Courtesy Regina Leader Post:

Ron Lancaster won two Grey Cups as a quarterback and two more as a head coach, but not with the same team.

Jackie Parker won three as a player with the Edmonton Eskimos and got to the Grey Cup as their coach in 1986, but lost.

Tom Flores? The one-time Oakland Raiders quarterback went on to coach them to two Super Bowl wins, but his only championship as a player came as a Kansas City Chiefs backup.

So is Kent Austin about to step into history as the first man to quarterback, then coach, the same professional football team to league championships?

We pose the question, knowing that somewhere a history geek sits, armed with proof of the contrary involving the 1927 side from Toronto Balmy Beach, or some such … but we’re prepared to go out on that limb.

“You might be on to something. I don’t know,” the Saskatchewan Roughriders head coach said Wednesday at the end of a two-hour practice at Rogers Centre in preparation for Sunday’s Grey Cup meeting with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

If you think about it, there are a limited number of championship quarterbacks, and a surprisingly small percentage of them who go on to be head coaches. Of those, far fewer coach the same team they played for — Bart Starr with the Green Bay Packers springs to mind — and fewer still are successful at it.

So meet Kent Austin, mould-breaker.

The man who has a whole parking lot — paved, even — named after him on the west side of Mosaic Stadium/Taylor Field has the opportunity to do the rare sporting double this weekend. And even more of a longshot: he could do it, as a rookie head coach, under the same artificial sky where he quarterbacked the Riders to their 43-40 victory over Hamilton, 18 years ago, in that greatest of all Grey Cup games.

“Sometimes those things just work out in a quirky way. You can’t really orchestrate it,” Austin said. And he should know.

There’s been a fair amount of serendipity associated with his career, all the way through.

Just getting started in the CFL was chancy.

“I was director of the Senior Bowl in 1985, and a young quarterback from Mississippi was supposed to play in the game but hurt his knee in his senior year,” said Riders GM Eric Tillman. “I still honoured the commitment for him to come to the game, so he came down but failed the physical and couldn’t play. But I told Dan Rambo I thought he would be an outstanding Canadian league quarterback.

“Now, who would have believed, 22 years later, that he would be the head coach and I would be the general manager of a team in the Grey Cup?”

And that the two of them would inherit — from Tillman’s predecessor, Roy Shivers — Kerry Joseph, the quarterback who Tillman (as GM of the Ottawa Renegades) and Austin (as quarterback coach) introduced to the CFL five years earlier.

After retiring as a player in 1996, Austin quit football “cold turkey” to start playing catch-up as a businessman, trying to build a life after football back in his native Tennessee.

“For the first year-and-a-half, two years, I didn’t pick up a football, didn’t even watch a football game,” Austin said Wednesday.

“Then in 2002, my old high school coach, Carlton Flatt at Brentwood Academy, called me and asked if I would come out and volunteer my time to work with quarterbacks and receivers. I said I just didn’t have the time, I was too busy. Then I thought about what he and the school had meant to me and my wife, so I decided to do it.

“That year we went to the state finals and got beat, but the football bug had bit me again, and it was like the Godfather — the more I tried to get out, the more they pull me back in. After that season was over, my wife said, ‘Kent, this is the happiest I’ve seen you since you got out of football.’ ”

So he came back, to a job as Joe Paopao’s quarterback coach with the expansion Renegades. And now, after winning a Grey Cup as offensive co-ordinator of the 2004 Toronto Argos — and helping Damon Allen win his first CFL outstanding player award, after 21 years in the league — here he was Wednesday, ducking as much credit as he could for the Riders’ success.

“I’m not wired that way. Sport is always about the players. Always,” he said. “I have played a part, but just a part. If you want to give credit on the coaches’ side, give it to my staff. They’ve done an unbelievable job.”

It is not as though he just wandered in the door in Regina and immediately began doing everything right. He has felt like a rookie, he said, at least once every day, all season.

“You’ve got to have a great staff. You’ve just got to, as a head coach. I believe in trying to have guys on your staff that are better coaches than you are,” he said.

Of course, not every new head coach is secure enough to surround himself with people who might end up taking his job. See: Danny Maciocia, Edmonton.

“That may be true, but I don’t believe in that, at all,” said Austin. “I think that’s a recipe for failure. I believe in getting the best staff possible, and building into that staff, and letting them coach — and if they’re a better coach than you are, that’s actually a good thing.”

Austin’s staff is an anomaly, in that nobody yells at Roughriders practice. It has more the feel of a classroom than a field of play.

“None of our coaches, because I don’t allow it, believe in browbeating players. We’re there to teach. You don’t have to constantly harass players to get them to play. They want you to show them what they did wrong and teach ‘em how to be better, and they will respond,” Austin said.

But something happened to this team, this year, to make it all come together under a first-year head coach.