POPP ERA OVER FOR ALS
After 21 years as the team's general manager and occasional coach, Jim Popp and the Alouettes have parted ways. Herb Zurkowsky examines who might be his replacement.
If every coach in professional sports has a shelf life, so, too, does every general manager.
That Jim Popp had a 21-year run as GM of the Alouettes is nothing short of extraordinary. That he will no longer fill that role — as team president Mark Weightman was forced to announce Monday morning, in lieu of the absentee ownership tandem of Robert and Andrew Wetenhall — is a surprise after two decades, but shouldn’t come as a shock.
If a general manager is the architect of a team’s foundation, he too must be held responsible when the cracks begin to show. And there have been a lot of them recently. The Als have become a train wreck. And their image around the Canadian Football League has been damaged.
Popp was a brilliant GM whose strength was in player personnel. The Als’ roster is littered with players Popp uncovered — at every position but quarterback. That was his Achilles heel, perhaps because, for the longest time, it was Tracy Ham and then Anthony Calvillo. But there wasn’t a succession plan in place. Since Calvillo suffered a concussion in 2013 and then retired, the team has used a dozen quarterbacks — and there still is no quarterback of the present.
Had Popp simply concentrated on those two areas, he might have remained the GM for life. Unfortunately, his ego kept getting in the way. When Popp made the regrettable decision to hire Dan Hawkins as head coach in 2013, replacing Marc Trestman, the experiment lasted five games before Popp took over.
And when Robert Wetenhall decided to fire Tom Higgins — Popp wasn’t consulted, his lustre already beginning to fade — eight games into last season, Popp shouldn’t have replaced him, even if Wetenhall insisted. Popp was never a good coach, but his talents and success as a GM began to erode when he could no longer concentrate on what he did best.
Popp stepped on many toes along the way. As a coach, he once told the team during halftime that they were making him look bad. On another occasion he told players, in no uncertain terms, they’d probably be working in a department store or selling narcotics if their play didn’t improve.
This certainly isn’t the way to motivate a team. And when the team didn’t respond, he blamed injuries, or all the offensive coordinators the team had been through, or the constant shuffling of quarterbacks. Popp took on too much responsibility and, when it came time to admit he created the mess, never took culpability.
He overpaid for free-agent receivers Duron Carter and Kenny Stafford last winter and then forced others to renegotiate their contracts. Carter and Stafford are both gone. As is Vaughn Martin, another one of Popp’s free-agent signings. Remember Henoc Muamba? The Canadian middlelinebacker lasted four games, and then was jettisoned hours before he was due a significant signing bonus. The Michael Sam fiasco? Let’s not even go there.
Isn’t it amazing how many former Als — Jerome Messam, Brandon Whitaker, Sean Whyte, Mitchell White, Dominique Ellis; the list goes on — have said how delightful they are to have escaped the mess? And how many of them would nonetheless look good in a Montreal uniform right about now?
“I’m not sure how many more head coaches and offensive coordinators he could go through and still pass the blame to them,” one player said in a text message. “He had a lot of time to try and fix some mistakes and change some stubbornness but, in the end, I guess it was too little, too late.”
The Als, arguably, have failed to develop sufficient Canadian talent and haven’t unearthed an impact player in a long time. So there will be those who say Popp’s firing — it was not a mutual decision — was deserved and inevitable.
And yet, it’s sad. Many will remember the last few years, overlooking what Popp accomplished in more than a decade. The Als were one of the CFL’s great franchises with an unparalleled level of success, a team that finished first in the East Division 10 times in a 14-year span, beginning in 1999. They won three Grey Cups and appeared in the title game eight times between 2000 and 2010. Montreal is the last club to win consecutive championships.
But the Als haven’t reached the Cup since 2010, the longest drought of any team. And, like Saskatchewan, they’ve missed the playoffs for a second consecutive year. In a nine-team league, where two-thirds of the clubs qualify for post-season play, this is an ignominious accomplishment.
Popp wore many hats, and the argument will be made the organization is no better off without him. His replacement — Université de Montréal head coach Danny Maciocia is the leading candidate and extremely popular — will have big shoes to fill and inherit numerous headaches.
There’s unrest on the coaching staff and the players aren’t enamoured of having to take a school bus to and from practice daily. And if the next GM is Maciocia, how will he feel about the organization attempting to persuade him to retain interim head coach Jacques Chapdelaine, who went 4-2 after replacing Popp?
Maciocia and Chapdelaine worked together at Edmonton in 2007. That relationship didn’t end well.