O’Leary: Argos’ chemistry experiment pays off

It’s not the kind of thing you often see on the roster of a team that’s a win away from playing for a Grey Cup.

A quick scroll through the Toronto Argonauts’ roster, including their players on the one- and six-game injured list, shows almost 60 players that are in their first year with the team. There’s a wide range of CFL experience there and no one has questioned the talent that GM Michael ‘Pinball’ Clemons and vice president of player personnel John Murphy have assembled over the last two years. Getting a roster that’s full of new faces to gel and leap off of paper and up to the top of the East Division standings is no easy feat.

So how have they done it?

“I’m glad you asked that question,” Argos’ linebacker Henoc Muamba said on Saturday when the topic came up.

“It’s a great point that oftentimes goes overlooked. If you look, any team that has success, any team that wins, any team that reaches the next level, chemistry plays a huge role in that. I already knew as soon as I signed, you look at the roster, you see…a lot of new faces. I knew that that would be one of the challenges.

“But the beautiful thing is that I didn’t have to carry that whole burden. I didn’t have to carry the responsibility of building that chemistry, if you will, because at the end of the day, it can’t be fake, it’s got to be authentic, it’s got to be real. I love the spirit of this team because you’ve got guys with a lot of talent, you got guys with a lot of experience coming in here and although we hadn’t played together at the time, we had guys who were willing to do the work.”

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It feels like a lifetime ago when you look back to 2019, but the Argos went through a massive tear-it-down, build-it-back-up project from the end of that season, through the cancelled 2020 campaign and into 2021 to get to this moment, a win away from playing for a Grey Cup. Clemons and Murphy brought in Dinwiddie, a first-year head coach and when he finally got to address his team for the first time, it might have felt a lot like a massive Zoom call come to life.

“I’m just excited about the opportunity that’s here. I felt like we would get here, I’m sure a lot of other people didn’t think (a) first-year head coach could get the ship going in the right direction,” Dinwiddie said.

“I felt without a doubt in my heart that we’d be in this situation. Did I know it’s going to happen for sure? No, I didn’t. But I just felt we were working towards that goal. I felt like we had the players in our locker room to get to where we’re at, with this stage.”

Dinwiddie didn’t want to spend too much time looking back, with two big goals still in front of him. The East Division’s nominee for coach of the year, he led the Argos to a 9-5 finish and a 6-1 record at BMO Field. It wasn’t as smooth a ride as the team’s record suggests, either. He and team management opted to go with McLeod Bethel-Thompson as their starting quarterback over Nick Arbuckle and subsequently traded Arbuckle to Edmonton in October. Before that, the team had to make a mid-season switch in the defensive coaching staff.

Defensive coordinator Glen Young and defensive backs coach Josh Bell left the team in September and the Argos brought in Chris Jones as a replacement. Through that, the Argos seemed mostly unaffected, with the wins continuing to pile up, even if they weren’t always aesthetically pleasing.

Then of course, the team dealt with its COVID protocol violation on Friday, which ended up requiring Bethel-Thompson and four other players to isolate and have to test negative daily leading into Sunday afternoon’s early kickoff.

Despite the flood of new players in the room, Muamba saw a team that had strong leadership and that grew together through their short time together.

“Sometimes you’ll have guys that have great calibre and they have played a lot and have accomplished a lot. And they’re just not willing to work,” he said. “They’re not willing to extend the words to their teammates. They just want to come and play the games and get their stats and leave.

“That’s not the case with this team. You have guys that are willing to work. There were ups, there were downs but we stayed together. There are a lot of leaders on this team. It’s not just me that was willing to do the extra work, that was willing to stay an extra five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, that were willing to have that extra conversation with a teammate.”

Muamba said he’s watched that room full of relative strangers go from being random players to teammates to family. They’ll take that togetherness onto their home field on Sunday, looking for a win to extend their season one more week.

If they need an example to follow, they need look no further than the 2017 Argos. That team rolled in a top-to-bottom change at GM, head coach and through the roster that season. They got hot in the final weeks of the campaign, defended BMO against a tough Saskatchewan team (that was led by Chris Jones) and went on to upset Calgary in the Grey Cup. For the four teams left in this season, there are limitless possibilities, if they want to see it that way.

“To be honest with you,” Muamba said, “I still feel like we haven’t even reached our peak yet.”