Injuries don’t cast coach in best light
CFL: Benevides’s merits obscured
With all due to respect to the hoi polloi, trying to evaluate B. C. Lions head coach Mike Benevides’s performance just before a home game against the expansion Ottawa Redblacks is going about it backwards.
Win, as the Lions should, and the crisis goes away for another week, so what was the point?
“You always evaluate,” general manager Wally Buono said. But for life- altering decisions, he said, “you have to wait until the season’s over. Could we be 9- 5 right now, or 10- 4 if we make the plays we should make? There’s only two games we couldn’t have won: against Toronto and in Montreal. Every other game…”
A better question is: why are the critical masses even talking about the head coach’s role in the decline and fall of a Canadian Football League club that’s been somewhere between good and great ever since Buono got here in 2003?
Why, for that matter, is anyone outraged that the 7- 7 Lions can’t find their butts with both hands on offence when their No. 1 quarterback, No. 1 and 2 running backs, and three of their top four receivers are all hurt, and the offensive line has been in a state of flux all season?
Why is anyone surprised that the signing of quarterback Kevin Glenn as an insurance policy against the uncertain health of Travis Lulay didn’t turn out to be the salvation of the season?
Benevides keeps saying next man up when another of his mainstays goes down — and the list now includes Lulay, Andrew Harris, Stefan Logan, Courtney Taylor, Bryan Burnham, left tackle Hunter Stewart, cornerback Dante Marsh and, barring a hasty return from an injury that the team might be wise to rest through next week’s bye, Manny Arceneaux.
That’s seven offensive starters, 1,214 rushing yards, 2,129 receiving yards and 14 of their 17 receiving touchdowns out of the lineup.
Next man up? Even Benevides knows it sounds hollow.
“The biggest thing is, I have to try bring them examples of guys who’ve had the opportunity and succeeded, whether it’s ( slotback) Bryan Burnham or now ( defensive back) T. J. Lee — I try to bring it back to something that they can believe so that I’m not full of crap,” the coach said Thursday.
But Benevides knows, and the players must know, that the Next Man Up is almost always a downgrade.
“We all understand there’s a reason they weren’t playing. It’s because the other person is either better, more experienced or a little bit of both. So you have to be honest with them,” Benevides said. “But at the same time, our job and their job is to win, and they have tremendous enthusiasm for that opportunity.”
The CFL, as a whole, is in a transitional period, not all smooth, with new stadiums still getting the kinks out, new roster rules, a new understanding of where it makes most sense to deploy Canadian talent and a low ebb in quarterbacking talent.
That last one has come back to bite the Lions.
All credit to Buono for having the foresight to acquire a veteran for the first half of the season, a decision that seemed doubly important when Lulay’s surgically repaired throwing shoulder blew out in his very first game back.
But surely it has dawned on even the most vitriolic critics of the Lions’ offence that when push comes to shove, Kevin Glenn not only isn’t going to be Travis Lulay, he is probably going to play a lot like Kevin Glenn — which is to say prone to throwing interceptions, missing open receivers and turtling under a heavy pass rush rather than using his legs.
And even Glenn is impossible to evaluate fairly, given the dearth of weapons and uncertain protection he’s had to deal with.
There is only so much Benevides, or offensive co- ordinator Khari Jones — another sitting duck for the critics on social media — can do with personnel that screams mediocre, and a constantly changing cast of it at that.
Amid a season dominated by defences, a merely average offence hasn’t got a chance. A below- average one is going to get buried.
Does that mean the coach is blameless? Nope. It could be he is as average as his players are, right now. But how can you tell?
And then there’s the whole question of what Buono would do about it even if he were convinced the problem was coaching.
As a GM, he has never fired a coach and would he really move on Benevides, his protege, whom he has brought along from the lowest assistant on the totem pole in Calgary through increasing responsibility in B. C., and to whom Buono handed the coaching reins when he kicked himself upstairs following the 2011 Grey Cup victory?
Or is he too invested in Benevides to give up on him yet, in a season plagued not merely by injuries, but crippling injuries to key players?
Remember: Benevides, like Buono, comes from the defensive side of the ball, and the Lions’ defence is playing lightsout. Asked whether he thinks his boss takes injuries into consideration when rating his coaches, Benevides said: “I’m not sure. You’d have to ask him exactly how he sees that.”
Both know there is no time for a miracle cure, a magic airlift of talent that could change everything. It’s up to the people that are here, now.
“If it was just a few, maybe, but it’s the starting left tackle, it’s the starting tailback, it’s multiple starting slotbacks, it’s the starting corner,” the coach said. “But I do have a lot of belief in the guys we have here … and, you know, the proof’s in the pudding. We’ve been able to compete, but we haven’t been able to win, and this isn’t about competing. This is about winning.
“I know that all our leashes are short.”