Can Jeff Garcia help the Alouettes fix their offence, or are there too many cooks in the kitchen?

A week after bringing in legendary CFL coach Don Matthews and famed NFL quarterback/QB coach Turk Schoenert as consultants, the Montreal Alouettes have again expanded their coaching staff, hiring former CFL and NFL quarterback Jeff Garcia Monday. For now, Garcia's role is unspecified, but it seems highly likely the team will try to have him help develop their struggling quarterbacks. (Oddly enough, though, the 44-year old Garcia said he'd even step in himself if asked; that seems highly unlikely, but hey, head coach Tom Higgins said the team had discussions about bringing in Garcia as a QB, and anything is possible in this league.) The question is if Garcia's addition will prove useful, or if the Alouettes will have too many coaches and too little direction.

Garcia's credentials as a player are impressive. The San Jose State product spent five years in the CFL from 1994 to 1998 with Calgary and earned four divisional all-star nods, plus the Grey Cup MVP in 1998 after he led the Stampeders to a 26-24 triumph over the Tiger-Cats. After that, he went to the NFL and played there from 1999 to 2009 with seven different teams, earning four Pro Bowl nods. He then went to the UFL in 2010 and made a brief return to the NFL in 2011 with the Houston Texans. As recently as last year, he apparently reached out to the Cleveland Browns to see if they had any interest in him as a quarterback. That didn't go anywhere, but Garcia's football career north and south of the border is still remarkable, and he should have plenty of experience to draw on when working with quarterbacks. He's also been doing that for several years, training high school and college quarterbacks through Jeff Garcia Football.

However, Garcia's joining a crowded roster of offensive minds, and one without a lot of CFL coaching experience. The titular offensive coordinator (following the pre-preseason firing of Rick Worman) and quarterbacks coach is Ryan Dinwiddie, the former NCAA and CFL quarterback who's in just his second year as a coach. Schoenert has plenty of experience as a quarterbacks coach in the NFL, but has never been involved in the Canadian game, and while Garcia knows the CFL, he hasn't been around it much since 1998; he also doesn't seem to have a formal background of coaching with a team. Matthews is a legendary CFL coach who knows plenty about offence, but he's also 75 and hasn't been regularly involved in the league (apart as a brief stint as a Montreal consultant last season) since 2008. There's also receivers coach Erik Campbell, running backs coach Mark Speckman, offensive line coach Kris Sweet and offensive quality control coach Andre Bolduc to consider, plus potentially head coach Tom Higgins and general manager Jim Popp. With all those voices involved, will the Alouettes be able to establish any sort of consistent offensive identity?

It's notable that the team's already looking at shaking up its quarterbacks too. While Troy Smith has been named the starter again for Friday's game against Edmonton, he's likely on a short leash given his ineffectiveness this year, and the team tried out three new quarterbacks Monday: Texas A&M product Jerrod Johnson, Cornell's Chris Amrhein and San Diego's Mason Mills. That seems reasonable considering the dismal way Smith and primary backup Alex Brink played in a 31-5 loss to Toronto Friday, helping the team hit a historic low of scoring less than 10 points in back-to-back games for the first time in their modern history in Montreal (since they returned to the city in 1996). At least the Alouettes didn't get completely desperate and bring in Tim Tebow (although those rumours were circulating). They're at least looking at people with a little more potential.

Quarterback changes could complicate things even further for the Montreal offence, though. All these coaches are going to have to work together to establish an offensive plan, and then they'll have to pick the right quarterback to then execute that plan. Garcia very well could be a useful part of that braintrust, but the difficulty may be in getting everyone on the same page, and there's no one person to look to as an obvious leader on the offensive side. If the Alouettes do somehow miraculously turn things around on offence, the additions of Garcia, Schoenert and Matthews may look brilliant, but the new coaches are facing a steep hill in front of them, and figuring out how they're going to attack it may be complicated given their numbers.

(Correction: This post initially spelled Rick Worman's name wrong as "Rick Wormack".)