Sporting Madness

The University of Guelph announced this morning that Kyle Walters will be stepping down as their head football coach [thanks to Jaime Stein for the tip]. The press release says Walters "will be parting ways with the Gryphons to focus on pursuing coaching ventures elsewhere at the professional level." Mike Treadgold , the sports and health editor of The Ontarion (Guelph's student newspaper), tweeted this morning that a source informed him Walters is off to Winnipeg to become the special teams coordinator with the CFL's Blue Bombers, and also mentioned that rumour on his blog . It isn't completely confirmed yet, but that certainly sounds plausible given both the Bombers' coaching turnover and Walters' apparent desire to seek opportunities at the professional level. Guelph may miss Walters. He was only the head coach for four years and only put up a 13-18-1 record overall, but the team certainly seemed to be on the rise recently. They've made the...

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about how Madden players might just turn out to be decent NFL coaches (and also the surprising lack of time today's coaches spend in game situations). Seeing as it's unlikely that NFL teams are going to be hiring gamers any time soon, I thought I'd take a look at how those teams make their decisions on who their head coaches should be, and how backgrounds influence NFL coaches' success. This hopefully will provide some insight into what kind of head coaching candidates teams should consider and how this year's new hires ( Chan Gailey in Buffalo, Pete Carroll in Seattle and Mike Shanahan in Washington) might do. Now, coaching success can't be considered in a vacuum; the personnel coaches inherit have a lot to do with their success. Thus, I looked at how coaches do both in immediate turnarounds (so, the next season) and over the long term (their complete records), and I also looked at their backgrounds. I selected the last f...

This [ David Naylor , The Globe and Mail ] is absolutely out of the blue. I hadn't even heard rumours that Toronto Argonauts head coach Rich Stubler was about to be fired, but that makes sense given their play this year, and it makes abundant sense if you can replace him with the CFL's all-time leader in wins, Don Matthews . The team has called a press conference for 11:15 this morning to announce the change, and everyone from the CBC to The Fan 590 's Bob McCown to Sportsnet 's Perry Lefko has picked it up: TSN still hasn't had anything on the air, though, as they're still focusing on yesterday's firing [ Stephen Brunt , The Globe and Mail , a must-read as always] of Hamilton Tiger-Cats head coach Charlie Taafe . It's pretty funny that both struggling Ontario franchises decide to get rid of their coaches within a day of each other. Perhaps this is just the usual Argos' plan to upstage the Ti-Cats? Seriously, though, Matthews certainly isn...