By Stampeders.com staff
When Wally Buono — a distinguished member of the 2014 Canadian Football Hall of Fame class — became head coach and general manager of the Calgary Stampeders in 1990, one of his first actions was to hire a former CFL quarterback named John Hufnagel as his offensive coordinator.
The results were immediate and overwhelmingly successful as the Stamps averaged 13 wins per year during the seven seasons Buono and Hufnagel were on the same staff.
Hufnagel was just a couple of years removed from his playing career when he started working for Buono 24 years ago.
“I learned a tremendous amount from Wally,” said Hufnagel. “First of all, Wally has a great football mind.”
Buono had been a linebacker during his playing career but Hufnagel marveled at his knowledge of the sport on both sides of the ball.
“It wasn’t just that he had a great defensive mind,” said Hufnagel. “He was instrumental in the growth of our offence when I was a coordinator here.”
The Calgary offence, which had never scored 500 points in a season, hit that milestone in every year of the Buono-Hufnagel partnership and exceeded 600 points on five occasions.
Hufnagel left the CFL in 1997 to work in the U.S. but returned to Canada in 2008 when he assumed the same head coach/general manager dual roles in Calgary that Buono had once held. By then, Buono was working in Vancouver and on his way to becoming the winningest coach in CFL history.
So just what made Buono such a successful bench boss?
“He was very confident in his approach and that made everybody in his organization confident,” noted Hufnagel. “He was a great leader of men. He always showed his appreciation for the hard work that his assistant coaches did for him and that’s just one of the many reasons why he was a great leader of men.
“He has a lot of strong traits, but one of the strongest is his eye for talent and making personnel decisions.”
So, Buono was a solid tactician. A strong leader. An exceptional talent evaluator. Little wonder that he won all those games (254), all those coach-of-the-year awards (four) and all those Grey Cups (five).
Hufnagel is quick to admit that he was the beneficiary of much Buono wisdom during those seven glorious seasons on his coaching staff in Calgary.
“Have I carried a lot of those (lessons) throughout my coaching career?” he said. “Most definitely. I’ve had the good fortune to be with a lot of good coaches and the bulk of my beliefs about coaching stems from the time that I spent with Wally.”
Hufnagel clearly learned those lessons well. While Buono remains the Stamps’ all-time leader in coaching wins with 153, Hufnagel holds the franchise record for best winning percentage.
Fittingly, both men will be in the same stadium on Sunday when the Stamps are in Montreal to face the Alouettes in the 2014 Hall of Fame Game.
Also in this year’s class are Ben Cahoon, Uzooma Okeke, Moe Racine, Charles Roberts, longtime Canadian university coach Larry Haylor and Neil Lumsden.