CFL.ca staff
Montréal – Anthony Calvillo sits in his car in the parking lot just outside the Montreal Alouettes’ practice facility, squeezing in an interview before he can head home for the evening.
It’s eight o’clock and it’s the end of another long work day for pro football’s all-time leading passer. He’s on the other end of game day prep now, designing and installing instead of executing.
⇒ TAKE A LOOK AT THE PHOTO ALBUM OF THIS WEEK’S PRACTICE
“The days go by so fast,” he says. “They just fly by.”
Calvillo and Ryan Dinwiddie – named co-offensive coordinators two weeks ago – are spending those long yet fleeting days repairing the Montreal Alouettes’ gear-grinding offence, looking to turn the lurching into acceleration, as quickly as possible.
Coming off a bye week, the last place Alouettes play host to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers on Sunday. It will be the first look at what Calvillo and Dinwiddie have been able to cook up.
“It feels good to have that extra time,” Calvillo says of the bye, which has given the coaches time to hit the Als’ offence with a three-point tune up; Identify its strengths, simplify it, and then begin to add to it. A total demolition and reinstallation? Not possible, says Calvillo.
“The key is to make sure we’re staying within our foundation of what we’ve established because you can’t just start from scratch,” he says, then repeats the point. “You just cannot do that. You try to expand on the things that you think we were doing well.”
“It’s been a process but we definitely did not just throw everything out the window.”
Calvillo and Dinwiddie, along with the rest of the Alouettes’ offensive coaches, have their work cut out for them. Montreal is seventh in the CFL in net offence, and dead last in two important passing categories. With a team quarterback efficiency rating of 76.1, the Als have gathered just 217.1 yards per game through the air. Averaging just under 21 points per game this season, Montreal is in eighth in that category, just ahead of the visiting Blue Bombers, who might well have solved their own offensive troubles with the trade that brought in quarterback Matt Nichols.
Calvillo’s rise in the ranks has been a swift one. He started the season – his rookie year as a coach – overseeing Montreal’s receivers. In late August, he was given the quarterback coach’s job. Then, on September 5th, he was named co-offensive coordinator along with Dinwiddie, when Turk Schonert was fired after a home loss to the B.C. Lions.
Now, Calvillo and Dinwiddie will try to make a co-creators’ kind of structure work as the Alouettes attempt to climb from the basement, adding what they hope will be a better offence to an already excellent defence. Calvillo knows there are doubters out there, who do not believe a two-headed coordinator structure can work. He, however, says he has no doubts. That’s partly because he’s seen it done before, when he was a quarterback. Between 2003 and 2005, Calvillo’s plays were designed and installed by Doug Berry and Kevin Strasser and the Alouettes made three straight Eastern Finals, with two trips to the Grey Cup Game.
The other reason Calvillo doesn’t foresee any problems is that he believes he and Dinwiddie are very similar.
“We both speak the same language which means we’re pretty much on the same page in terms of thoughts, philosophies, plays,” he assures. “It’s been a very, very smooth transition working with Ryan.”
“We’re very up front with one another,” Calvillo continues. “First thing we said was ‘look, if something doesn’t look right, you have a concern, you say something.’ Feelings are not going to be hurt here. He’s not a very frightful guy. I’m not a very frightful guy. I think that’s the first step. You’ve got two guys who don’t worry about those things and we can just kinda focus on what we think’s going to be best for the entire team.”
Whether the Alouettes have rookie Rakeem Cato at quarterback or veteran Jonathan Crompton at the helm, the Als offence will be one that has been trimmed back for signal-callers. Calvillo wants his quarterbacks operating in a place of clarity and clarity comes from simplicity. At least right now it does.
“We wanted to build a foundation that, every quarterback we have, whether they’re a rookie or a veteran, is going to be able to handle it,” Calvillo says. “That’s where it started.”
“We’re trying to make it more simple.”
That means reading defences and choosing target receivers in a less complicated fashion and having each quarterback adhere to the principles and processes of one basic system, as opposed to tailoring the offence to the quarterback who’s out there.
“I’ve never put too much emphasis into skill set,” Calvillo says. “To me, as a coordinator, you have to make things that are gonna be good for all the quarterbacks.”
That’s not to say there will not be a little something different in the play books for, say, Cato as opposed to Crompton.
While the passing game has been problematic for the Alouettes in 2015, one thing they have been doing very well is running the football. Second in the CFL in rushing yards per game at 122.5, it is an obvious pillar of the new plan. With running backs Brandon Rutley and Tyrell Sutton behind what is, perhaps, the best offensive line in the league, it’s no surprise that Calvillo and Dinwiddie identified the running game as the solid ground from which they can breathe life into the Montreal attack.
“I think Kris sweet, our offensive line coach, has done an amazing job with our run game,” says Calvillo. “He comes up with a lot of ideas that help us have success. So, we’re like ‘Kris, you’re gonna continue to do that and we’d like you to add more.’”
“There’s a lot of things that we’re trying to do that’s gonna make things a lot easier for not only the offensive linemen, the running backs, but also the quarterbacks.”
It has already been established that, on game day, Calvillo will be the one sending in the plays from the sideline. That, he insists, does not indicate anything more than he happens to be the guy chosen to relay a game plan that is a team effort from he, Dinwiddie, Sweet and Receivers Coach André Bolduc.
“The whole entire coaching staff is gonna create the game call sheet,” Calvillo says. “We’re gonna sit down as a staff and figure out what’s our best ‘first and ten’ game calls, our best ‘second and medium’ and our best ‘second and long’ calls and then we’re gonna come up with a consensus; ‘these are our top plays. We’re gonna call these.’ This way we’re all communicating with one another.”
“Once we’ve put that on a list, we have our top calls. Then, I’ll call those, accordingly, once we get on the field.”
Not that the Alouettes’ offensive philosophies will be rigid, Calvillo says. Like everyone else, he and Dinwiddie will adapt to the game in front of them and to the game planning of the opposition.
How well they do that – indeed, how they do any of this – is still in question. The Winnipeg Blue Bombers will be the first to get a taste.
⇒ WHAT NOT TO MISS ON SUNDAY’S GAME
What lies over the distant horizon for Calvillo – many see him as a bona fide, future head coaching candidate – is not something on his mind right now. He has immediate goals to spy.
“It’s been very hard to see us struggle and it started in my last year, in 2013,” he says. “It’s carried over for the past two years. I’m looking forward to the challenge. To get this organization back to where it was when I was playing. That’s the mindset we have as a coaching staff.”
“Let’s get it back to being consistent, to winning week in and week out and being dominant.”
There are a number of ways to do that, but they all start with the same hard work and long hours.
Those are things that Anthony Calvillo is getting well acquainted with now.
