The dismissal of Dan Hawkins as the Montreal Alouettes head coach after only five games can be traced back to the franchise-altering move the team made in 2008.
Montreal’s hire of Marc Trestman five years ago was perceived by many in the Canadian Football League as an obscure one at the time. But in the immediate aftermath of the Alouettes reaching the Grey Cup game that November — losing to the Calgary Stampeders, who had just brought John Hufnagel back from the NFL — other CFL teams quickly tried to find the “next” Trestman, scouring the United States for an offensive-minded coach who could quickly adapt to the wide-open Canadian game.
When Trestman left for the Chicago Bears coaching job six months ago, it became clear that Montreal was searching for the same on-paper candidate.
General manager Jim Popp told some interested parties with previous CFL head coaching experience that he wasn’t looking for someone who had held the top job in the league before.
It was clear the Alouettes were looking to clone Trestman. They came up with Hawkins.
Now in the middle of their bye week, coming off a win to improve to 2-3, Hawkins was fired, and Popp, remarkably, becomes Montreal’s head coach for a fourth time in the 2000s.
Hawkins was the wrong hire from the beginning. He demanded to bring his own coaching staff, outside of veteran CFL assistant Noel Thorpe — who had already been hired to run Trestman’s defence before the Bears came calling.
None of Hawkins’s hand-picked guys had ever coached a down of Canadian football. His offensive coordinator, Mike Miller, lacked imagination. Against Calgary, the Als did not sniff the red zone in the final three quarters of the game.
At Popp’s urging during the winter, Doug Berry was brought on to be an advisor to Hawkins but Miller ran the offence and called the plays, despite Berry’s prior time as an offensive coordinator and head coach in the CFL.
The logical next step is Miller leaving and Berry running the controls for quarterback Anthony Calvillo, hoping to salvage a season that still has 13 games left, and a terrific wide receiving corps for the quarterback to target.
Reading between the lines of Calvillo’s ongoing post-game comments made it clear there was division within the ranks of a team that had been a machine under Trestman — winning consecutive Grey Cups, and reaching another.
Hawkins is one of the quickest dismissals in league history. Hamilton fired rookie head coach Tom Dimitroff in 1978 after a 1-3-1 start while Ottawa parted ways with Jim Gilstrap two games into the 1996 season and others lasted three games before getting the pink slip.
Hawkins’ methods were unconventional, and there were rumblings during training camp that there were issues with the lack of knowledge in the Canadian game throughout the coaching staff. The dismissal of Hawkins was not a five-game issue — it went back to his hiring.
In reality, this was a chase to go back in time and find the next Trestman. They wanted another renaissance for Calvillo’s career.
Instead, it’s now Popp, who took over for Rod Rust in 2001; who took over for Don Matthews in 2006; who kept the job in 2007, and it got so bad that they went off the board and found the head coach of today’s Chicago Bears.
Trestman isn’t coming back but the Alouettes still have a chance to contend, especially in a poor East division.
But they never did with Dan Hawkins, which is why his era ended before it really began.