Courtesy Regina Leader Post:

Edmonton Eskimos president Rick LeLacheur and head coach Danny Maciocia preached continuity Tuesday, even as they presided over a burgeoning body count.

The Eskimos’ teflon braintrust announced the firings of offensive co-ordinator Jacques Chapdelaine, offensive line coach Carl Brennan and special teams coach Scott Squires a full week after Chapdelaine’s imminent dismissal as team scapegoat had been reported by the Edmonton media as a fait accompli.

This trio of fall guys joins the previously jettisoned R.D. Lancaster and Dennis Winston on the growing discard pile. It’s even possible to throw former head coach Tom Higgins on that heap, since Eskimo management positioned Maciocia as the heir apparent months before Higgins’ departure.

But for the sake of argument, let’s set the toll at five assistant coaches who have paid the price for the Eskimos’ two straight non-playoff finishes.

The men who hired most of those coaches, LeLacheur and Maciocia, orchestrated Tuesday’s corporate bloodletting and Eskimo fans are told to view their ongoing involvement as continuity. It comes off as little more than self-preservation, because their lousy track record suggests LeLacheur and Maciocia are the wrong people for this massive rebuilding job. Firing patsies while retaining the wrong people in jobs of influence under the guise of continuity has been and will continue to be the downfall of this floundering organization.

As a leadership duo, they provide more bodies than answers each offseason, predict better days ahead and somehow manage to placate the board of directors. LeLacheur assures fans and media that he and Maciocia make personnel decisions based on what they think gives the team the best chance to win. And you thought they just threw darts. Whatever the method, they keep getting it horribly wrong and should have been stopped.

“I was far from perfect,” Maciocia said when asked about his performance as head coach. “We’re all accountable.”

But only some of you are still employed. Last year, Lancaster and Winston took the fall for 7-11. This year, Chapdelaine, Squires and Brennan are being held most accountable for 5-12-1. You could argue Chapdelaine paid the highest price, since he came from a great job in B.C., was tabbed as the next head coach and lasted one season. You could also argue he’s been thrown under the bus. But he manned up the way you wish other Eskimos would.

“I can tell you we did have some offensive shortcomings and the responsibility for those rests on my shoulders,” he said. “I have absolutely no regrets. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

He got one season to prove himself, failed and is gone. But Maciocia skates into Year 4 unscathed. He and LeLacheur are not held accountable for 12-23-1 and two non-playoff finishes because they hold the power. Maciocia the director of football operations has a soft spot for Maciocia the head coach. LeLacheur the team president has a soft spot for Maciocia the director of football operations and head coach. And the board of directors has a massive blind spot when it comes to both men.

Predictably, all the buzz at Tuesday’s press conference centred on the departure of Chapdelaine. He was brought in as the man to replace Maciocia, both immediately as offensive co-ordinator and eventually as head coach. The succession would be seamless, we were told.

A year later we are now supposed to believe Chapdelaine came to Edmonton and morphed into something different and undesirable. We are supposed to believe that giving him the heave-ho and perhaps handing his job to Rick Worman makes the Eskimos a better team. We are supposed to believe these firings were the product of postseason review. But if we believed every transparent explanation emanating from the bowels of Commonwealth Stadium these days we would only have ourselves to blame.

Because fans and media are firing bullets and with LeLacheur and Maciocia so busy covering their own behinds, they are making this stuff up as they go along. Chapdelaine was a goner weeks ago, the prospects of his imminent demise accompanied by unflattering leaks to the media. We heard he was unwilling to take input. We heard he was crude and demanding. We heard he rubbed some players and management the wrong way.

On Tuesday we also heard from Maciocia that none of the players quit on any of the coaches. OK then, should the players on a 5-12-1 team be comfortable? Or should the coaches of a 5-12-1 team demand much more?

If the Eskimos were 13-5 the previous year and decided they didn’t like Chapdelaine’s no-holds-barred act, I might listen to their complaints. But they were 7-11 and out of the playoffs in 2006 for the first time in 34 years while Chapdelaine was fresh off a major role in a B.C. Grey Cup win. Do you want also-rans telling winners how it’s going to work?

If you keep doing things the same way, the results will not change, no matter how many deck chairs you shuffle. As long as LeLacheur and Maciocia are free to create their personal continuity, the franchise will falter. The only marked difference might eventually be felt at the turnstiles, since many Eskimo fans won’t simply forget last year’s promises of improvement and focus on the fresh ones.

Probably because the words keep coming from the same two people.