Can the Alouettes’ three-headed offensive leadership rejuvenate their attack?

When you're talking about splitting leadership three ways, there are a multitude of examples both effective and ruinous. For every terrifying Cerberus, peaceful-while-it-lasted triumvirate or "Holy Trinity Of Nerd Rock," there are three-headed knights who can't get out of their own way and rulers who couldn't share power for long. Tripartite leadership isn't all that common to see these days, especially in football, but it's what the Montreal Alouettes are going to on the offensive side of the ball ahead of Thursday night's clash with Toronto (7:30 p.m. Eastern, TSN/ESPN3) in the wake of the firing of head coach Dan Hawkins. General manager Jim Popp has stepped in as head coach, but he won't be directly involved in the offence, which is going to be a split between quarterback Anthony Calvillo, play-caller and former CFL head coach Doug Berry and titular offensive coordinator Mike Miller, a carryover from the Hawkins regime. Will this leadership trio pan out for the Alouettes and revitalize their moribund attack, or will they try to go in different directions and get in each other's way?

One element in favour of this is that it's going to be hard for the Alouettes' offence to get worse than it was under the downfield passing scheme emphasized under the Hawkins/Miller regime. While going for big plays is nice, it's tougher to do that all the time in a three-down game that puts an emphasis on completing passes and moving the chains, and it's particularly tough when your offensive line may not be good enough to keep your 40-year-old, not exceptionally mobile quarterback upright long enough for receivers to finish running slow-developing pass routes. Through six weeks of the CFL season (they've played five games thanks to a bye last week,) the Alouettes were last in the league with 269.8 yards of offence per game, 207.0 passing yards per game and 6.6 yards per pass, and their 60.1 per cent pass completion mark was the CFL's third-worst. Thus, there's nowhere to go but up.

Moreover, while this may be a power-sharing triumvirate, one member of it is clearly less involved in dictating the outcomes. Miller may retain his role as offensive coordinator, but he isn't calling the plays any more, and comments from Popp, Berry and Calvillo have all focused on how the scheme will be closer to the high-percentage, West Coast-style offence of short passes that the Alouettes ran so effectively from 2008-2011 under Marc Trestman and Scott Milanovich and then last year under Trestman and Marcus Brady. While Miller will still be contributing and sharing the offensive experience he's picked up from a decade-plus of work in the NFL and the NCAA, it sounds like he'll be much more of a consultant than an actual player here. That may make him the Marcus Aemilius Lepidus of this arrangement: useful to have around and titularly important, but a much less crucial player in governance. Berry and Calvillo both know what they're doing, and granting Calvillo a larger role in how the offence is run seems like a positive for Montreal given his experience and past success. As long as they don't wind up in a two-way feud a la Caesar and Pompey or Octavian and Marc Antony, this may spark an offensive resurgence for the Alouettes. Perhaps they'll turn into a fearsome hellhound, a la Cerberus:

However, splitting leadership roles unconventionally doesn't always pay off in football. We've seen that recently on the CFL front with the 2011 Saskatchewan Roughriders, who had Ken Miller as vice-president of football operations, Brendan Taman as general manager and Greg Marshall as head coach. That didn't last terribly long, with all three trying to pull in different directions at times, and it didn't work particularly well. We'll see if Montreal's offensive triumvirate can produce the terrifying results of a Cerberus (mythological or fictional!), or if they'll be a source of amusement like the Three-Headed Knight: