Don’t blame Nichols for drubbing

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/08/2018 (2091 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers quarterback Matt Nichols was speaking for himself this week, but in a way he was speaking for all of us.

“There’s nothing more refreshing than being off of social media. It’s unbelievable the negativity,” Nichols told TSN’s Sara Orlesky. “It’s quite ridiculous to be honest with you.”

Nichols was speaking against the backdrop of a week that had seen him roundly criticized on social media — and elsewhere — for his performance in a win over Hamilton last week, despite the fact that win over the Ticats was the Bombers’ third in a row and fourth in five games.

Well, if Twitter users didn’t like Nichols after that performance, they were surely apoplectic Friday night after a 44-21 Bombers’ loss to the Ottawa Redblacks at Investors Group Field dropped the Bombers’ season record to 5-4 at the midway mark of the 2018 CFL season.

Nichols wasn’t especially effective on this night and he won’t need Twitter to tell him that. Touchdown strikes of 45 yards and 72 yards to Darvin Adams were both dropped into a bucket and Nichols led an impressive TD drive in the third quarter that got Winnipeg within one score.

But while Nichols’ final numbers were decent — 23-for-35 passing for 291 yards — the big plays were interspersed by far too many long stretches of two-and-outs.

Still, if you’re putting this loss on Nichols — and a lot of Bombers fans were, judging by the booing they did late in the fourth quarter when Nichols returned to the game after being shaken up briefly — you watched a different game than I did.

No, this loss had a lot more to do with a non-existent defence than it did with anything Nichols did or didn’t do on this night.

How bad was the Bombers’ defence on this night? Redblacks QB Trevor Harris went 22-for-29 passing for 241 yards — in the first half.

You find me an offence or a quarterback that thrives on a night their defence is embarrassing themselves like that.

And so with that, the Bombers and their newly embattled quarterback will head shakily into their biggest test of the season so far — a meeting in McMahon Stadium next weekend against an undefeated Calgary Stampeders team that is beginning to look a lot like the 1972 Miami Dolphins, minus Garo Yepremian.

But back to this Twitter thing.

Nichols was irritated this week to learn that even winning isn’t enough to impress the Twitterverse, but he said he’d managed to avoid the worst of the criticism because he made a conscious decision prior to the start of this season to simply stay off social media entirely.

If only Elon Musk had done the same, his company, Tesla, wouldn’t now be the subject of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Musk, in case you missed it, flippantly tweeted last week that he was considering taking his embattled — and money losing — electric car company private at US$420 a share and had already secured the funding.

Musk’s tweet initially sent Tesla’s shares skyrocketing — a US$420 valuation would have been a 20 per cent premium on current prices — before plummeting back to earth when it emerged Musk was just blowing smoke (420, get it?) and had neither the funding or, really, any clue what he was talking about.

Securities regulators look dimly at those sorts of things and as this week ended, a tearful Musk was bleating in the pages of the New York Times about taking too much Ambien and how hard things are being the CEO of a company that Bloomberg estimated this spring is burning investors cash at a rate of US$6,500 per minute.

And so it goes in an age when stupid rules the day on Twitter, whether its emanating from the White House, Silicon Valley or Joe in River Heights, who has a take on all that ails a Bombers offence that coming into this week led the CFL in points scored and touchdowns.

Nichols, to his benefit and that of every fan with a stake in this team, is having none of it.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s people who have zero clue what plays were called. They have no idea what your reads were or if it was you who was off or someone else who was off or it was the defensive guy making a great play,” Nichols told TSN.

Look, we’re all entitled to our own opinions, but we’re not entitled to our own facts.

And those facts are this: while Nichols is throwing for barely 200 yards a game this season, the Bombers are leading the league in rushing yards — by a mile — and even with Friday’s loss, Winnipeg is 4-2 since Nichols returned from injury.

There are two kinds of people who shouldn’t be on Twitter: there are public figures like Musk for whom it has become self-destructive; and then there are public figures like Nichols for whom it seeks to destroy.

A wise man once told me: if you’re seeking validation on the internet, you’re looking in the wrong place.

And the place Nichols and the rest of the Bombers need to be looking right now is at the film.

Friday night was ugly, any way you looked at it. Next weekend will be a horror show unless this team gets right in a hurry.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek