OUT OF THE TUNNEL: THINGS ARE BUBBLING

BY: RODPEDERSEN.COM STAFF

July 23 is just hours away and we can hear the clock ticking to the impending end of the 2020 CFL season. From various parties it looks more and more likely that the CFL will not be returning until 2021.

Arash Madani was fantastic on the Rod Pedersen Show on July 19 breaking down the many things that could take down the season. Those seven-plus minutes summed up the past four months of frustration from so many fronts. Go back and watch, it’s must-see viewing for any football fan.

We will break down what the next steps will be once the season is officially over next weekend (or hopefully we eat our words and are writing about some sort of shortened version of the 202 CFL season). We’d never be so happy to be wrong!

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As the COVID-19 pandemic is having a resurgence across North America, more and more leagues and teams are either cancelling or postponing their seasons.

This is happening en masse in the NCAA.

This week Canada’s remaining college football team that could potentially have a season is done. Simon Fraser and the rest of the Great Northwest Athletic Conference (GNAC) suspended fall sports through November 30 because of the pandemic. 

This has been an interesting month for Simon Fraser athletics. First came the renewed uproar over their team name, the Clan. This is a name that is tied to the explorer’s and school’s namesake Simon Fraser’s Scottish heritage but now the word is much more connected to the racist organization (Ku Klux Klan).

The school will be changing its name and when football returns in 2021 it could be the dawn of a new program.

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Across the rest of college football, most FCS conferences have either suspended indefinitely or postponed their football seasons to the spring of 2021. The same can be said across Division II and Division III football. 

On the FBS level, nothing else has really changed other than the handful of conferences cancelling out of conference games.

It sure feels like they are pushing hard to have some sort of money generated season on many fronts. We will know more once camps officially open in a couple of weeks.

Locally we still await what will happen with Canadian Junior and high school football. Both will happen very soon and are intrinsically linked with each other across the west. The PFC and BCFC are well set up to have shortened seasons with games being played with teams within their own regions without the need for extensive travel.

With Major League Baseball getting underway along with the return of the NBA and NHL on the horizon, and so many football seasons in doubt, it’s going to be an interesting month in the world of sports on who can and who can’t deal well with the pandemic and its endless impacts on society.

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Now let’s have some fun and get back to our lists. Today it’s something that is almost a CFL-only happening. That’s when a team that has a .500 or lower record and is in the bottom half of the CFL standings wins a Grey Cup.

The majority of the time the cream does rise to the top of the CFL but there have been a handful of teams that for one reason or another were able to capture the Grey Cup.

Here are some of the worst teams that have won a Grey Cup title:

1988 Winnipeg Blue Bombers (9-9, 5th best record in the CFL). There will be a trend of back-to-back seasons of woeful teams that win a Grey Cup and this is the first. Winnipeg was the opposite of the Sakatchewan Roughriders a year later. Great defence but a terrible offence. They started 2-4 but then went on a tear led by the newly signed Sean Salisbury. In the Grey Cup, they were double-digit underdogs to the B.C. Lions but ended up with the 22-21 victory.

1989 Saskatchewan Roughriders (9-9, 4th best record in CFL). They couldn’t settle on a starting quarterback between Kent Austin and Tom Burgess but even with that they had a dynamic offence but they had one of the worst defences in the CFL. Somehow they were able to knock off a two-loss Edmonton Eskimo juggernaut in the West Final before beating the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the Grey Cup.

2000 B.C. Lions (8-10, 5th best record in the CFL). This is the first team to win a Grey Cup with a losing record. A tumultuous season that saw a coaching change seven games into the season when Greg Mohns was replaced by veteran coach Steve Buratto. They won three of their last four games to earn a playoff berth before edging Edmonton in the West Semi-Finals and hammering the West’s top team, the Calgary Stampeders in the Final. They were able to beat the league’s best defensive team, the Montreal Alouettes in the Grey Cup game.

2001 Calgary Stampeders (8-10, 5th best record in the CFL). Here we go again with back-to-back cruddy teams to win a title. B.C. the year before was the first to win a Grey Cup with a losing record and Calgary became the second. This was the worst defence in the CFL and no real stars on offence either. Including the playoffs, quarterback Marcus Crandell and the Stampeders won six of their last seven games including a dominant victory over the 14-4 Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the championship game.

2016 Ottawa Redblacks (8-9-1, 5th best record in the CFL). The third and latest team to win the Grey Cup with a losing record. This was more of a product of a poor East Division than the league as a whole. The Redblacks ended up finishing first in the East with the top four teams in the West all having better records. This might be Henry Burris’s best work in his now Hall of Fame career with a season capped with one of the best Grey Cup games in recent memory. The 39-33 overtime victory past the Calgary Stampeders.

1970 Montreal Alouettes (7-6-1, 6th best record in the CFL). This might be the worst team to ever win the Grey Cup. Yes, there are now a handful of teams to win with a losing record but that’s a cause of weird quirks but this team somehow had a better than .500 record but also clawed their way to the Grey Cup. 

This was an offence that was atrocious. They averaged just 16 points a game under the guidance of quarterback Sonny Wade. Here is a little insight of how different of an era it was. Wade threw just 17 touchdown passes and a whopping 31 interceptions. One in every 10 passes were intercepted.

The rollercoaster season began with a 6-2 stretch to begin the season only to end in a 2-4-1 stretch. They then dominated the post season winning the East Semi-Final and crushing Hamilton in the second-last two-game total point East Final. The season finished in the muck of Exhibition Stadium in Toronto where Montreal dominated the Calgary Stampeders 23-10.

Of note, they might have had the nicest uniforms in CFL history with the light-green with white and red uniforms topped with a white helmet with the bird that was just two lines and a dot for the eye. Pure aesthetic beauty.

(RODPEDERSEN.COM STAFF)