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Late January isn’t the time of year when Canadian Football League teams normally fire their general managers.

Which suggests the dismissal of Argonaut general manager Jim Barker on Tuesday may involve some unique circumstances.

To review, the Argonauts completed a dreadful 5-13 season back on Nov. 5, missing the playoffs and losing 11 of their final 12 games, including their last seven in a row.
Yet it took 80 days to determine that Barker - who had two years remaining on his contract - deserved to lose his job while head coach Scott Milanovich kept his.

The only way a team fires its GM at this time of year is if it's got a pretty good idea whom it’s going to hire, or at the very least a shortlist of suitable candidates it believes are interested. Putting together that list is surely what's been occurring the past few weeks, while Barker has been minding the store, taking care of football matters this off-season and waiting to learn his fate.

So who will the Argos hire as their next GM?

The pool of candidates within the CFL is slim and most of those wouldn’t be allowed to pursue the Toronto job this late in the off-season anyhow (The Argos would have to ask for permission to talk to anyone under contract to another team and after Jan. 31 they aren’t even allowed to ask).

There seems little chance the Argos will find their next GM currently working elsewhere in the CFL. Same for the possibility their current GM may be someone with a CFL background currently out of work. Former Montreal Alouettes general manager Jim Popp might seem like an obvious candidate, but as of Tuesday afternoon, no one from the Argos had so much as reached out to him for a conversation to gauge his level of interest.

Meanwhile, there are rumblings that someone from the Argonauts has been poking around the NFL in recent months, inquiring about suitable candidates within that league to become a CFL general manager.

That’s a road rarely travelled in hiring a CFL GM, since strong familiarity with the Canadian league, its players and its quirky rules – both on and off the field – is generally a prerequisite for success. Exceptions are rare, if they exist at all.

The Ottawa Redblacks did explore the option of hiring a mid-level NFL executive to become their general manager back before joining the CFL in 2014. However, they opted to hire Montreal Alouettes assistant general manager Marcel Desjardins - and three years later won the Grey Cup.

Argonaut president Michael Copeland said he has spent the past few weeks exploring successful organizations on both sides of the border, talking to people and trying to identify who might be able help the Argonauts build and sustain a winner.

And while he claimed he doesn’t yet have a shortlist per say, he says he has a pretty good idea whom he wants to talk to.

Add it all up and there seems a very good chance that the next Argonaut GM is going to come from the NFL, someone who may or may not have much familiarity with the CFL or Canada. That’s a move inherent with risk but the Argos appear prepared to go that way, unless there’s another option sitting in the weeds no one can see.

The new GM will likely have to keep Milanovich, since hiring a head coach and building a staff this late in the year is near impossible. And if he’s an NFL import, with limited or no CFL experience, he’ll need a strong staff of experienced people around him to instruct and educate him on the nuances of the game and the league.

As for Copeland, he already figured to be under pressure heading into the 2017 season, based on the team's disappointing attendance and business performance last season.

Given his chance to remake the football operations side, his apparently outside-the-box approach to finding the next Argo general manager is only going to add to that.