I understand what your "saying" and Trestman would likely agree as well, he's said a number of time it isn't him. Even Charlie Taafe looked like a pro coaching the Als.
Taaffe never won a Grey Cup for the franchise. Frankly, I think 15_championships's suggestion that 'any coach' could make this team a winner is sheer overstatement -- our string of Grey Cup failures of the past decade proves otherwise. Sure, the team has enjoyed a lot of on-field success, but it had also lost five Grey Cup games while winning only one.
How quickly people forget that at the end of the 2007 season, it wasn't at all certain that Anthony Calvillo still had a career left in football. Quite apart from his wife's illness, he had had a poor season, the team's offensive line was in shambles (had given up the most sacks league-wide), and the talent to replace former stars like Copeland still wasn't in evidence. Popp was not a qualified head coach, Chris Jones had flown the coop to Calgary, and suddenly nobody knew if the Als would even make it past the division final in 2008, let alone challenge for the Cup.
Enter Marc Trestman, who implemented a CFL-style version of the West Coast offense that even other coaches (e.g. Ken Miller) have since admitted that they have emulated or adopted in part. Beyond the offensive system, he also brought a different, detail-oriented philosophy to the dressing-room. Three years later, the players are still drinking his Kool-Aid, because that Kool-Aid has just given the franchise back-to-back Grey Cups. That's not accidental or the happy byproduct of just having good players. That's a head coach whose creativity and football acumen are surpassed only by his ability to motivate his players to excel.
Of all the big North American team sports, football arguably demands the best and most from its coaches. It is a highly strategic game that requires coaches to put players in a position to succeed through creative and personnel-appropriate scheming, effective play-calling, and efficient game management. Trestman has done in three years what Don Matthews, one of the greatest CFL coaches of all time, couldn't do in five: he's given this Montreal franchise two Grey Cup wins in two consecutive seasons. Is he the sole reason we've won? No, not at all. But not being the sole reason for the team's success does not logically mean that Trestman has nothing to do with the team's success. That's faulty reasoning dressed up in hyperbole.
In hindsight, it's easy to make victory seem inevitable, but take a look at the season that was and tell me with a straight face that Montreal, or for that matter any team, was a lock to win the Cup. Parity was pretty high.
And to be clear, this isn't sour grapes or not enjoying our success. I just find that on this forum, the reasoning is frequently faulty, or reliant on post hoc teleology: i.e. because we know, in December 2010, that the Als have won back-to-back Grey Cups, it must have been inevitable that they were going to win them and therefore that the head coach's role in that success was minimal at best. But looking at the halftime adjustments that Trestman and Milanovich made in the 2010 Grey Cup, I find it very difficult to believe that coaching had nothing to do with the championships we just won.
Looking back on it, I do believe as well that coaching had a major impact on the 2010 Grey Cup.
Etcheverry game planned his defence extremely well, and it gave the Als lots of problems in the first half. Major credit has to go to Trestman and Milanovich for making the proper adjustments to the offence to take control of the game in the second half.
Also, Tim Burke deserves a heck of a lot of credit. Montreal was in zone most of the game, which they hadn't really been doing all season, the D was almost exclusively in man coverage all season. And the Riders seemed to have no answer to his defensive game plan. . . what was it, 8 punts in a row for them in the second half? That is not a testament to an ineffective Rider offence as much as it is a testament to a tremendous defensive performance by the Als, in my opinion.
:thup: :thup:
No argument here. I was hard on Burke this year, but as in 2009, his defense really rose to the challenge at crunch time.
No question we have a wonderful coaching staff and Trestman has brought a level of respect and profesionalism to the coaching ranks of the CFL. In fact elevated it in to another category compared to the Rita's and Berry's of the league but they have the "horses" and the Football operations side of the business is tops in the league.
I guess your all right 
Yes, they have the horses. But the OP was saying that Trestman had nothing to do with our recent success. That's just not true. Football is a game that lives and dies on coaching. Would this team have been able to finally get over the Grey Cup hump and win back-to-back championships with Bart Andrus on the sidelines?
I'm not saying Trestman is the only reason we won. But he's not irrelevant to our success either. He's been an important component, for which Jim Popp deserves a ton of credit. You can also argue, quite easily, that Trestman is the man who resurrected Anthony Calvillo's career by turning him into a timing quarterback in a West Coast offense. That wasn't Calvillo's game before Trestman arrived.