Johany Jutras
TORONTO — There is no shortage of experience and past success split among the Canadian Football League’s nine coaches going into 2018.
Two of them, of course, June Jones and Mike Sherman, still have a lot to prove in the three-down game.
If Wally Buono’s 25th season on the sideline is his last, he will retire as the league’s all-time leader in coaching wins at the end of November. Buono has only missed the playoffs twice in his three decades in the league, posting an impressive .635 winning percentage.
Marc Trestman has spent only a quarter of Buono’s time as a head coach, with a slightly lower winning percentage than the Lions’ bench boss. But the Argos’ head coach is working on quite the resume, winning the Grey Cup in half of his six CFL seasons and appearing in the big game four times.
Chris Jones, Mike O’Shea and Rick Campbell have all been at the helm of their respective teams for four seasons, combining for eight playoff appearances and two Grey Cups, while former quarterbacks — but relative newcomers to the coaching circle — Dave Dickenson and Jason Maas have combined to go 50-20-2 since becoming head coaches in 2016.
Let’s take a closer look at the nine head coaches, ranked by the number of seasons in the league:
| COACH | CURRENT TEAM | RECORD | SEASONS | PLAYOFF APPEARANCES | GREY CUP WINS (APPEARANCES) |
| Wally Buono | BC | 273-156-3 (.635) | 24 | 22 | 5 (9) |
| Marc Trestman | TOR | 68-40-0 (.630) | 6 | 6 | 3 (4) |
| Chris Jones | SSK | 41-31-0 (.569) | 4 | 3 | 1 (1) |
| Mike O’Shea | WPG | 35-37-0 (.486) | 4 | 2 | 0 (0) |
| Rick Campbell | OTT | 30-40-2 (.431) | 4 | 3 | 1 (2) |
| Dave Dickenson | CGY | 28-6-2 (.806) | 2 | 2 | 0 (2) |
| Jason Maas | EDM | 22-14-0 (.611) | 2 | 2 | 0 (0) |
| June Jones | HAM | 6-4-0 (.600) | 1 | 0 | 0 (0) |
| Mike Sherman | MTL | — | — | — | — |
When Buono exits the coaching ranks after this season, Trestman will be left as the league’s elder statesman. The 62-year-old had already proven himself with the Montreal Alouettes before going to the NFL, appearing in three Grey Cups in five seasons and winning two of them.
Upon returning, Trestman turned the Argos into a Cinderella story for the ages, taking a team with no head coach and no GM in February to winning a championship in November, a span of nine months. Trestman’s legacy could continue to bud in his second season with the Argos, who are a threat to win the East for the second year in a row.
O’Shea, Dickenson and Maas represent a different generation of coaches: former players who hail from the same era of CFL football. Dickenson and Maas were both quarterbacks, and O’Shea would have tackled both of them before all three became head coaches.
Maas has yet to win a Grey Cup but has gone an impressive 22-14 and appeared in the division finals in both of his seasons on the Eskimos’ sideline. Dickenson has appeared in two Grey Cups while winning an unheard of 80 per cent of his games through two seasons. And O’Shea helped turn around the Bombers, guiding them to back-to-back playoff appearances and, last November, their first home playoff game since 2011.
Jones, who turns 51 this season, spent 12 years around the league as an assistant/coordinator, earning a reputation as a defensive mad scientist. He was a winner everywhere he went before taking his first head coaching job with the Edmonton Eskimos, leading them to a Grey Cup in 2015 in just his second season.
Parlaying that success into a dual GM-coaching role with the Riders, Jones has needed only two seasons to take the Riders from bottom-feeder to Grey Cup contender.
REDBLACKS head coach Rick Campbell has taken a similar path as Jones, earning his stripes as one of the league’s highly-touted defensive minds. The turnaround he engineered in the nation’s capital remains one of the most impressive in CFL history, with his REDBLACKS going from 2-16 in their expansion year in 2014 to appearing in back-to-back Grey Cups, eventually winning it in 2016.
Chris Jones coached the Riders to within a game of the Grey Cup in 2017, his second season as coach (Arthur Ward/CFL.ca)
Seven of the league’s nine head coaches have coached two or more playoff games. Then there are the other two.
June Jones and Mike Sherman possess polished professional coaching resumes, but not on this side of the border. Jones’ elevation to head coach so soon after arriving in the CFL was surprising, but he was good enough to shed the interim label after taking over an 0-8 Ticats team and even providing faint playoff hope on the way to a 6-4 finish.
The former Hawaii coach went into a difficult situation and established a winning culture, leaning on quarterback Jeremiah Masoli and setting the team up for continuity and success in 2018.
In Montreal, all eyes will be on Sherman, who posted a 57-39 regular season record with the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, where he also served as the general manager for five years. Over that span, Sherman coached six playoff games, winning two of them while working with legendary quarterback Brett Favre.
Sherman faces a challenging task taking over a three-win Alouettes team in his first CFL coaching job, but the team has upgraded on paper and will look to contend for a playoff spot in the East Division. While Sherman is older, time will tell if he can follow a similar path as Trestman, who took over the Als in 2008 without a shred of CFL experience.
