When he was hired back in 2013, Marcel Desjardins laid out a plan for the success of the Ottawa REDBLACKS.

In charge of a brand-new team, the freshly-hired general manager was essentially the only employee in the building at that point. With 13 years experience as an assistant GM in Montreal and a year-and-a-half spent as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ GM, Desjardins knew what it would take to turn that empty room into a hub of activity and more important, a successful one in the CFL.

“I kind of stated at my (introductory) press conference that we’d try to be competitive, but what that meant in terms of wins…” Desjardins said in Mont-Tremblant, Que. at the CFL’s presidents and GMs meetings.

“Year 2 we were hoping to have a winning record and then by Year 3 we were hoping to compete for a Grey Cup. That’s kind of how I went about it.”

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Five years in, Desjardins has built a model franchise, slightly ahead of his ambitious plan. The REDBLACKS went through their anticipated woes in their 2-16 debut season in the league in 2014, but have since played in three of the last four Grey Cups and of course won the championship in 2016, their third year in the league.

“We made a lot of good decisions. My biggest decision or best proper decision was hiring Rick (Campbell),” Desjardins said of the team’s strong play over the last four years.

“Our ownership understands that Rick and I work well together and understands, you know, let them do their thing.

“A lot of other places, that may not be the case and that’s how you can get messed up situations. It’s turned out very well. Having been in Montreal and having been to the Grey Cup year-in and year-out for a long time, that was kind of the standard.”

Desjardins journey to the GM’s chair in Ottawa started at the CFL’s head office in Toronto. A graduate of Laurentian University’s sports administration program, he took a job with the league working in communications. A year later, he went into football operations.

“Contracts, database, transactions, the CBA. All of that fun stuff,” Desjardins said.

The job brought him into regular contact with the league’s GMs. One of them was then-Alouettes GM, Jim Popp.

In one of their conversations, Popp told Desjardins that he was looking to hire an assistant, someone to groom as a future GM in the event that he left the organization.

“Twenty four hours later Marcel called me back and asked if I’d consider him,” Popp said.

“He said, ‘I’ve been working in the league office and I feel like I’m missing something and I’d like to be a part of a team.’ He said he’d never scouted, never done any of that stuff.

“I thought about it and I realized he knew all the rules, he knew all the teams in the league, he’d registered all of the contracts. I could teach him how to scout. I’d get him going in that direction.

“We worked out a deal and he came over and left the league office and I got him started and eventually he became an assistant GM.”

“It was a lot different at the team level,” Desjardins said of the move to Montreal.

“The commitment level is that much higher, the time you put in is excessive. But it was fun and it was a totally different dynamic from being at the league office.”

Once Desjardins showed that he knew what he was doing, Popp gave him the freedom to work.

“He always let the people that worked underneath him do their thing, as long as the job was done and was done well,” he said. “He was always very proactive in how he wanted to approach things.”

Desjardins worked as assistant director of football ops from 1999 to 2001 and worked as assistant GM from 2002 to the midpoint of the 2006 season. In that time, the Als played in five Grey Cups (counting that ’06 season) and won one, in 2002. When the Hamilton Tiger-Cats came calling, Popp gave his young assistant a hearty recommendation. He joined the Ticats in late August, 2006.

A first-time GM, he inherited a 2-9 team and its payroll as the league was transitioning to a salary cap. It wasn’t easy.

“There was no cap in ’06 and I come in in ’07 and they’d spent through the nose,” Desjardins said.

“The bottom line is to me, know your circumstances going in. I don’t know if I did that well enough. That was the biggest thing.”

Desjardins wasn’t out of work long. Popp hired him back immediately and the two worked together for another five years, collecting two more Grey Cup wins in the process.

“Sometimes things just wear out or they take a different turn and there’s different owners or different visions and they want their own people,” Popp said. “That probably happened to Marcel more than anything.

“I think that Marcel took very good notes of what he would do next time. (In Ottawa) he’s got the right group of people. He didn’t hire a lot of people around him in Hamilton that he knew or knew his way or the way we did it in Montreal.

“The next time in the front office, he hired a lot of former Alouettes that had worked with him or understood how he wanted things done. Then as a coach (with Campbell) he got the right person in there that was going to listen and maybe not be combative to some things.”

Ottawa, of course, was a different challenge than what Desjardins faced in Hamilton. The building was empty, so to speak. There are pros and cons that come with building from the ground up with an expansion team.

“Our first year in terms of free agency nobody knew what we were going to be about,” he said.

