Courtesy the Hamilton Spectator:

A once-great team is now the CFL’s poster child for futility. The loyalty of fans is being tested like never before. What is wrong with the city’s beloved Tiger-Cats and what will it take to turn the team around?

Me-OW! This is one sick kitty.

As healthy as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats organization may be elsewhere, on the field the team has been horribly afflicted.

They can’t win on the road, they rarely win at home and, as Ron Lancaster once sighed, there’s nowhere else to play.

This team isn’t having just a bad year, it’s having a bad millennium.

No matter what happens Saturday night against the visiting Edmonton Eskimos, the Cats are doomed to complete their worst three-year cycle since the old Wildcats and Tigers combined forces, way back in the middle of last century.

Their won-lost record over the last five years is also the most wretched in franchise history, and it’s been amassed under three different coaches, three different general managers and three different marquee quarterbacks.

Only the woeful, and eventually dead, Ottawa Rough Riders endured a worse three-year stretch than the one the Cats are now ending. At least their fans hope it’s ending.

Already the only CFL franchise to manage a 1-and-17 spill on its ledger, Hamilton is on the verge of becoming the first city ever to endure a pair of 2-16 seasons.

While the new Ticat football administration is barely a year old — it was born with the hiring of Marcel Desjardins as general manager in August 2006 –to the black and gold faithful, the on-field mess has now gone on for five years. And counting.

Fans don’t see a new beginning, they see more of the same. This will be the third straight year that the Cats win fewer games than in the previous season.

As CFL experts across the country urge Hamilton fans to be tolerant of a team in the midst of massive rebuilding, Ticat Nation grows ragingly impatient.

They’re voting with their feet, as indicated by precipitously declining attendance at Ivor Wynne in recent weeks. Those still coming to the games spend more time booing than they do Oskee-wee-wee-ing.

For a large segment of Hamiltonians, the Ticats have always been a metaphor for this city: a gritty, never-say-die David which might not always win but always gave the Goliaths a helluva battle. They haven’t seen enough of that in recent years.

How did it get so awful? How did this modern fairy tale, with Bob Young waving the magic wand, become Welcome to My Nightmare?

There is no simple answer. The knee bone is always connected to the thigh bone.

The Ticats’ wretchedness, this year and long term, has been a function of injuries to quarterbacks Jason Maas and Casey Printers, hopelessly predictable offences, severe talent deficiencies in the secondary and receiving corps, trades which didn’t work out as plotted. But above all else, it’s been a function of costly inexperience on the field, on the sidelines, and in the football office.

As bleak as things seem — very few of the current Cats would make any of the top teams in the league — history indicates that it’s not inevitable that the carnage continues.

After each of the club’s previous three worst seasons — 3-15 in 1991; 2-16 in 1997 and 1-17 in 2003 — there was a remarkable turnaround the following year.

But the seeds of those rebirths were a new coach, a new quarterback, new ownership, or some combination thereof. And over the past four years, the Cats have tried all of these solutions, and more. Still, the losing continues … and worsens.

If there was an individual germ which started this epidemic of defeat, it was the 1-17 season of 2003, when owners David Macdonald and George Grant declared bankruptcy.

But like most bad times, that disaster actually began during the good times. In the gloaming of the golden era of 1998-2001 (two Grey Cup appearances, 43-28-1 record) budget cuts led to the subsequent migration of free agents, most notably to the hated Argos.

Fan interest plummeted, and corporate support shrivelled. When the club went bankrupt, it left behind a skeletal, survival-mode administrative staff, a cynical, shrunken fan base and no coach or GM.

When Young bought the ashes in late 2003, he had to build too much in too short a time. Correctly, he concentrated human and financial resources on marketing, re-connecting with fans and creating a welcoming environment at Ivor Wynne.

The Youngsters had expertise in those areas, but were absolute football novices. It showed.

Greg Marshall, who had excelled at McMaster, was made the head coach. But local football writers stressed that a rookie head coach needed veteran CFL help on his staff and in the manager’s suite.

Outside of Mike McCarthy behind the scenes, that help never came. Ron Lancaster, the new GM, became seriously ill that first year and wasn’t readily available.

Marshall had a serious confrontation with his veteran players that a more experienced staff could have seen coming. And if there’d been a CFL-wizened GM, he would have urged Marshall to take over the offence much sooner than he did.

The club gave Marshall Joe Paopao to work with in year three, but that offence was terrible, and never figured out how to use Corey Holmes. By game four, Marshall was jettisoned–ridiculously early. That left 14 games in limbo, with players playing for a coach (Lancaster) they knew wouldn’t be back.

Meanwhile, Rob Katz arrived from the business department to become general manager in 2005, ostensibly to find a new general manager for the foreseeable future.

Katz did engineer the Maas and Holmes deals, filling obvious holes as Danny McManus’ career waned, and he hired Marcel Desjardins, who had apprenticed for years in Montreal’s exemplary front office.

But Katz was a marketing man, less familiar with CFL football and players than anyone around him and, according to sources, overvalued enough personnel that the Cats were strapped with salary cap issues.

That partially set the stage for this season’s disaster, when it appeared that many of the building blocks were in place for a Ticat return to prominence.

Desjardins, whose training in Montreal did not include cleaning up messes left by predecessors, had to trade away some veteran players for salary reasons, and the return was far less than anticipated. His department also didn’t provide the current coaching staff with enough quality receivers or defensive backs.

Charlie Taaffe, the experienced (although seven years ago) CFL coach Desjardins wanted, was unavailable until Christmas. That left precious little time to hire deeply experienced coaching help, especially when veteran Rod Rust opted out of becoming defensive co-ordinator.

So while the 2007 Cats have received more individual skill training than any Ticat team before them, they are dreadfully ill-prepared in the situation recognition specific to the three-down game. The other scene-setters for the 2007 flop were the related factors of inexperience and turnover.

The Cats’ roster had the most first-year CFL players in the league. It’s illuminating that the team with the second-most, the Montreal Alouettes, also had a terrible season. With changes in the roster every week, the starting units never gained enough experience together.

And with so many new players, especially at key positions, not enough true team leaders emerged. That void combined with mounting losses to amplify the culture of losing which has plagued the Cats for three seasons.

But while there was a leadership issue, this team has never given up, which was regularly noted by their opponents. That suggests that there is a core of character which can be expanded upon.

Scott Mitchell, a perceptive football man, was made team president in January, after a new GM and head coach were already in place. That’s always a perilous situation, and it’s now up to Mitchell to decide if Desjardins and Taaffe retain the jobs he didn’t hire them for.

Mitchell has been barely able to contain his frustration at the chronic losing, but he’ll have to remember this as he weighs his options: the worst problems in football operations have been directly related to inexperience and a lack of continuity.

And, despite his blueblood CFL pedigree, Mitchell is new to his job, too.

The blueprint for a successful CFL team — the Eskimos for years, the Alouettes for a decade, the Lions of recent years — includes first-rate quarterbacking, stable, hands-off ownership, continuity of management philosophy, a clearly defined organizational structure, a strong personnel department, steady head coaching, locker-room leadership, and a reliable central core of players that can absorb a small annual influx of new blood.

The Ticats have some of that already in place, but the question is, how much? Mitchell has said changes are coming, and surely they must. No team loses this many games by accident, or without consequences.

Mitchell’s dilemma is gauging the depth of the shortfall of talent in all areas of the football operation, and how much instability and lack of continuity have contributed to that shortfall.

And he has to balance all of that against fans’ demands that every head must roll.