BUONO BIDS ADIEU
Tomorrow night marks the final time the CFL’s legendary bench boss patrols the Lions’ sidelines at B.C. Place Stadium.
Let’s see if we understand this correctly.
During his playing days, Wally Buono was a leadfooted linebacker and adequate punter for the Montreal Alouettes who carved out a 10-year career based largely on his work ethic and preternatural toughness.
He then became a defensive coach with, first, the Montreal Concordes, then with the Calgary Stampeders, before he was named the Stamps’ defensive coordinator. In 1990, the late Normie Kwong hired Buono as the head coach in Calgary over, among others, Tom Higgins, who had been the Stamps’ offensive coordinator.
Buono then started producing quarterbacks the way Titleist produces golf balls, raising two simple questions: How and why?
“I’ve thought the same thing,” says B.C. Lions quarterback Travis Lulay. “This is my take on it. When you play the position, sometimes you feel like you’re playing naked. Everyone sees every mistake you make. That’s why the most underrated trait of good quarterbacking is mental toughness.
“That’s what Wally knows. Some guys throw it prettier than others. He doesn’t care. He cares if the guy can make the next play after making a bad one.”
There are, of course, a number of imponderables in Buono’s remarkable career as a head coach, but the greatest mystery is the concept of Wally, the quarterback whisperer.
In his time in the CFL, the man who played and coached defence has developed QBs who have won nine MOPs and nine Grey Cups while being named MVP of the championship game seven times.
OK, Doug Flutie, who was dropped in Buono’s lap by former Lions owner Murray Pezim, accounted for six of the MOPs and three Grey Cup MVPs.
But Marcus Crandell won a Grey Cup MVP while directing the Stamps to the 2001 title. Casey Printers was named the CFL’s MOP in 2004. Jeff Garcia was named All Pro in the NFL more times (four) than all-CFL (once). And that doesn’t account for Danny Barrett, Henry Burris, Dave Dickenson, Buck Pierce, Jarious Jackson, Lulay or Mike Reilly and the other products of Buono’s assembly line.
Consider the following. In 1997-98, Buono’s three quarterbacks in Calgary were Garcia, Burris and Dickenson. In 2010, the Lions quarterbacks were Printers, Jackson, Lulay and Reilly, and from 2005-07 they had Dickenson, Jackson and Pierce at the position.
How do you account for that?
“I think he’s had good coaches,” said Jackson, who spent seven seasons with the Lions under Buono and is now the team’s offensive coordinator. “Wally’s strength is he knows what he doesn’t know and he knows what he knows.
“He’s been around the game long enough to know what the good ones do and the bad ones do.”
One of those coaches is John Hufnagel, currently the Stamps’ president and GM, who Buono hired as his first offensive coordinator in Calgary in 1990. The Stamps’ staff that year included quarterbacks coach Jeff Tedford. Both Hufnagel and Tedford would later become offensive coordinators in the NFL.
“I kept my home in Calgary and Wally was aware I’d be interested in coaching,” said Hufnagel, who had been out of the game a year when Buono came calling. “He brought me in for the interview. Things worked out.”
You might say. That year the Stamps were cursed with an inadequate offensive line but had a mobile quarterback in Barrett. Buono called in Hufnagel and Tedford and wondered, what if we line up with an extra receiver or two, spread the field, and let Danny deal with the pressure.
Thus was born the spread offence that revolutionized the game on both sides of the border.
“Wally has a lot of strengths. One is his ability to judge talent,” said Hufnagel.
He’s also had luck on his side a couple of times. Garcia, Lulay and Reilly were all close to being cut before they showed well in exhibition games. Lulay says he and Reilly, both MOP and Grey Cup MVP winners, have shared more than one laugh about that over the years.
But identifying the next guy has also been a central plank in Buono’s philosophy. He said he learned that from watching Scotty Bowman’s great Canadiens teams in the 1970s and Hugh Campbell’s Eskimo dynasty.
“As an organization, they always had the next guy and they were never scrambling,” said Buono. “I always thought, you have to identify them, then you have to build them. They don’t come ready made.
“Huff (Hufnagel) and I both thought you had to give the third quarterback enough reps to keep him accountable.”
Lulay can relate. When he was with the Seahawks under Mike Holmgren, starter Matt Hasselbeck took all the meaningful reps in practice while the backups watched.
When Lulay got to Vancouver, it was a different story.
“I was the No. 3, but I was getting enough reps to get better,” he says. “I was getting three, four reps a period. That accumulates. Over the course of a season, that’s a couple of seasons of repetitions against some very good defences.”
And that’s produced some very good quarterbacks. Still, when asked to unravel the mystery of Wally the quarterback whisperer, Buono says the underlying reason is fairly simple.
“I think you win with offence,” he said. “I’ve always believed that. I used to tell Huff, I can keep them to 37, but you have to score 38. I always put the money on offence.”
Some get a keepsake to remember Wally, but Buono prefers a parting Grey Cup
The Stampeders middle linebacker heads into the final week of the season with 115 defensive tackles, most in the league. That total will only go up as the Lions try to get their ground game on track heading into the post-season. Sutton averaged over 100 yards in his first two games with B.C. before getting shut down by the Riders. Singleton, just the second Canadian player to have multiple 100-tackle seasons, is Calgary’s nomination for Outstanding Canadian.