Coach Mike Kelly started the Blue Bombers off with a big win on Wednesday night.
The Mike Kelly era is underway with a win.
While it is only one game - and a pre-season one at that - in a football market such as Winnipeg, it's important.
Kelly needs to make an immediate impression after turning over the team in the off-season and coming across as a cocksure individual despite lacking any previous professional head coaching experience.
An announced attendance of 27,742, which is quite a turnout for a pre-season game, watched the Bombers beat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 32-22. The Bombers led 26-0 at the half.
"I hope everybody feels a little more relaxed right now," Kelly said in is address to the media.
Anything less than an impressive showing by the Bombers at home would have created some angst among Bomber followers about Kelly and his master plan.
By playing his starters, including quarterback Stefan LeFors, whom he acquired in an off-season trade from Edmonton, in the opening quarter, Kelly put his team in a position to succeed and make an immediate impression.
"`I don't know what they're going to think," LeFors said of the crowd. "`They'll probably find something wrong with what we did, but really what matters is what happens in this room."
Are things really that tense that LeFors has developed an us-against-the-world attitude this early into the 2009 season - before an actual regular-season game has been played?
A day after the Bombers' victory, Kelly publicly proclaimed LeFors as his starting quarterback.
"Hearing the news…it's exciting to know I have someone in my corner. Someone who believes in me and someone who traded for me and knows what I can do," LeFors was quoted in the Winnipeg Free Press. "This gives me the confidence I can get the job done. Coach Kelly has put his confidence in me and I know he'll put me in a position to succeed."
LeFors completed five of eight passes for 98 yards, which are respectable numbers for 15 minutes worth of work.
Then again, it happened against the Tiger-Cats, a team in yet another rebuilding process.
It really shouldn't have come as any great surprise that Kelly anointed LeFors as his guy. He created an open competition in training camp after doing away with the Bombers' top two quarterbacks from last season. Kelly has a background on the offensive side of the ball and had seen enough of Kevin Glenn and Ryan Dinwiddie to know he didn't want them on his team. LeFors played behind Ricky Ray and Jason Maas in Edmonton, which is to say he didn't play very much. But as the Eskimos' receivers coach last year, Kelly saw enough of LeFors to decide he could start and made the track to bring him to Winnipeg.
In Toronto, new head coach Bart Andrus anointed Kerry Joseph as his starter going into training camp, avoiding any kind of controversy. When Joseph started out slowly in the first quarter of the Argos' 37-24 pre-season loss to Montreal, Andrus took him aside and told him to relax.
Wise words from a rookie head coach in the Canadian Football League.
The Andrus era hasn't been dissected and analyzed in Toronto with the same furor as Kelly in Winnipeg. Then again the Toronto market isn't nearly as focused on the Argos as Winnipeg is with the Bombers.
In Winnipeg, Battleship Kelly has been making all kinds of news, including winning his first game.
