Courtesy Regina Leader Post:

One of the crosses the B.C. Lions must bear as one of the CFL’s best organizations is that other less fortunate ones will frequently pluck their people.

The latest, player personnel director Bob O’Billovich, 67, isn’t exactly a spring chicken. Obie has been around the CFL so long he was in his second term with the Lions.

He tried to pick up the pieces of the nearly ruinous Joe Kapp/Larry Kuharich short run under the entertaining ownership of Murray Pezim back in 1990. All was lost, of course, when they let Doug Flutie escape to Calgary after an 11-7 ‘91 season. Try as he might, Obie couldn’t get Tony Kimbrough to play quarterback like Flutie and they limped in at 3-15 after an 0-8 start in ‘92.

Beginning as a defensive back and quarterback in Ottawa in 1963, O’Billovich has spent 44 of his years in the CFL, and he goes from likely the best organization to the worst, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Not even sweeping up after Kapp/Kuharich was this bad.

That’s the downside. Only bad teams need general managers. The Ti-Cats are 12-42 in the last three seasons and have fired three general managers in four years. Working for the Hamilton organization won’t be anything like working for the Lions.

While all that turmoil was swirling around in Hamilton, O’Billovich was getting the Lions share of the credit for finding players such as Cameron Wake, Aaron Hunt and Jarious Jackson. Director of player personnel was what he was paid to be. And he could do it from his Oakville, Ont., home and still find time to discover a cure for the common cold. Turning the Ti-Cats around should be a cinch then, right? Well, perhaps not.

Wasn’t offensive co-ordinator Jacques Chapdelaine, who left the Lions to become associate head coach and offensive co-ordinator of the Edmonton Eskimos, marked to become head coach Danny Maciocia’s successor with the Eskimos? Then, when Edmonton (5-12-1 this season) didn’t improve on its 7-11 last-place finish of 2006, when they missed the playoffs for the first time since the Ice Age, Chapdelaine’s work was brought into question and he and a couple of other assistants became scapegoats.

Did Chapdelaine suddenly get stupid? Did the designer of the offence that propelled the Lions to a 2006 Grey Cup victory forget everything he’d learned? Will he get the next head coaching job that’s out there? The answer is “no” to all three questions, because even though most realize that losing starting quarterback Ricky Ray was more likely why the Eskimos went backwards, the rising star has fallen a bit.

One of the reasons the Lions have finished first in the West Division for four straight seasons and the Calgary Stampeders did the same thing for eight of the 13 years Buono was running things there was, pure and simple, because he knows how to instill and install the elements necessary to building a winning organization. Certainly the question can be asked why there haven’t been more Grey Cup wins than the one with the Lions and four in Calgary, but nobody in the last two decades has built winning organizations like Buono.

For the strength of the league you hope that O’Billovich can take what he has learned by working with Buono for a decade and use it to reconstruct the Ti-Cats.

And you hope if Chapdelaine and quarterback Dave Dickenson end up someplace else that they, too, will get the opportunity to use what Buono has taught them to improve the team they’re with.

But it’s not as easy as Buono makes it look.