A Maas-ive impact

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This article was published 18/11/2023 (712 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

HAMILTON — As Zach Collaros gets ready to start his fourth straight Grey Cup game on Sunday, a feat that no other quarterback has achieved in the CFL’s 65-year history, there’s reason to believe he might not be here if not for the dedication and support from a man on the other sideline.

“He’s definitely someone, in the early part of my career, that if not for him, who knows what would have happened,” Collaros told the Free Press following walk-through Saturday at Tim Hortons Field, where his Winnipeg Blue Bombers will face off against the Montreal Alouettes in the championship game.

It was back in 2012 that Collaros and Alouettes head coach Jason Maas first crossed paths as members of the Toronto Argonauts. Collaros was in his rookie season and Maas, who had spent several years as a quarterback in the CFL, was starting his post-playing career as the club’s quarterbacks coach.

Maas recalled Collaros being a smart and eager study, with a quiet confidence to him. Collaros had arrived at training camp that year knowing plenty about the game but was foreign to the nuances of Canadian football, having played his entire career to that point in his home state of Ohio.

“I still remember him coming into training camp late and having to get him ready for the first pre-season game and he had only been there for a couple days,” Maas said. “He was very confident that he’d go in and I wasn’t quite so sure because I know how different our game is. But he went in there and played just so smoothly and then he didn’t play the rest of the year.”

Collaros stuck with the Argos for the whole season, assigned to the then nine-game injury reserved list back when you could hide healthy players on long-term IR. That meant he was strictly a practice player, which was far from an ideal position at the time, given how Toronto opted to employ its offence.

Scott Milanovich, who was the head coach and offensive co-ordinator, was implementing a West Coast style offence that doesn’t provide much opportunity for backup quarterbacks. In fact, No. 1 pivot Ricky Ray was the only quarterback who got live reps during formal workouts, leaving the others to shadow the future Hall of Famer.

“We didn’t have a lot of reps we ran through in practice and that’s just the way it was,” Maas said. “The starting quarterback does all the reads and in the meeting room he’s the only one speaking. The only time we all would speak up is if he wasn’t understanding the play we were designing.”

Maas knew that if he was going to properly develop his other guys it was going to have to happen outside of work hours. He went to Collaros and asked him if he’d be willing to spend some time together to get a better understanding of the playbook.

So before Maas would retreat to team meetings and prior to Collaros hitting the gym, they would spend close to a half hour on the field going through live reps of every play installed at practice that day. That work vastly improved Collaros’ comfort with the offensive scheme and better prepared him to take advantage when he got the opportunity to play.

“That was what I felt would make him a better quarterback and, obviously, I had experience in doing that visually myself before games,” Maas said. “You kind of, as a coach, take some of those learning lessons you thought were important and try to pass them along. But it takes a willing participant to do that and that’s why when you get a guy like Zach, who is a sponge and wants to work and wants to be the best, it’s easy to provide whatever he’s looking for and believe it’s important.”

Collaros returned for the 2013 campaign, earning his first start following an injury to Ray. He won his first four games and started four more in what turned out to be a breakout season, leading to a starting role with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats the next year.

Collaros said in those two off-seasons before arriving in Hamilton, he would visit Maas in Arizona, where Maas would continue to coach and develop him. Their bond was built over a mutual love of the game and desire to get better every day.

“He just cares deeply about the game,” Collaros said of Maas. “Every time he would screw up, he’d get pissed off and is just a really competitive guy. I remember when we first met it felt like I didn’t eat for two days because I just sat there with him and pored over the playbook.”

The two remain friends and stay in touch regularly. They exchange text messages with one another, sometimes to praise a good game plan or just share a tidbit of knowledge here and there.

Make no mistake, Collaros has the full intention to deliver a crushing loss to Maas and the Alouettes in Sunday’s Grey Cup, but he’s happy for his former coach after what went down in Saskatchewan last year. Maas was fired as the Roughriders’ offensive co-ordinator, proving to be a scapegoat for a dysfunctional organization that missed the playoffs in 2023 for a second straight year.

Maas was then hired in Montreal, where he also has former Riders QB Cody Fajardo, leading the Alouettes to 11-7 regular-season record before playoff victories over the Ticats and Argos, who had tied a CFL regular-season record with 16 wins and just two losses.

“You got to blame somebody, right?” Collaros said. “I just know Jason is a lot like (Bombers OC) Buck (Pierce) in the sense nobody is going to outwork him, and he cares a lot about the game. Watching him over the years, while he was in Ottawa, some of those teams and, obviously, Edmonton, they’ve always been a lot of fun to watch, especially in the pass game. Very creative, but also you could tell how detailed and how well he communicated with the quarterbacks.”

Maas said he’s flattered by Collaros’ kind words but he’s quick to pass back the credit. He’s proud of what Collaros has achieved over his career and is beyond impressed by how he’s come back from injuries to lead the Bombers to the brink of becoming a dynasty, having won two Grey Cups and going for a third in just four seasons.

“When you say a quarterback has the ‘it’ factor, that’s what I saw in Zach. There’s a confidence about him,” Maas said. “He has an ability to make plays out of nothing, but he can also read defences and he understands the offence and works extremely hard and is tough. There’s a lot of attributes about Zach and I have loved watching him continue his career and be so successful. People say he’s the first quarterback to go to four straight Grey Cups, there’s a reason why.”

Jeff.Hamilton@freepress.mb.ca

X: @jeffkhamilton

Jeff Hamilton
Multimedia producer

Jeff Hamilton is a sports and investigative reporter. Jeff joined the Free Press newsroom in April 2015, and has been covering the local sports scene since graduating from Carleton University’s journalism program in 2012. Read more about Jeff.

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