Ticats promote Scott Milanovich to head coach

“I grew up in a fan base similar to this one and it’s another reason that I feel like things are full circle for me,” Milanovich said Wednesday afternoon as he was introduced to the media. “I share that passion, it’s just a different black-and-gold team.”

He said Hamilton reminds him of his original home, just as it did another steel-town boy, Ron Lancaster.

Milanovich said he’s also been on the other side of that fierce passion for the town team. The 27th head coach since the old Tigers and Wildcats amalgamated for the 1950 season, spent five seasons as the coach of the Ticats’ most bitter rivals. In 2012, with Orlondo Steinauer — the close friend he replaces after Steinauer relinquished coaching duties to concentrate solely on being team president — as his defensive backs coach, the Argos won the 100th Grey Cup in Milanovich’s first head coaching job. He was named the CFL’s coach of the year that season.

“(Steinauer) is the reason I’m here; he’s the one who brought me here a year ago,” said Milanovich, adding that during discussions about him taking over the top coaching job he repeatedly “pestered” Steinauer to make sure he wanted to make the major structural change.

This will, technically, be the third CFL head coaching job for the 51-year-old Milanovich. He returned to Canada from the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, where he’d been quarterbacks coach, to take over the reins in Edmonton during 2020, but the whole season was cancelled. Before coaching a game there, he returned to the NFL and the Indianapolis Colts, where he was quarterbacks coach for two years. When the Colts made changes, the Ticats hired him to work with Steinauer and then-offensive co-ordinator Tommy Condell.

Milanovich spent much of the first half of the season working remotely from his and wife Jaime’s new home in Florida until he took over from Condell in August. Last month, the Saskatchewan Roughriders asked permission to interview both Milanovich and Hamilton defensive co-ordinator Mark Washington for the Riders’ vacant head coaching job. Milanovich was considered the front-runner in the multi-level search but, after being asked back for a second interview, Milanovich informed the Riders he was withdrawing his application.

The new Ticat head coach also worked in the CFL with Calgary under Wally Buono 20 years ago and in Montreal where he was quarterbacks coach, offensive co-ordinator and eventually assistant head coach under Marc Trestman as Anthony Calvillo continued his evolution into a Hall of Fame quarterback.

He’s coached in the NFL, the XFL and NFL Europe and, along the way, has nurtured well-known pivots Zach Collaros, Blake Bortles, Nick Foles, Carson Wentz and Matt Ryan. He helped Ticats rookie Taylor Powell go from third stringer to a commendable starter as Bo Levi Mitchell and Matt Shiltz missed numerous games with injury last season.

And now he has to help the front office decide whether Mitchell will be his starting quarterback next season, which would require the club to pay him a significant bonus in January.

His first priority will be hiring his coaching staff — it’s believed that several of the senior coaches have already been asked to come back — but right after that, the focus will be squarely on free agents, and Mitchell’s situation.

“All decisions will happen down the line,” said Milanovich who said he was fortunate to spend time with Mitchell this year but not as much time on the field as he’d have liked, because of Mitchell’s injuries.

“I do know Bo still has the arm strength, the accuracy, the competitive fire and the leadership, all those things I wouldn’t have learned about if I was coming in here from somewhere else.”

Milanovich said being with the team last season gives him a leg up on starting his new job here because the entire environment is familiar to him. And working closely with the offensive players will enable him to provide invaluable input on playing personnel decisions.

He has yet to decide if he’ll retain the offensive co-ordinator position but it seems inconceivable that someone with such deep experience, and strong views on offensive concepts, would not be the co-ordinator. The CFL’s often-criticized player-personnel-department salary cap comes into play too. Milanovich certainly gets a significant pay increase — neither the dollar value nor length of term have yet been revealed — although some will be partially offset by a reduction in Steinauer’s compensation as he moves from two jobs to one.

To borrow phrase from the classic football lexicon, Milanovich can be a “hard ass,” not worrying about offending players by bluntly pointing out mistakes he sees during practice and in film rooms. But he also offers strong encouragement.

“The good ones, they want that feedback,” he explained, recalling, “One of the things I told the offence was, ‘I wasn’t hired to be your friend I was hired to make you better.’ Ideally you can do both. I want to push them but I don’t want to push them away.”

He mentioned his upbringing in a family in which it doesn’t matter what you do, but it does matter that whatever you do, you do it well.

“If there’s one thing I hope our team takes from me over time … it’s that,” he said. “We’ve got to find that mindset where we’re burning the ship, there’s no turning back. I won’t make too many promises, but one is that.”

He grew up with “failure is not an option” and said the Ticats are “not going to back up. We’re going to go after this thing with guns blazing.”

He says the most important thing in a quarterback is “that he’s a guy you can trust with the ball in his hands. You just can’t turn it over consistently. I think there’s many different ways to get it done. Bo can still do it, Shiltz can do it in a different way.”

Turnovers, especially by quarterbacks — even during Milanovich’s tenure as offensive co-ordinator — haunted the Ticats from the beginning to the end of last season, so he’s got his hands full on that one.

Those hands will also be very full trying to close the gap between the Ticats and two of his former employers, the Alouettes and Argos, who went a combined 8-0 against Hamilton in 2023.