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Naylor’s Kickoff: Jones firing was predictable, if not inevitable

Khari Jones Khari Jones - The Canadian Press
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The Montreal Alouettes resume their season tonight against Edmonton, fresh off a bye week and with a new man on the sideline.

General manager Danny Maciocia’s decision to replace Khari Jones was predictable (yes, many predicted it), if not inevitable.

It’s a scenario that illustrates a few of the cold, hard truths in the Canadian Football League that reveal themselves whenever coaches are fired.

In the case of Maciocia taking over for Jones, there are at least four of them.

The first is that it’s almost always more difficult for a coach to be working for a general manager who didn’t hire him than for one who did.

Jones became head coach early in the 2019 season, roughly seven months before Maciocia was hired by the team’s new owners.

Most GMs have an idea of who they want to coach for them long before they ever get the job, and it’s usually only a matter of time until they get what they want. In these instances, firing a coach doesn’t go down as a negative for the GM, because the GM bears no responsibility for the head coach being there in the first place.

A second truism is that it’s undoubtedly more difficult to work for a general manger with a background in coaching.

Maciocia has been a head coach in both the CFL and at the U Sports level. He sees the game – no matter which title he holds – like he’s still on the sideline. Watching someone coach a team differently than you would is inevitably going to frustrate a general manager who thinks like a coach.

There’s a decent list of former head coaches who moved upstairs and struggled watching someone else do it. The great Wally Buono is one. Ron Lancaster is another. Jim Popp developed a reputation for replacing head coaches with himself in Montreal. Rightly or wrongly, it seems that GMs who were former coaches are hard to please, especially if, as in Jones’s case, you were never their guy in the first place.

That brings us to our third truism: injuries are usually part of a coach’s demise.

If you surveyed CFL coaches before the season about the league’s most feared offensive player, you would have heard the name William Stanback, Montreal’s powerhouse running back who sets the tone for the Als offence.

Stanback going down to a season-ending injury in the opening game was more than just a bad omen for Montreal. Although his backups have filled in admirably, there’s no replacing the best back in the league.

The Alouettes have the CFL’s worst redzone touchdown percentage. That’s the area of the field where Stanback can have the most impact, as a back who’s virtually impossible to tackle one-on-one.

Our fourth and final truism is that instability at quarterback is always the fastest route to a head coach being fired. It’s often said that coaches look smart when they have great quarterbacks and not so smart when they have bad ones.

Jones didn’t have bad quarterbacks, but somewhere along the way he lost his faith in Vernon Adams this spring. Adams was Montreal’s unquestioned starter last season before a season-ending injury opened the door to acquiring Trevor Harris from Edmonton.

Although Adams won the starting job about of training camp, getting pulled for Harris early in the second game of this season cast doubt over how much faith the coach had in the supposed franchise quarterback.

Jones made the move he thought gave his team the best chance to win. But at 1-3, the instability at quarterback just became one more thing associated with his dismissal.

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The Arbuckle carousel rolls on

Few quarterbacks have had a career quite like Nick Arbuckle, who was traded for the third time in two and a half years on Monday when Edmonton Elks sent him to Ottawa where he’s expected to be the replacement for the injured Jeremiah Masoli.

Arbuckle came into the league with Calgary in 2019, where he performed admirably as the backup to Bo Levi Mitchell. After throwing more than twice as many touchdown passes as interceptions in seven starts with the Stampeders that season, he was the league’s hottest pending free agent.

That’s where his story gets a little weird.

Former Redblacks general manager Marcel Desjardins traded a first-round pick for Arbuckle’s rights after the 2019 season, and then inked him to a lucrative contract to be the team’s franchise quarterback.

The Redblacks’ other option after the 2019 season was former Blue Bomber Matt Nichols. But with Nichols uncertain to be ready to start the season, Ottawa opted for Arbuckle. Nichols signed in Toronto for the season that never took place.

After the lost season, Ottawa wanted to redo Arbuckle’s contract. When that process got drawn out, Ottawa released him and pivoted to Nichols, who had been released by Toronto, in what proved to be a regrettable decision.

Arbuckle instead went to Toronto, where he helped the Argonauts hand the Winnipeg Blue Bombers their only loss suffered all season with Zach Collaros under centre. But by October, McLeod Bethel-Thompson had taken the No. 1 job and Arbuckle was dealt to Edmonton.

Then Elks general manager Brock Sunderland inked Arbuckle to a deal late last season to be Edmonton’s starting quarterback in 2022. That situation was up in the air the minute Sunderland was fired immediately after the season and replaced by Chris Jones in in December.

Jones seemed unconvinced about Arbuckle from the outset, leading him to invite eight quarterbacks to camp. By Week 4 Jones had replaced Arbuckle with Tre Ford, a remarkable but still raw rookie straight out of U Sports.

Right now, Ottawa needs Arbuckle as much as Arbuckle needs Ottawa. Let’s hope the marriage works this time for both parties.

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Atlantic expansion not imminent

This weekend’s Touchdown Atlantic game is once again stirring speculative conversation about the CFL expanding with a 10th team in Atlantic Canada.

Especially, since in late 2019, Halifax Regional Council approved a conditional $20 million grant for a stadium that would house a CFL team.

Then came the pandemic, which shifted the priorities of both the league and local governments in Atlantic Canada.

So, where does it all stand today?

Schooner Sports and Entertainment, the group behind the CFL expansion bid, doesn’t answer media requests. But sources say it’s undergone some changes to its roster and is retrenching while it comes up with a new strategy.

Don’t expect the CFL’s tenth team to be kicking off anytime soon. This one has a long field to travel to get to the end zone.

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The Marino suspension

No one seemed happy about the four-game suspension handed out to Saskatchewan Roughrider defensive lineman Garrett Marino for injuring Masoli and his conduct during his team’s win over Ottawa last Friday.

The Roughriders and their fans deemed the punishment too harsh. Much of the rest of the league’s players and fans seemed to want him gone entirely.

Masoli released a statement Tuesday calling out both the CFL and the Roughriders for their responses to what occurred – the league for only assessing Marino one game for comments directed at Masoli’s heritage, which he called a “slap on the wrist,” and the Roughriders and Marino for their overall lack of contrition in the days that followed the game.

The league broke the four-game suspension into blocks – two for the hit that knocked out Masoli, one for a hit on Dino Boyd on the previous play, and one for the on-field comments directed at Masoli.

Presumably, each of those was based on precedent, allowing the league to get to four games, which constitutes double the longest suspension ever delivered to a player for on-field conduct.

Marino announced Wednesday he would not appeal and issued a public apology that read as if it had been written by a lawyer.

 

 Apparently, Marino considered an appeal but determined in consultation with the CFLPA that he was unlikely to win it. That was good news for everyone. 

The league is happy to move on from a story that dominated CFL headlines for nearly a week. The Roughriders get to avoid the public relations blowback that would have come with an appeal for behaviour that was resoundingly condemned across the league. The CFLPA avoided the optics of having to defend Marino at the same time it’s been promoting the issue of player safety.

The CFLPA was essentially put on notice by Collaros on Tuesday when he opined on the Marino suspension during his media availability, reminding everyone that it had been the quarterbacks the union had asked to lead the support during phases of collective bargaining. He could have added that the quarterbacks pay the most union dues.

The union, CFL and Roughriders should all be thankful Marino opted to take his punishment without a fight.