The 2024 Toronto Argonauts season ended with a Grey Cup celebration. The 2025 season ended with a thud.
The numbers speak for themselves, the most damning is a 5-13 record, the worst by far since 2019, the season prior to the beginning of the Michael Clemons/Ryan Dinwiddie era.
On Sunday, the team gathered one final time, for exit meetings, physicals, and a team gathering where players, coaches, and staff members would hear from Dinwiddie and Clemons. To say the least, the feeling in the room was dramatically different from their final farewell 11 months ago.
It was a season that nobody in the organization was prepared for. Expectations for the season were high, after all, the club was coming off a Grey Cup championship, and while the team was raided in the off-season via free agency, everyone was confident it had filled the void created by those departures.
On Sunday, Argonauts.ca sat down with Dinwiddie in his office to discuss a difficult season. He was open in his replies and accepting of what happened.
“It’s tough,” he admitted when asked how he was doing. “It’s a tough season. We’ve been through a lot of adversity. It’s obviously not the finish that we wanted, probably not the start we wanted. We put ourselves in a tough spot starting 0-3, and we’ve got to win more games at home (where they were 3-6). We’ve got a long way to go, we obviously understand that.”
One of the reasons Dinwiddie has earned the respect of the players is that he doesn’t sugarcoat things. He’s an exceptionally straight shooter who isn’t afraid to point out the negatives but does so to make his team better. He’s also not adverse to confessing when he feels he wasn’t at his best.
He admitted they need to get better in terms of players and coaching. The native of Elk Grove in Northern California says he and his coaching staff have to spend the off-season analyzing their schemes, their approach to practice, and how they teach and run their drills.
“The execution needs to clean up and that starts with me,” he said.
That self-awareness resonates with his players and staff.
One thing that Dinwiddie was pleased with was that his players didn’t start pointing fingers at each other when things didn’t go their way. That can be an easy thing to do when a group used to winning starts losing, but the culture he’s established stopped any seeds of dissension from germinating.
“They stuck together,” the coach explained. “That’s important to winning football games. Obviously, that’s not the case this year, but as far as sustained success, we have that in the locker room as far as our approach. I’m very appreciative of the fight, but we’ve got to find ways to get better.”
And what are those ways?
“We’ve got to be more explosive at times on offence, we’ve got to be more physical there. Defensively we’ve got to be a little bit more aggressive, I thought we lacked physicality there a little bit as far as dominating your approach and letting teams be a little bit fearful. There’s a lot we’ve got to look at and analyze.”
In talking to Dinwiddie, you’d think the Argos were blown out of every game, though perhaps the beatdown in Calgary the night before was top of mind. The Argos were in virtually every game in 2025 but went 2-9 in games decided in the last three minutes and were 0-5 in games decided between 4-9 points.
“You look back at some of the losses we had,” Dinwiddie recalled. “The one at Montreal (where they led 25-7 late in the third quarter but lost 26-25), Sask at home (where after tying the game on a last-minute TD and two-point conversion, Mario Alford returned the kickoff 99 yards for a touchdown) and Ottawa at home (where they had a 21 point lead in the first quarter). I look back at those games and if we could have some of them back we’d be right around .500 and give us a chance to compete in the playoffs.”
Dinwiddie then started talking about the jobs he and his staff did this year. He said they met for about an hour-and-a-half on Sunday, just before he sat down with Argonauts.ca, and talked about how they can improve.
“We talked about the players, but also we analyzed ourselves and what we can do differently,” he explained. “I think we’ve got to have out thumbs on our players a little bit more. You just can’t expect them to understand what the expectations are. I think each position coach needs to own their position group and find that identity within themselves and the group because that’s your resume as a position coach. It doesn’t matter who they are, they’re yours and we’ve got to find ways to get better there.”
The coach wasn’t emotional in the free-flowing conversation. He was being very direct in his answers, which should not be construed as passing the buck. He knows that the bottom line is the record, and that it’s the chef, not the sous-chefs that get the blame for a bad meal.
But while he talked at length about how he and his staff have to improve, when asked about what job one in the off-season was, he was direct with his response.
“Roster,” he said, meaning that the club must improve its talent level, before quickly adding, “and coaching staff, where are we going to be? We’ve got to sit down with Keith (MLSE President and CEO Keith Pelley) and see what’s the best approach, what changes we need to make, and what things we need to do to get us back to where we were in years past.
“Obviously there are high expectations in the building,” said the coach. “We’ve had a lot of success since I took this job. No one’s more disappointed than me, it’s tough, it’s humbling, but at the same time, you can sit back and sulk about it and make excuses for it and that’s not going to be the answer. We’ve got to find answers. I look forward to working, you know me, I’m always working, I have a lot of pride in this job. We’ve got to do better for our fans and better for our ownership and find ways to get into the playoffs and do that collectively each year. We’ve got to be more consistent; we’ve been consistent for four years, but I want to be able to give us a chance to win the Grey Cup each year.”
It takes hard work to maintain that level of success, as prior to this year the club had reached the Eastern Final in each of Dinwiddie’s four seasons, winning the Grey Cup twice in the last three years. The coach is committed to rolling up his sleeves and doing what’s necessary to become a Grey Cup contender again.
“As the leader of the organization it starts with me. You can’t waste a day and get better.”
There were some positives in 2025 to build around, but it will be a new-look Argonauts team in 2026, with the coach hoping to be playing in November rather than looking ahead to the following season.