Lefko on Calvillo: The rise to greatness

MONTREAL – You think of the success quarterback Anthony Calvillo has had in his Canadian Football League career and you wonder how he has gone from ordinary to extraordinary.

And the answer may be two coaches: Don Matthews and Marc Trestman.

If there is anyone who is singularly responsible for the ascension of Calvillo to perhaps the greatest quarterback in CFL history – certainly one who will set some records that will take a long time, if ever, to be eclipsed – it is the man known as The Don.

When hired by the Montreal Alouettes in 2002, Matthews, one of the top-winning head coaches in CFL history, saw something in Calvillo that convinced him he could be his starting quarterback. Calvillo had already been the Als’ starter for two years, but hadn’t done anything particularly noteworthy.

With the bravado/cockiness that Matthews routinely displayed in his coaching career, he started calling Calvillo by the initials A.C.

And A.C. would become the Als’ sparkplug henceforth.

As he had done in various other stops in his career, Matthews decided Calvillo should call his own plays. Matthews believed quarterbacks had a greater feel for what was happening on the field and what worked for them than anyone watching from the sidelines or up in the press box. Some quarterbacks want to be given the plays from the coaches without the added mental task of having to think of what play to call and continue that train of thought for a series – kind of like playing chess and having to anticipate two and three moves ahead.

Calvillo embraced the opportunity and little by little he developed the confidence that is so evident today. You watch him at the line of scrimmage making audibles and it’s obvious he is seeing defences he’s probably seen countless times before.

And that all happened because Matthews sensed that Calvillo could have the same impact on the Als as Doug Flutie had in Toronto when he led the Argos to back-to-back Grey Cup wins in 1996-97. Upon his hiring as the Argos’ coach in 1996, Matthews allowed Flutie to run the offence, even though he had coaches working with the brilliant quarterback. Flutie was brilliant enough and creative enough that he could have put in his own offences in the days leading up to the game, and when something didn’t work he could just make it up on the fly like kids playing out in the streets.

Matthews has often said Flutie is the greatest player he has ever coached – and he has coached many – but that Calvillo is not far behind on that list. Prior to Matthews’ arrival, Calvillo was just a run-of-the-mill quarterback who hadn’t show any sign that at some point in his career he would break Damon Allen’s CFL record for 394 career passing touchdowns, which is expected to happen at some point tonight against Toronto at Molson Stadium, or his all-time professional career passing yards. In 2007, Allen broke the 70,553 mark set by Warren Moon. Allen retired with 72,381 yards.

That mark, as unfathomable as it may seem, will be eclipsed by Calvillo sometime later this season. He currently has 68,892, only 3,489 in arrears. Given that he routinely throws for at least 300 or more yards a game, the old mark should fall in another 10 or 11 games.

That is mindboggling.

At age 38, showing no signs of stopping or retiring, there’s no telling what kind of numbers Calvillo will total.

Calvillo doesn’t call his own plays in the current Als’ system. That task goes to head coach Marc Trestman, and you can’t argue with Trestman’s success. He has coached the Als to Grey Cup appearances in his first three seasons in the CFL and has won the last two. If he can lead the Als to another Grey Cup appearance and/or win, he will have established himself as the greatest active coach in CFL history and certainly one of the best of all time. Since his first full season, there have been reports of NFL teams interested in hiring him as head coach. You’d have to think it would happen, not unlike what happened with Marv Levy, who also coached in Montreal en route to becoming a legendary NFL head coach. But Trestman, who came from the NFL where he had a long history as an offensive co-ordinator or quarterbacks coach, seems content with the Als and the CFL. He has a comfort level and a star quarterback.

When hired as the Als’ head coach, Trestman huddled with Calvillo and asked him what he liked to do running an offence. Trestman listened instead of coming in and deciding what kind of a system he would foist on his veteran quarterback. That’s what some coaches to do, thinking they know more than the players, tinkering with what already works instead of just tweaking it. The system has worked elsewhere, they say, and it will work here. Often they are co-ordinators hired for the first time as a head coach and inevitably they fail because the magnitude of looking after an entire team versus just one aspect of it is too much to handle.

This is what separates the great leaders from the good ones – the generals from the lieutenants.

And the results speak for themselves for Trestman.

The confidence he placed in Calvillo as a veteran with wisdom and experience, combined with his own background working with quarterbacks, has taken his signal-caller to the next level. He has currently thrown eight touchdowns and only one interception in two games this season and his quarterback rating is 132.9. To put it in the simplest of terms, 100 or more is good. Calvillo’s highwater mark previous to this has been 111.1. What he is doing this year at this point has been like a brilliant mind solving complex codes as if they were simply two plus two.

The climb to greatness began with Matthews and it has continued with Trestman. That’s the impact of coaches who separate themselves from the others: they know how to win and realize it all begins with the quarterback.