If there’s one person who knows how Nick Arbuckle is feeling this week, it’s his head coach.

Ryan Dinwiddie spent most of Tuesday’s 30-minute coaches’ press conference at the Vancouver Convention Center answering questions about Arbuckle, who will start at quarterback for the Toronto Argonauts in the Gray Cup Sunday against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in place of Chad Kelly, who broke his ankle in the fourth quarter of the Eastern final.

Arbuckle finished last week’s game going 5-for-8 for 73 yards while throwing down a couple of TD passes to close out a 30-28 win over the Montreal Alouettes.

After the game, Dinwiddie wasted no time in naming Arbuckle as the starter for this weekend, which will mark the sixth-year pro’s first CFL start in the playoffs.

“I think it was pretty obvious, but I also wanted to build confidence in Nick,” said Dinwiddie, whose other option was second-year center Cameron Dukes. “I’ve seen Nick do it, I understand how he works, he understands the system and he can adapt.”

It’s a rare situation to say the least for a player to be given the keys to the car before the biggest race of the season, and Dinwiddie is one of the few to have experienced it.

Bombers fans will remember Dinwiddie replacing an injured Kevin Glenn in the fourth quarter of the 2007 Eastern Final against Toronto and holding on to win the Gray Cup. The then 26-year-old would make his first CFL start in the championship game against the Saskatchewan Roughriders the next weekend, which the Bombers would narrowly lose 23-19.

There are many parallels between the two situations, but Dinwiddie noted that there are also significant differences between his younger self and Arbuckle this week.

“Nick is more experienced and has played in bigger matches. It was the first big game I played in the CFL. I was really looking forward to it…unfortunately a couple of plays probably changed this game,” Dinwiddie said.

“But I think Nick is a little more experienced than me, he’s been in these big games, and then we’ve been together for a long time – me calling the plays for him, him running them. We’re more fluid than the situation in which I found myself.

Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea was in attendance as a fan during the Gray Cup at the Rogers Center in 2007, fresh off the penultimate season of his playing career.

“Article 392,” he remembers.

There are several key storylines this week, but Arbuckle is by far the most important and the main reason the Bombers opened as 10.5 point favorites.

O’Shea isn’t interested in what the punters have to say, however, and he insisted his players aren’t going into this match as favorites either.

“I think as a competitor you always want everyone to be healthy. It really is,” O’Shea began.

“After that, you just rely on having a veteran to lead the group and understand that you’re playing against a complete team, and you can’t take anyone for granted and take anything lightly.

“Ryan is going to have Nick trained and ready to go, and they have two other phases that are on fire right now. So we’re not going to face just one player and we’re not going to get ahead of ourselves. We’re going to stick to our process, and that’s never really been the case with the opposition throughout the week. It’s always about ourselves.

Somewhere amid all the talk about Arbuckle, O’Shea talked about his own quarterback situation this season and the decision to stick with Zach Collaros, whose 3/8 touchdown-interception ratio highlighted the departure of 2-6 of the club.

“I don’t know if there would be a coach in our league that would have replaced Zach. He’s just too good. He’s too competitive. His leadership skills, guys follow him,” O’Shea said.

“I’ve been saying this for eight years now, maybe more, there’s no need to be instinctive if you know the answers to why things happen the way they happen, and if everyone has a great understanding of it, so you just work on those things and check them off and eventually it works out for you,” he continued.

“That time wasn’t easy, but trying to solve the problems was because you knew where the answers were.”

Arbuckle has had a tumultuous career in both starting and backup roles while playing for four different clubs since joining the CFL in 2018. He broke into the league with Calgary, where he worked for two seasons with Dinwiddie , who was coaching the quarterbacks at the time.

After spending last season as a backup in Ottawa, Arbuckle went unsigned during the first wave of teams signing free agents and it seemed his time in Canadian professional football was over, until Dinwiddie l ‘calls during training camp in May. The Argos were looking for depth at the position, with Kelly set to serve a nine-game suspension for violating the league’s policy on gender-based violence.

Dinwiddie’s history with the signalman was important, but what became even bigger, he said, was Arbuckle’s maturity since they last worked together.

“I think he got a little too far ahead of himself leaving Calgary and didn’t understand, hey, I just have to play quarterback. You don’t have to be a franchise deliveryman right away, just go play football. I think he learned from it and I think he’s in a better place right now,” Dinwiddie said.

“When we came into camp, I thought Cam (Dukes) was having a good camp, but like any head coach, injuries happen, right? And I just said, “Hey, we need to make this phone call.” I think at the very least, he’s going to make the other quarterbacks better and our locker room better. It was the right decision and obviously it was reflected in what we’re going to see on Sunday.

With the Argos’ offense changing dramatically without league MVP Kelly, the Argos went 5-4 without their starter during the regular season – something Dinwiddie believes will serve his club well this weekend.

“Nick just has to manage the game, make the right throws, he doesn’t have to be a hero. We don’t need to force throws, you can’t make big plays, they have to come,” he said. “Like I told him, it’s not about him, it’s about the football club, and he just has to be a piece of the puzzle and do his thing and not put too much extra pressure on himself.”

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Joshua Frey-Sam
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Josh Frey-Sam reports on sports and business at Free press. Josh started at the newspaper in 2022, just weeks after graduating from Red River College’s Creative Communications program. He primarily reports on amateur sports teams and athletes and writes a weekly real estate article for the business section. Learn more about Josh.

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