of contentment and that takes the edge off. You believe you have more of a divine right to win than the opposition. You can tell yourself [ not to think that way]. You can tell yourself whatever you want, but that’s not what you believe. It’s hard to stay driven.
“I’m hoping that some of this coaching change will address that edge. We’ve got a good football team, but for it to remain a good football team there has to be change. And I think changing the coach, changing the voice, gives you a new direction and changes the atmosphere.”
That atmosphere, in both senses, could hardly be more different than a year ago when it was sunny and warm in Kamloops and Buono paced his veteran team through training camp, increasing physicality and intensity for veteran players as the regular season approached.
This week, Benevides had his first- string offence run full bore against the starting defence on the second day of camp. Technically, tackling is not allowed but, there was plenty of pop before Benevides ramped down the contact on Wednesday to give bodies a chance to recover.
Most veteran players will dress for the Lions first preseason game, next Wednesday against the Saskatchewan Roughriders at BC Place.
Benevides preceded training camp with a meeting Saturday, telling players at 5: 01 p. m. that last season was officially over. Expect to hear the motto 5: 01 a lot this season. It has been chilly and damp here all week and the weather was especially raw and blustery on Wednesday. “I love it,” Benevides said. He believes in practising hard, but Benevides admitted the extra intensity is also part of getting players’ focus where it needs to be.
“Absolutely,” he said. “We’ve got to get to it as fast as we can right now. Your mental focus has to be on point and physically you have to be ready to adapt to situations. That is absolutely part of it – ramping it up as fast as I can but still being smart about it.”
The Lions’ concern about a hangover has nothing to do with the Canucks, whom coach Alain Vigneault admitted last month were unable to regain the mental level that helped carry his team to the Stanley Cup Final in 2011.
Since the Edmonton Eskimos’ CFL dynasty ended in 1982, only two Grey Cup winners have successfully defended their titles: the 2010 Montreal Alouettes and 1997 Toronto Argos. That’s two repeat winners in 29 Grey Cups.
Only seven times in the last 25 title games has even one of the finalists made it back to the Grey Cup the following season. Put simplistically, the best two teams in each of the last 25 years have failed in 18 of those seasons to be among the best two teams the next year.
The CFL has been mostly an eight- or nine- team league during this time. Some years, there are clearly two or three teams better than others. Yet, only two have won consecutive Grey Cups.
Beyond the small number of teams, the CFL hangover is even more perplexing than the NHL one because football’s playoffs do not have the devastating physical drain or the short turnaround time between seasons that hockey’s twomonth survival test causes.
Benevides points out that CFL teams have perhaps a harder time keeping players because all free agency is unrestricted and the lucrative National Football League constantly recruits in Canada. Coaches from a winning organization also are in demand.
But in the Lions’ case, nearly all their key players are back. MVP quarterback Travis Lulay re- signed, and line- of- scrimmage stars Khalif Mitchell and Jovan Olafioye were expected to go to the NFL but didn’t. And Buono merely stepped back from the sidelines, while Benevides kept the coaching staff largely intact and added defensive guru Rich Stubler as a coordinator.
So really, as Buono said, it comes down to complacency.
“I think the mental part is harder than the physical part,” Lulay said. “You’ve got the guys who have been there and done that, so, physically, there’s no reason not to be good enough to [ win the Grey Cup] again. Benny’s message early on is you want to nip that in the bud – that some people may feel satisfied. It’s human nature in a way. The Grey Cup wasn’t long ago. Shoot, now that we’re back practising, it feels like we had a week off.
“We’re not completely forgetting about last year, but we need to find our own identity for 2012 and, mentally, that’s what this training camp is all about.”
Veteran defensive back Korey Banks said: “We’re not talking repeat; we’re talking getting better. If we do that, we’ll be OK.”