Don Matthews and Wally Buono are the two most accomplished coaches in Canadian Football League history.
And yet, quiet Ryan Dinwiddie, four years into his nearly anonymous run as head coach of the Toronto Argonauts, has a higher winning percentage than either of those legends.
He has coached four seasons in the CFL and begun each year with a different starting quarterback. And with that, he has a winning percentage of .676.
Matthews won 63.4% of the CFL games he coached. Buono won 63%. Andy Reid has won 64% in the NFL, just ahead of Bill Belichick and behind Don Shula at 67%.
All of them legends, the Mount Rushmore kind of football coaches on both sides of the border, with big presence and bigger personalities, all of them in the Hall of Fame or going there one day.
Dinwiddie could walk down Yonge St., at lunchtime on a sunny afternoon wearing an Argos jersey and no one would notice him. Part of that is being an Argos coach. Part of that is being who he is, more than what he is.
But say this much about Dinwiddie: In a sports-crazed Toronto with John Schneider, Darko Rajakovic, Craig Berube, John Herdman and Troy Ryan all running local teams, the difficult-to-define Dinwiddie is the most accomplished of them all.
Don Matthews used to say: “You are what your record says you are and Dinwiddie’s record is 46 wins and 22 losses.”
In four seasons with the Argos, he’s won one Grey Cup, he’s finished first in the East three times and second once. Heading to Saturday’s Eastern final in Montreal, this may have been his best year as a coach.
He got through half a season with his starting quarterback banished by a team-challenging suspension, with a portion of his roster lost to the salary cap, with too many injuries and his defensive coordinator gone to Saskatchewan to become a head coach. The Argos won 11 games and would have had 12 had Dinwiddie dressed a representative roster for the final regular-season game in Edmonton.
Under those circumstances, he should have been up for coach of the year. He’s never had a year more challenging than this one and come through to date still standing, just one away win from getting this team to Vancouver for the Grey Cup.
Matthews had another expression he’d use when coaching the Argos and all his other CFL teams. Coaching is a dictatorship, he would say. “And I’m the head dick.”
Matthews had a certain way and a certain presence about him. You loved him or hated him, sometimes in the same day, depending on whether you played for him or tried to cover his teams. It’s hard to explain exactly who that outwardly vanilla Dinwiddie is.
“Internal presence is more impressive than external presence,” said Pinball Clemons, the Argos adroit general manager, who played his best football for Matthews and has tremendous regard for the late great coach. But in a different kind of way, he has tremendous regard for Dinwiddie and all he’s done with his football team in a relatively short time.
“It’s too early to define who he is,” said Clemons. “We’ve been together for a number of years now. We were together in the pandemic year when we didn’t play any games and he came to work every day, preparing for a season (that wasn’t played).
“I’ll tell you this, he’s among the best I’ve seen (in the CFL). You can’t define him? I’ll say this, there’s an old adage: Don’t judge a book by its cover. I’d say that about RD. Whatever you think he might be, he’s more than that.”
Dinwiddie took an unusual route to becoming head coach of the Argos. Almost always in football, this is who gets hired as head coach of most teams: Either a former head coach or a college head coach. Or a former offensive or defensive coordinator, and once in a while a special-teams coach gets promoted.
Dinwiddie was the quarterbacks coach in Calgary. He hadn’t been a coordinator yet. He had previously worked in Montreal in a lesser coaching position and before that served as a backup quarterback in Winnipeg, Saskatchewan and Hamburg in NFL Europe.
In Calgary, he worked for John Hufnagel, the winningest coach in CFL history, whose .712 percentage is third in pro football behind only John Madden — before the video games — and this guy named Vince Lombardi. Hufnagel was Dinwiddie’s mentor with the Stampeders. And it was Hufnagel, who suggested to the Argos’ jack of all trades, John Murphy, that the team should hire Dinwiddie.
Dinwiddie isn’t stoic, like Tom Landry. He can be an emotional wreck on the sidelines and sometimes his team can follow suit. But he has a rather stunning sense of offensive timing — he is both the head coach and the offensive coordinator of the team — and that puts him in a rare position in the CFL.
What also sets him apart: His personality. His players call him fiery and explosive. That’s the Dinwiddie they see. But deep down, there is this humble, calmness about him. Quite often, he will walk past Pinball on a given day and thank him for hiring him and the opportunity he has been given.
Coaches don’t tend to think that way about those who hire them. Someone such as Matthews would tell his bosses they were lucky to have him. Dinwiddie is thankful for the opportunity he has been given and he makes sure his bosses are aware of that.
“I don’t know many people who love golf more than he does,” said Pinball. “And you know how many times he’s played golf this season? I think once. He’s always working. He’s always preparing. His level of preparation is second to none.
He will need all of that Saturday afternoon in Montreal. The Alouettes whipped the favoured Argos in last year’s Eastern final.
Dinwiddie will have to be at his best come game time. Pinball is expecting nothing less from the coach he so admires.
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