(Montreal) The last season of the Montreal Alouettes, crowned by the conquest of the eighth championship in its history, was as surprising as it was unexpected at the start of the year.
Because we must remember that barely 11 months ago, the Alouettes were owned by the Canadian Football League, and that general manager Danny Maciocia had just named Jason Maas as head coach – possibly the choice the most unpopular of the names mentioned at the time – and that the team had come close to closing up shop.
What’s more, Maciocia did not have the budget to renew his squad, either to sign new contracts for the players present or to acquire them on the free agent market, which caused the loss, among others, of Trevor Harris, Eugene Lewis and Jake Wieneke.
The future of the Alouettes looked bleak and sad, and many believed that the good progress seen over the past three seasons, including an Eastern final in 2022, would only be a vague memory before new years of darkness. Many also placed the Alouettes dead last in the league in 2023.
The arrival of funds from the CFL, however, allowed Maciocia to replenish his players. Then, in March, Alouettes fans got what they had been asking for for several years: a deep-pocketed Quebec investor to run the club. This is Pierre Karl Péladeau.
The Alouettes’ season was played out in sequences. Two victories followed by three losses and four other wins allowed the Montreal football club to reach the halfway point of the season with a very respectable 6-3 record.
But the next four games, against the league’s top three – the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, the Toronto Argonauts and the British Columbia Lions – would bring the Alouettes back to 6-7.
The team then began an irresistible push, winning its final five games of the season to finish with an 11-7 record, second in the East, behind the Argos’ historic 16-2 record.
It’s simple: the Alouettes were 0-7 against the Argos, Bombers and Lions, and 11-0 against all other teams in 2023!
After defeating the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the Eastern Division semi-final, the Alouettes overcame their complexities against two of the three teams in the league’s top three, beating the Argos and the Bombers in quick succession to get your hands on the Gray Cup.
But let’s go back to February. So without a quarter, Maciocia had to quickly find a solution. He turned to Cody Fajardo and Caleb Evans.
If Evans arrived with a very specific role – that of second quarter and sneak specialist – the first arrived with a bad reputation, and after having been confined to the sidelines with the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
The adventure with the Roughriders ended so badly for Fajardo that he even considered retiring last winter.
This was before Maciocia studied absolutely all of his CFL reps and was convinced that Fajardo could still do well in the Ambrosie circuit. All that remained was to convince Fajardo himself.
Maciocia did this by presenting him with a two-year offer, something no other team was willing to offer him. He then understood that Maciocia and Maas really wanted him in Montreal, and he came to the metropolis with an energy that he may have lacked in the green and white uniform.
Contrary to what many observers feared, Fajardo (317 in 443, 3847 yards, 14 PTC, 12 INT) did not get himself into trouble and none of the Alouettes’ seven defeats can be attributed to him. He also finished first in the circuit with a pass completion rate of 71.6%, while maintaining a respectable efficiency coefficient of 97.1.
Once the quarterback was found, Maciocia now had to find reliable receivers for him. With the departures of Lewis and Wieneke, as well as the names of Tyson Philpot and Reggie White Jr. on the injured list, only Kaion Julien-Grant remained among the top five receivers for 2022 in the lineup.
The d. g. Montrealer believed he had brought experience and leadership to his roster by hiring veteran Greg Ellingson on the free agent market. The receiver identified as No. 1 on the first day of camp by Maas, however, only played one game with the Alouettes.
It is therefore to the football operations team that we owe some of the best finds at this position: Austin Mack (1,184 yards) and Tyler Snead (788), who have led the Montreal attack all season.
Julien-Grant was heading toward a 1,000-plus passing yard season before suffering a shoulder injury that forced him to miss the end of the campaign. Philpot came back strong, adding 532 passing yards, but most importantly, catching the pass leading to the Alouettes’ winning touchdown in a 28-24 victory over the Blue Bombers in the grand final.
Mack and Snead may have been great finds, but it was the arrival of defensive end Shawn Lemon and linebacker Darnell Sankey during the season that changed the situation for the Alouettes.
Lemon revived a defensive line that was having trouble reaching the opposing quarterbacks, while Sankey solidified the tertiary. Their work, combined with that of Marc-Antoine Dequoy and rookie Reggie Stubblefield, among others, made Noel Thorpe’s unit the most formidable in the CFL at the end of the season.
Almondo Sewell summed up their impact well during Gray Cup week in Hamilton: “Their arrival transformed this unit from a great defense to a championship defense.”
A few days later, his prophecy came true.
Lemon and Sankey were rewarded with new agreements at the beginning of December, like several other key elements of the core of the Montreal team.
The Alouettes’ senior management then made sure to provide stability to the club by extending the contracts of Maciocia and Maas by three and two years respectively and before the holiday break.
The two men find themselves with free rein to plan the long-term future of the team.
