WITH POPP AT ARGOS’ HELM, THERE IS NO SEA TOO DEEP
Rudderless in March, GM has steered team to within a game of CFL’s great destination
It didn’t seem anything close to likely on that late February morning when Jim Popp was named general manager of the Toronto Argonauts and Marc Trestman was hired as head coach that this team would get within a game of the Grey Cup.
They were three months behind every other team in the CFL. They missed out on free agency. They had no coaching staff. They’d done no planning. If not for the people hired that day, who had championship pedigree in Montreal, the whole operation seemed like a big fat football joke.
“We got back to the office that day and the biggest thing was, we needed a coaching staff,” Popp said. “We needed to put it together as quickly as possible, and we concentrated on that.”
Trestman got on the phone. Popp got on the phone. March is not exactly a time to find football coaches. Most of them are working. The good ones are.
“Once we got that done, then we focused on our players and what we needed,” Popp said.
It started with researching their own players. You never really know a player until you break him down on film, game after game, season after season.
“When Don Matthews first came to Montreal, he had no regard for Anthony Calvillo,” Popp said during a lengthy interview. “Then he went and watched film for a couple of weeks and he came out of our dungeon with a smile on his face, saying ‘Holy crap, I didn’t know he was that good.’ He was instantly high on him. That’s what you have to do: You have to study. We had to study our players.”
Trestman didn’t have to study Ricky Ray. If he didn’t necessarily know the quarterback, he knew his game. What he didn’t know was the person. So he got on the phone with Ray and having not spent any time on the field with him, named him his starting quarterback on the day he was hired to coach.
“The biggest thing was talking to Ricky Ray,” Popp said. “Marc talking to him, he could hear in his voice how much he wanted to play, how much he thought he had left in the tank. He was adamant he wanted to play and felt he was in the best health in three years.”
Working with Trestman for the first time, Ray passed for 5,546 yards and took about 5,546 hits in doing so, give or take. It was the second-most yardage he’s thrown for in 15 CFL seasons.
“Everybody gets caught up in how low-key he is,” Popp said of Ray. “To me, he’s such a smooth operator it is almost lackadaisical, but he’s such a leader by example. This guy is unbelievably tough, and what a student of the game he is.”
Ray became part of the Argos’ great Sunshine Boys duo of this surprising season. At 38, his favourite target has been 32-year-old S.J. Green, a receiver many thought was finished before this season began.
Ray was thought to be at the end. Green, apparently, had beaten him to the finish line.
“S.J. had a severe injury but I never heard it was careerending,” said Popp, who brought him in from Montreal, where he broke into the CFL. “I was watching video of him rehabbing. What I had in mind is not getting back to what he was, but becoming an effective receiver. I looked at him the way I looked at Nik Lewis when I brought him into Montreal. I felt he was a player who could help us.”
At a mini-camp in May, Green took part only in shadow workouts, not running real plays. In training camp, they gave him more work, little by little.
“We were giving him days off,” Popp said. “We were taking it slow. His knee was responding great. He started to look like his old self.”
After being written off, Green caught a career-high 104 passes for a career-high 1,462 yards.
“You have to credit Ricky and S.J. for what they’ve done here,” Popp said. “They understand the league, they understand the system and they trust each other. Once you have that kind of trust, it’s easy.”
Popp took Green from Montreal, and brought in linebacker Bear Woods from the Alouettes as well. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have been hired as GM had he had not been able to secure his old Montreal coach, Trestman. But there was another piece of Montreal business that needed to be taken care of.
When Popp ran the Alouettes, he had James Wilder Jr. on his negotiation list. He had tried on numerous occasions to bring Wilder to Montreal. One day this past winter he noticed Montreal had dropped Wilder from its list. He jumped at the opportunity.
“Marc and I talked about it. Who does he remind you of, he asked? I said his father. Marc had coached his father in Tampa. We had to convince James that this would work for him.”
In the final six games of the season, after Brandon Whitaker was hurt, boy, did it work.
Wilder did the near impossible: He ran for 872 yards and five touchdowns, and caught passes for another 533 yards. The notable numbers were when he rushed for 190, then 141 yards in back-to-back games in September.
Popp thought Wilder would be good. He had no idea he would be this dominant.
“I can’t sit here and tell you … I thought he was going to do all these things,” Popp said. “Before he did that, he was one of our better special-teams players, and normally if you can play special teams, they keep you in the NFL.
“My first question with James was, how did the NFL teams not keep this guy? I reached out to some of those teams and we found out they never really looked at him that way.”
It leaves the Argos now, desperate in the winter for a roster, with a Hall of Fame quarterback who has done everything, a receiver playing his greatest football at age 32, and a running back who seemingly can’t be stopped, especially when catching the ball.
It makes the team dangerous, but that was just one factor in the Argo resurgence.
Popp knew, after seeing his off-season roster, that he needed a new receiving corps, needed to rebuild the secondary, needed to add depth to the defensive line, and was fortunate on defence to come up with game-changers like Marcus Ball, who was a significant part of the Argos’ last Grey Cup victory in 2012 and Woods, the all-star linebacker on defence.
But it isn’t just players with the Argos. It’s the rapport that Popp and Trestman share, the kind of trust necessary to operate effectively.
“We understand each other,” Popp said. “We listen to each other. The great thing with Marc is, as much as he’s a teacher, he wants to learn. He’s a great listener. He asks for your knowledge every week and he wants to know what you think. It’s not for me to tell him what to do: He knows what to do.
“I understand him. Before I got to this position, I was a coach. I grew up in a coach’s family. I understand that part of it.”
The part he doesn’t yet understand — this takes time — is the city and its fan base. Selling the Argos is a challenge, even with an Eastern final at BMO Field on Sunday. There’s a fan base. There are ticket buyers. There’s just not enough of them.
Popp figures this is just another challenge in a career full of challenges.
“I was in the startup of NFL Europe,” he said. “I was in the startup of a football league that lasted 10 months, had a draft, three weeks of practice and never played a game. I was in Saskatchewan when everybody was taking pay cuts because the team was bankrupt, if you can believe that now. I was at the startup operation in Baltimore. I was in Montreal when (we) had 1,600 season ticket holders and played our games in the Big O and our fans would move in the stands as we moved with the ball. I’ve seen a lot.
“It doesn’t matter what sport you are in, you have to find your niche. All we can do is control what we can control. I’m very proud of our accomplishments (this season), but nobody is going to be happy unless we win it all.”
(Ricky Ray is) such a smooth operator it is almost lackadaisical, but he’s such a leader by example. This guy is unbelievably tough.