Campbell gets early start on '23 season by retaining entire Lions coaching staff
The B.C. Lions are getting down to business already.
The Leos finished their season only three weeks ago with the Western final, but co-general manager and head coach Rick Campbell announced Wednesday that his entire coaching staff had signed extensions for next season. Offensive co-ordinator Jordan Maksymic and defensive co-ordinator Ryan Phillips highlight the 10 coaches returning.
B.C. finished 2022 with a 12-6 mark, its first double-digit winning season since 2016. They beat the Calgary Stampeders 30-16 in the Western semifinal and then fell 2820 to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the West final.
“We wanted to retain them all and to be able to get them done this quickly was really good,” Campbell said. “Once the season ended, we wanted to be aggressive on re-signing coaches and players and try to be ahead of the curve on it.
“It's a big step. You go through some years where you have a bunch of changes and things are changing all the time and that makes things more difficult. This is a good step for our off-season to get this done and it allows the players to know who they are working with as far as our free agents or other (teams') free agents, who'll have a pretty good idea now who they'd work with in B.C.”
Campbell says with the offensive and defensive staffs back together and, hopefully a large group of returning players, the Lions will be starting at a higher point going into next season.
“I look at the continuity. It's not about staying the same. It's about having the ability to grow and evaluate and get better,” he added. “You're not in the phase of getting to know each other. You're in the phase of ironing out the finer details of things. That's the part I'm excited about. I've been around this league for a while now and the teams that I've been a part of that have had success, it usually involves quite a bit of continuity.”
The next step for Campbell and Neil McEvoy, who shares the GM duties, is to re-sign their own pending free agents before they're eligible to hit the open market in February.
The Lions have several key players looking for new deals, including defensive backs T.J. Lee and Garry Peters, running back James Butler, linebacker Bo Lokombo, kicker Sean Whyte and offensive linemen Sukh Chungh, Joel Figueroa and Peter Godber.
“That process is already underway. You probably don't end up retaining every single person, but we'd still like to have a large group of them back,” Campbell said.
Wide receiver Bryan Burnham, who announced his retirement on Tuesday, was in that pending free agent group.
Quarterback Nathan Rourke is under contract for next year but is working out with various NFL clubs. Lions play-by-play voice Bob Marjanovich was reporting on his Twitter on Wednesday that Rourke has workouts with Minnesota, Arizona and Philadelphia coming up. There have been workouts reported already with Las Vegas, Jacksonville and Denver.
Along with Maksymic and Phillips, the Lions are retaining special teams co-ordinator Don Yanowsky and coaches Jason Tucker (receivers); Kelly Bates (offensive line); Trysten Dyce (running backs); John Bowman (defensive line); Travis Brown (linebackers); Tanya Henderson (defensive assistant); and Derek Oswalt (special teams assistant/video co-ordinator).