Blue Bombers set sights on historic achievement By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CST Friday, Nov. 18, 2022

Among followers of this city’s professional football team, they are names mostly uttered in hushed, reverential tones:

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This article was published 17/11/2022 (671 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Among followers of this city’s professional football team, they are names mostly uttered in hushed, reverential tones:

Grant.

Ploen.

Lewis.

They are considered by Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans to be near-sacred figures, centrepieces of a bygone era in which the local squad dominated the Canadian Football League. Between 1958 and 1962, the Bombers — coached by Bud Grant and with Kenny Ploen and Leo Lewis at quarterback and running back, respectively — won four Grey Cup championships (1958, 1959, 1961, 1962), cementing their status as a legitimate CFL dynasty and the most successful and storied Bombers roster of all time.

They are, quite rightly, considered among the greatest Blue Bombers. What they and their teammates accomplished has not been repeated by any Blue and Gold team since. The whispered tones and eternal esteem are well earned.

This weekend, however, the current crop of Bombers stands on the brink of elevating themselves into the ranks previously reserved for only Messrs. Grant, Ploen and company. Should they defeat the Toronto Argonauts on Sunday in the 109th Grey Cup in Regina — something the sports books have installed them as favourites to do — they will have accomplished something not even the most celebrated of Winnipeg football teams could do: win three consecutive titles.

Since the current Winnipeg club’s formation in 1930 and its first Grey Cup win in 1935, the CFL championship “three-peat” has been accomplished only three times — by the Toronto Argonauts in 1945-47, the Edmonton Eskimos in 1954-56 and by Edmonton again during an unmatched string of five Grey Cups between 1978 and 1982.

Achieving and maintaining excellence in Canadian professional football is more difficult now than it has ever been, owing to the frequent movement of players from team to team in pursuit of the best free-agent deal. Also a factor is the justifiable urge for anyone who compiles a substantial CFL resumé to seek a south-of-the-border audition in the hopes of landing employment in the exponentially more lucrative National Football League.

That the Bombers have been able to maintain a stable team core and attract top-level talent to fill roster holes when they appear is a tribute to the club’s current management.

That the Bombers have been able to maintain a stable team core and attract top-level talent to fill roster holes when they appear is a tribute to the club’s current management, led by president/CEO Wade Miller and general manager Kyle Walters, and the unwavering team culture they have been able to cultivate under the leadership of head coach Mike O’Shea.

The attitude that has driven the Bombers during their recent run of CFL success — Grey Cup titles in 2019 and 2021, and the equally impressive accomplishment of keeping the roster relatively intact through a 2020 season lost to the pandemic — is encapsulated by a sign that reportedly resides above one of the locker-room doorways, emblazoned with the letters “FIFO,” which, filtered for family-friendly reading, means “Fit in or (go away).”

So essential is this coarsely worded call for team unity that FIFO has been included in the inscriptions inside the Bombers’ Grey Cup rings.

It is, by all accounts, a unique, special, immensely talented group, and inarguably is among the most successful chapters in Blue Bombers history. Regardless of the outcome of Sunday’s game — and particularly in the event of the much-discussed three-peat win — there should someday be a time when these names are also spoken in hushed, reverential tones:

O’Shea.

Collaros.

Bighill.

Jefferson.

Bomber fans waited a long, long time — remember that 29-year championship drought? — for this era to arrive. They should fully embrace all they joy, celebration and Prairie-city pride this team has provided.

As they say over at IG Field, this Sunday is For the W.