Courtesy: Kevin Sousa/CFL.ca

Ryan Dinwiddie is widely regarded as one of the best coaches in the CFL, but it doesn’t appear that his final cohort of players in Toronto saw it that way.

The Argonauts received a D+ grade for their coaching staff on the 2025 CFLPA team report card, the lowest mark recorded by any franchise in that category. That came as a surprise, considering that the majority of that staff helped to lead the team to a Grey Cup title just one year prior and were led by Dinwiddie, whose skillset was so coveted that the Ottawa Redblacks poached him this offseason.

Despite his new digs, the former CFL Coach of the Year did take notice of the poor grade.

“You obviously look at it. I think we’ve looked through over the last few months of what we’ve got to do better as a coaching staff from that experience and build forward with the Ottawa Redblacks,” Dinwiddie told 3DownNation from the CFL Winter Meetings in Calgary.

“I agree to a certain extent, then there’s a certain extent that I don’t agree with. It is what it is, but obviously, we have to have a lens. That’s one of the things I always talk about. Players have to have lenses; coaches do too. We’ve got to do a better job getting our players prepared to win football games. I think we had some adversity last year. I thought we handled it the best way we could, but there’s some things that we need to get better at. And then there’s a reason why some of the guys that were on my staff aren’t coming with me to Ottawa.”

Dinwiddie only brought two coaches with him from Toronto to Ottawa — receivers coach Pete Costanza and quarterbacks coach Drew Tate — choosing to fill the rest of his staff with new faces or incumbents.

Three other coaches remain with the Argonauts, as Mike Miller was promoted to head coach and chose to keep special team coordinator Mickey Donovan and running backs coach Dominic Picard, who has been moved to offensive line. Co-defensive coordinators Jason Shivers and Kevin Eiben, defensive line coach Greg Marshall, and offensive line coach Kris Sweet were not retained by Toronto and did not follow their former boss to his new franchise.

“To be honest, we’re so focused on moving forward, I didn’t even know that that grade was out there. I really don’t have much to say about that,” Miller said when asked by 3DownNation.

“The players, they’re asked, I guess, to vote honestly on how they truly feel. I guess that’s something you’d have to talk to them about. I enjoyed working with RD, and we wish him all the best, but we’ve got to focus on trying to do what we need to do for the Argonauts moving into 2026 right now.”

The Argonauts suffered one of the worst Grey Cup hangovers in CFL history in 2025, posting a 5-13 record while missing the playoffs for the first time in Dinwiddie’s tenure. Franchise quarterback Chad Kelly’s injury status was a persistent storyline throughout the campaign, but he ultimately missed the entire season while recovering from a broken leg suffered in the 2024 East Final. In part, the decision to keep him on the shelf was made due to an abundance of caution, with the Toronto offensive line struggling to keep any QB upright behind them.

At various points throughout the season, Dinwiddie called out his team publicly in post-game press conferences. He openly threatened to cut underperforming players and claimed the team had “pretenders” in the building. Though never known for mincing his words, the 45-year-old bench boss acknowledged he may have crossed a line with some players.

“I think you always talk to the media trying to wake up your locker room a bit. Was I a little bit more emotional last year than in years past? Probably, but the urgency, we needed to have that last year, I thought,” Dinwiddie said. “It wasn’t like we were just gonna walk in and win football games, like we did in years past. We had to find ways to win football games. You’ve got to take care of your locker room, make sure you don’t undress them publicly, and those things I’ll look at.”

When asked if he felt that Dinwiddie had lost the locker room, Argonauts’ general manager Pinball Clemons kept his answer complimentary.

“Those kinds of things we wouldn’t talk about publicly. He is in a new place now, and I think he’s going to do a terrific job,” he said.

“In terms of the grades, you don’t know exactly how guys feel, and you want them to answer honestly in these kinds of situations. When we look at the breadth of what Ryan Dinwiddie accomplished, we could do nothing but give high fives. But last year was a tough year, and so the score is what it is.”

For Dinwiddie, the frank reality is that his staff’s grade accurately reflected Toronto’s success last season. Despite all he did in his first four seasons with the Argos, winning two championships and finishing atop the East Division three times, your status in professional football is only as good as your most recent record.

“We didn’t win enough football games. We had a legacy going there, and we won football games there, but last year that wasn’t the case,” he said. “We had a lot of close games that we could have won, and I think we’ve got to do a better job of relating to our players and holding them accountable. But at the same time, holding our staff accountable, and that starts with me.”