By Stampeders.com Staff

Although there are significant differences in the way football is played on either side of the 49th parallel, there have been quite a few men who have served as head coaches in both the CFL and the NFL.

Marv Levy, Bud Grant, Hugh Campbell, Allie Sherman, Frank Ivy and, most recently, Marc Trestman are some of the coaches who had major success in Canada before trying their luck south of the border.

In a different but vaguely related category are the trio of current NFL head coaches who had brief stints as CFL quarterbacks.

New Orleans’ Sean Payton was with the Ottawa Rough Riders in 1987 while Jason Garrett of the Dallas Cowboys had a quick stopover in Ottawa in 1991 before embarking on a 12-year NFL playing career.

The third member of the group is San Diego Chargers head coach Mike McCoy, who played with the Calgary Stampeders in 1999.

McCoy was signed because of an injury to Dave Dickenson but with Henry Burris also on the roster at the time, McCoy figured to do a lot of watching from the sidelines. Then Burris also went down and the California native was quickly thrown into the fire.

“We had Mike for something like four days and then he started for us and won four or five games with no training camp and a lot of it was because he cerebrally was able to pick up things quickly and stay within the structure of the offence,” Wally Buono, the Stampeders head coach and general at the time, recalled in 2013 when McCoy was hired by the Chargers.

“He had all the things as a coach you need to have. You have to have a work ethic, you have to have discipline, you have to have toughness. Things didn’t faze him. His greatest assets weren’t his natural ability and those are usually the guys that make the best coaches. The guys who have to work at it not only develop their physical skills but also the cerebral part of it as well.”

Despite the lack of familiarity with the CFL game and a little bit of rust — he hadn’t seen game action since playing for Amsterdam in NFL Europe two years before — McCoy completed 63.9 per cent of his 183 passes for the Red and White and threw 10 touchdown passes compared to just two interceptions.

With Burris hungry to be a starter and poised to jump ship — he would sign with Saskatchewan the following season — and Dickenson pondering NFL possibilities, there seemed to be a great opportunity for McCoy to stick with the Stamps beyond 1999 and play a significant role.

Buono, in fact, would have loved for him to return but McCoy surprisingly decided to retire as a player and take a job as an offensive assistant on the Carolina Panthers coaching staff.

“Mike, at the time, could have been our starting quarterback,” noted Buono, “but he went to Carolina almost as a graduate assistant because he felt the vision for his life was to be a coach.”

The job in Carolina led to the offensive coordinator position with the Denver Broncos before the Chargers offered him his first chance to serve as head coach. San Diego has been 9-7 in each of McCoy’s two seasons at the helm.

On the eve of getting the Chargers job, McCoy was asked about his brief but successful stay at McMahon Stadium.

“Wally and the staff gave me a great opportunity to do something I hadn’t done in a long time,” McCoy recalled of his Calgary stint. “I chased a dream in the NFL and never really got to play, and going to Calgary and playing in the short amount of time I was up there was great.

“Unfortunately, we lost to Hamilton in the Grey Cup, but in the short time we were in Calgary, we met so many good people.”

McCoy and his wife Kellie have a lasting reminder of their time in Calgary — their first child, daughter Olivia, was born in the city during Mike’s stint with the Stamps.