Bring back coach Hawkins!

Popp deserves a very fair share of this dysfunction. There is no doubt or argument that the W's have lead the downhill trek, BUT the GM in all major forms of football that I am aware of LEADS the head coaching search. What a conflict of interest last winter. We NEVER interviewed the top candidates and we really do not know WHO was dragging their feet in the head coaching search. The Ws did a horrific job of controlling the process. At some point Little Andy flexed his lineage and came up with our ill-fated hire. Even Higgins was saddled with a majority of his staff. When you saddle a coach like that, you do not attract the prime candidates.For some insane reason, our GM also hires the assistants prior to hiring the Head Coach (Hawkins / Higgins). Where else does that happen? Yes, Popp did let Higgy fire Ray, but you have a staff of guys that have no loyalty to the Head Coach. You saw where Turk could not agree to letting Popp hire the staff when he was talking about the head job in '13 and we didn't know about that until Turk spilled those beans last week.I cant defend ANYONE in the Front Office triangle and certainly wont mitigate Popp's role in this mess. This is certainly , in my opinion a 3 headed mess.
For the last time, (I promise) Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton all conducted the traditional search of leading candidates and the GM presented his choice to the owner for approval. Can it be that simple? Why do we have a fixation on the unemployed and inexperienced / semi retired?

I agree that the way we've run our last two HC searches has been all kinds of messed up. But this time around, Popp wasn't even allowed to hire the HC. By all accounts, Hawkins picked most of his staff -- Speckman, Campbell, and Miller were known to him, I believe. The coach he didn't pick, Thorpe, had been hired by Trestman, actually, and the reason that hire was tail-backwards was because Trestman left the team incredibly late in the hiring season.

This year, Popp HAD to surround Higgins with guys he hadn't picked, because the Ws hired him so late and Higgins himself had no contacts worth speaking about. What else could Popp do? Fire guys who thought they'd be coming back all because the Ws waited until January to hire the HC? The process has been brutal for two years now and while I give Popp some of the blame, this year the Ws are the main culprits to me. They tried to play chicken with Popp thinking he'd cave, and he didn't. Then they folded like a house of cards and rushed to hire a guy who vaguely looked and sounded like Trestman, without their GM's consent. Then re-upped that same GM to a three-year extension. And you can see from the recent spate of hires that Popp is likely unwilling to step in again and be interim HC for another season, and rightly so. Why should he have to leave his young family to fix a mess that the Wetenhalls created by flouting his authority as GM?

Higgins knew it was too late to build a staff.
He knew he was being hired over the GM`s head.
He was lucky most assistants decided not to bail.
He canned Richelsky.

J’ai plutôt tendance à endosser cette vision.

Ray n’a pas cassé grand chose dans ses dernières saisons à Edmonton, et il faut constater qu’il était mal entouré du côté des entraîneurs offensifs. J’admets qu’il avait une ligne un peu poreuse en avant de lui, mais quand même.

Il ne faudra pas espérer trouver un autre Trestman, mais plutôt un autre entraîneur-chef qui a assez de colonne pour prendre les coups quand son équipe va mal et qui sait assez bien s’entourer pour prendre la situation en mains et la relever.

Si Higgins est ce genre d’entraîneur, il est temps qu’il le montre. Mais je crois qu’il n’est pas ce genre d’entraîneur, finalement. Le contrat de Popp a finalement été renouvelé, je laisserais beaucoup de latitude à Popp maintenant pour le choix du prochain entraîneur-chef. Un seul message clair pour lui : le prochain entraîneur-chef ne sera pas Jim Popp.

LeStaf is right on. People forget that after the 2005 Grey Cup, Ricky Ray's career was on a steady downward trajectory until the trade to Toronto. A parade of different (and crappy) offensive coordinators, poor protection, not enough offensive weapons, and generally subpar Eskimo teams turned him into a dink-and-dunk game manager who had a nice completion percentage but whose teams failed to make the playoffs three times between 2006 and 2010. If that can happen to Ricky Ray, who has been one of the league's elite QBs for over a decade, how are guys like Smith and Marsh going to fare in our "offence"?

Agreed. Winnipeg is also a good example. They had management issues and some poor coaches, and every QB they brought in failed.

This year? They got their management situation sorted out during last season. Better coaching ,and it looks like some improvements to the other positions on offense. Their new QB came in set up for success. Full credit to Drew Willy for being able to make it happen, but if you took him and put him where Troy Smith is now, how well does he do? I don't think he looks a whole lot better than Smith does.

When the QB is set up for failure, he probably will fail.