“I don’t necessarily mean in terms of record but how the team was going to be so, ‘Why commit to Ottawa? Let’s wait and see.’ From that standpoint we weren’t able to go after a lot of the high-end free agents, which we were able to do in 2015, with Chris Williams and Ernest Jackson. At the end of the day there were advantages and disadvantages.

“I knew I wanted another chance to be a GM. I knew the city a bit. I’d been here for a year in my last year of university. I’d read enough about the ownership and their commitment they had to be there. It took them five years to get to the point where they could get on the field type of thing.

“And obviously the intrigue of starting from basically zero was pretty appealing. I think my background having known the league and starting at the bottom at Montreal and working my way up in more or less every job I’d done, I felt more than qualified to do that.”

Armed with the good and bad experiences from his career, Desjardins has been able to set down that path of recreating the expectation that those Alouettes teams had of playing in the final game of the season. Save for their propensity for viral touchdown celebrations, the team seems to embody the demeanour of its GM and head coach. They’re low-key, with their focus not just on the ups and downs of the week-to-week in the regular-season, but with the playoffs and the bigger picture in mind.

While other teams have rolled the dice on big name high profile former NFL QBs over the last few years, Desjardins avoids that.

“I think it’s…distractions for nothing,” he said. “I’m not saying we would never do it. It would depend on the circumstances. We almost take more satisfaction out of finding the young college player that can come in and contribute right away, and he’s going to be paid something a little more moderate than this NFL guy. Again, I’m not saying we wouldn’t do it, but that’s not our go-to. Let’s put it that way.”

“We don’t want people that will be distractions. It’s about the we and not the look-at-me type of thing, which is so much a part of today’s world,” he said, noting that that’s not always an easy thing to find. This past season, he released two players — Loucheiz Purifoy and Josh Johnson — that he’d signed in free agency because he felt they didn’t fit with the vision he had for the team.

“We dealt with free agency last year and it’s such a quick thing. Those two DBs we signed last year (Purifoy and Johnson) that didn’t fit into our culture, we didn’t know that until they got in there with us. Could you do more homework and run the risk of losing the player? Yeah. Maybe that’s something we need to learn to do better.”

Chris Jones thinks back to the start of his career in the CFL, as the Alouettes D-line coach in 2002, before serving as the team’s defensive coordinator from 2003 to 2007. He laughs as he tells a story of calling Desjardins from an office down the hall from his and pretending to be a blue chip player. They greet each other as Jones’ made up talent, Tyrone, whenever they see each other.

They spent the last three years as rival GMs, before Jones left for an NFL opportunity with the Cleveland Browns on Jan. 17.

“He doesn’t do a lot of trading or a lot of moves and shaking. He’s more of a methodical guy,” Jones said of Desjardins.

“He’s going to come to you about once a year and if he does you know that he’s given it a ton of thought. It’s not like, ‘Well, give me more time to think about it.’ He’s thought about it for six months if he’s going to come (talk to you).”

“He’s very diligent and organized. I’d say from an administrative standpoint he’s arguably the best in the business and that includes north and south of the border,” said Edmonton Eskimos GM Brock Sunderland, who left the REDBLACKS organization in 2017 to take the Edmonton job.

“He’s very organized, very detailed and I was very fortunate to work under him to learn those things. I came from the opposite background. I came from personnel and scouting and having played and coached a bit, so it was a really great opportunity for me to learn and pick his brain on those things.”

The moment wasn’t lost on Desjardins when Sunderland got that opportunity. He brought Sunderland, then the Als director of scouting, over to Ottawa with him and made him assistant GM.

“You want to surround yourself with good people and quality workers. Jim was able to do that in Montreal,” Desjardins said.

“We’ve got a number of people in our office now who would be more than qualified to move on and do bigger and better things with other teams.

“I go back to Jean-Marc Edme, our director of player personnel, who I hired as an intern in Hamilton in 2006. He came with me to Montreal and worked with coach (Marc) Trestman.

“There is satisfaction in getting to do that for people but at the end of the day you’re only doing it because they’re good at what they do and they fit into your environment. It’s a two-way street.”

For all of the talk about the success his team has had, Desjardins notes that getting to the Grey Cup isn’t enough for him; even if he’s rattled off three appearances in a short amount of time.

“When people bring out congrats on getting there, I don’t take a lot of satisfaction out of getting there,” he said.

“I’m still kind of irked that we lost the last one. I’d look at the whole thing a little differently had we won that one.”