B.C. Lions owner Amar Doman didn’t make the trip down to the team’s Surrey practice facility to speak to the media on Wednesday but his message was delivered clearly by proxy.
I’ve held up my side of the bargain. It’s time for someone to deliver on the other end.
There is no other way to interpret the firing of head coach and co-general manager Rick Campbell after five years with the club. The 53-year-old helped return the Lions to national relevance following one of their darkest eras, making consecutive West Final appearances in 2022 and 2023. And yet, three straight playoff berths didn’t matter when results fell short of expectations in 2024.
“This wasn’t a friend decision. This was a business decision,” team president Duane Vienneau said after thanking Campbell for his tenure.
“We just felt that we have the player personnel here at this club and we maybe didn’t perform to our potential like we should have. We asked ourselves the reasons why and we know sometimes when you’re not performing the way you should be performing, when you feel you have the right players in the room, that you need to make a change to get to that next level.”
When Doman handed the Lions the requisite lemons for success this season, he wasn’t expecting lemonade in return. He wanted a bottle of fine Limoncello, the type he could leisurely sip in the aftermath of a home Grey Cup victory. What Campbell ultimately produced contained far less sugar than either option — an overly tart team that struggled to a 9-9 record, failed to deliver a home playoff game, and fell on their face in the West Semi-Final.
With the club growing in every other facet, a step backward on the field was an especially sour pill to swallow. It was made worse by the unprecedented investment Doman made toward the roster, shelling out marketing money and giving the Lions the green light to go over the salary cap in order to add quarterback Nathan Rourke and defensive end Mathieu Betts midseason. There will be fines still to pay as a result, with no championship bling to show for it.
As a result, Campbell was shown the door with a year remaining on his contract — a move that thankfully won’t affect the team’s football operations cap due to the ability to write off one firing. Fellow co-general manager Neil McEvoy has ostensibly been promoted to vice president of football operations but has ceded the final say on the roster to newly appointed general manager Ryan Rigmaiden, who previously served as director of player personnel.
“The biggest thing that I see is our lack of ability to overcome adversity on the field. There’s a lot of lack of mental toughness on this team and I think internally, we’ve all been discussing that for the last year,” said Rigmaiden when asked to diagnose the team’s current challenges. “There’s a variety of reasons why that stuff happens. Instilling a new head coach with some different ideas and different values, I think is going to be the biggest part of (changing) that.”
“I think your players take on the personality of your head coach. You look across the teams that are consistently good in this league, you see that.”
As the 2024 season drew to a close, questions swirled as to whether Campbell had lost the Lions’ locker room. His decision to continue starting Rourke at quarterback once Vernon Adams Jr. was fully healthy appeared to rub some players the wrong way, potentially contributing to their poor performance down the stretch.
While Vienneau was quick to let the team’s former coach off the hook for the quarterback situation, the verdict on the on-the-field performance was unforgiving.
“It’s not very often that you come across having two number-one quarterbacks on your team halfway through a season and it was a challenge to deal with no matter what and where you were. I wouldn’t say it was a part of this decision at all. I think our coaching staff and our football operations department did the best they could do with the situation that was presented to us,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say there was a loss of the locker room. I would just say that our owner has given us all the tools we need to build this football team and I just don’t feel like we performed this year the way we performed in the last couple of years.”
The Lions will roll with Rourke next season, confirming on Wednesday that they plan to trade Adams over the coming weeks. At the same time, they will begin a search for the team’s next head coach, with between eight and ten candidates expected to line up for interviews beginning as soon as Monday. That list is expected to include external frontrunners like Winnipeg’s Buck Pierce, as well as internal candidates like offensive coordinator Jordan Maksymic and defensive coordinator Ryan Phillips.
Rigmaiden listed leadership, accountability, and toughness as the three criteria that any new hire must meet but provided no timeline for a decision to be made. The hiring process is expected to be a collaborative one with the entire front office involved, though there will be one voice that matters above the rest.
“At the end of the day, this is a decision that ultimately is Amar’s,” McEvoy revealed. “It’s Amar’s football team. We’re just the caregivers at this point, but we work well together. We’ve already had those discussions.”
Rigmaiden believes that the Lions possess a strong core and have an elite quarterback to build around in Rourke. Though he intends to reside in Vancouver for six months out of the year, he’ll continue to perform the majority of his U.S. scouting duties on top of his GM responsibilities in order to supplement that group with fresh talent.
One way or another, he knows the team will need to get back to a place where the output on the field reflects the investment being made into it.
“Across the board in this building, we all have to chase greatness harder. From the equipment staff on up, everybody in this building, we all have to raise the bar,” Rigmaiden said. “I believe that starts with the head coach, with that message, but also we’ve got a tremendous owner and it starts with him as well. He’s done everything possible to give us a shot at winning and again, we fell short this year.”
The post Fired B.C. coach Rick Campbell underperformed after Amar Doman gave him ‘all the tools’ for success: Lions’ president appeared first on 3DownNation.
