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I don’t know. You’d think that when a guy wins his 100th game as a head coach in the CFL, the men who’ve gotten there before him would send him a nice gift or something.
Nine coaches had reached the century milestone before Calgary’s John Hufnagel made it an even 10 when his Stampeders defeated the Toronto Argonauts, 27-15, in Week 17. That’s an exclusive little club they’ve got going there, very difficult to get into. If there are no actual gifts coming from some of his compatriots in that clubhouse, Hufnagel can at least bank on hearty congratulations and lots of verbal slaps on the back in the wake of his earning the right to learn the secret handshake.
After he stopped laughing, Wally Buono, the winningest head coach in Canadian Football League history, said “no, there’s no gift coming.” Bob O’Billovich, eighth on the all-time wins list, also got a kick out of the thought. “Send him a gift? There’s no gift for that. You’re supposed to win,” he says, chuckling. “I should send him a text: ‘Welcome to the one hundred win club.’ I’m happy for him. He’s done a great job.”
Both O’Billovich and Buono consider Hufnagel a friend and so were delighted to see him pull off his one hundredth victory. Buono is especially close, going back about a quarter of a century with Hufnagel, to the days when they were re-designing offences and revolutionizing the game, forcing defensive coordinators to, in turn, develop new ways to cope.
“I did send him a note and just congratulated him because that is a tremendous accomplishment and I have a tremendous amount of respect for John,” says Buono. “And we have a good friendship.”
“When I heard about it I was very pleased for John and I was very proud that we had a relationship and if I helped him in any way then – hey, he helped me – I was glad to return the favour.”
If you want to know how someone reaches a plateau like the one decorated with a hundred pro football conquests, ask a mountain climber who’s done it before. Buono got there twice. “I don’t even remember when I hit a hundred,” he says. “Seriously, I don’t.”
First, he did it with the Stampeders in 1997. Then, he won his 100th as the head coach of the BC Lions, in 2011. All tolled, the Lions’ current Vice-President and General Manager stacked 254 opponents’ pelts on top of each other to lead The Pile High Club. A hundred? That’s like base camp for Buono.
O’Billovich collected his one hundredth in 1994, when his Argos defeated the Las Vegas Posse and a rookie quarterback named Anthony Calvillo. Obie finished his head coaching career with 107 victories. He was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame earlier this year.
“John was a good quarterback,” O’Billovich says, mulling over the qualities that make Hufnagel a very good coach. “He’s a very smart guy, too. He was as a quarterback and I think that’s carried over in his career as a head coach. One of the things I always believed, as a head coach – and I think John has those qualities – you have to be consistent in how you deal with the players. I think he does a good job at gaining their respect.”
“I think he’s had a great relationship with his players and his coaching staff.”
Buono, the linebacker, and Hufnagel, the quarterback, used to meet on the field as foes, back in the day. They would join forces about a decade after those hostilities ceased, and Buono about to begin his long career as a head coach.
As Hufnagel was winding down his playing career in Saskatchewan during the 1987 season, he took on some coaching duties as well. Prior to that, Winnipeg Blue Bombers Head Coach Cal Murphy had him as one of his quarterbacks and must have seen a future coach in him at the time. Because in 1990, when Buono was starting his first season as the boss in Calgary, he hired Hufnagel as the offensive coordinator, partly on a recommendation from Murphy.
“I was impressed with John’s work ethic,” Buono recalls, outlining some of the qualities he believes have made Hufnagel a hundred game winner. “I was impressed with his intelligence, his creativity. I was impressed with his attitude of excellence. He’s got a very good football mind and a very good business mind.”
Hufnagel and Buono have affected today’s CFL landscape in serious ways and not just with all those wins and Grey Cup Championships.
When they put their heads together back in 1990, they almost immediately began an alteration that has led to every CFL team using, really, a defensive back at one of the linebacker positions.
Like many innovations, it was born of necessity.
“We sat down and talked about how we couldn’t protect the quarterback,” Buono says, recalling that Calgary’s offensive line was struggling at the time. “So, we figured, let’s spread ‘em out (the receivers) and let the veteran quarterback – which I think was Danny Barrett, then Doug Flutie – deal with the extra blitzer and we lived and died by that. And it was very successful.”
”We developed a spread offence,” he continues. “The shotgun offence, the five receiver offence, the six receiver offence. If that’s being innovative and that’s affected the CFL, John was the coordinator and you’ve got to say the main architect of that.”
Hufnagel and Buono had created a type of offence that was so successful, opposing defensive coordinators had to redefine a linebacking position. “Those days people didn’t play the nickel defences like they do today, they usually played with three linebackers,” Buono says. “We’d try to get the receiver on the linebacker and when we did, we were successful.”
Very successful. By the mid 90’s, defensive coordinators started to use converted defensive backs at the strong side linebacker position in order to help cope with the extra receivers. They still do that to this day as CFL teams continue to regularly send six-packs of pass catchers buzzing into the defensive backfield.
“We took off from there,” Buono says of his early days with the CFL’s newest member of the century club. When Hufnagel left the CFL after the 1996 season, Buono was just nearing his first lap of the hundred wins mark. Hufnagel’s own assault wouldn’t begin until he was named Stampeders’ head coach more than a decade later, getting his first victory on June 26, 2008 when the Stamps bested the BC Lions, 28-18.
Not quite seven and a half years later, John Hufnagel made it to that 100 win plateau in only three games more than it took for Buono to do it.
“His legacy is what it is,” Buono says.
“He’s been very, very successful and that’s not by chance.”
