At this point, we still have no idea if there’s going to be CFL football in 2020.
We do know that we won’t see a full season, and all the latest rumblings making their way around the interwebs revolve around the league trying to pull off a six-game regular season with eight teams making the playoffs.
Is that long enough? I don’t know. I’d still watch it because I love football and will take what I can get this season. The rules are the same for everyone, so there shouldn’t be any asterisk on whoever ends up winning the Grey Cup, should this scenario become reality. Sports are fun and business. This would still be fun and generate revenue.
There’s still plenty of roadblocks in the way, most notably, if it’s worth it for the American players to come play and risk their health for 33 percent of their salary, should this be the figure the league and players settle on — before taxes and conversion, even. Frankly, I wouldn’t blame anyone who decides this year isn’t for them. It’s a lot easier for the other major sports when a pro-rated season still results in millions of dollars for many of them.
Regardless, that’s not what this is about.
Since we’ve got time to kill at this point, I started thinking about how we could come up with the mathematically shortest CFL season possible.
Unfortunately, the Atlantic Schooners not being a real team yet prevents us from the incredible dumbness that would be a one-game season that would probably look something like this:
Week 1:
Roughriders vs Blue Bombers
Edmonton vs Stampeders
Argonauts vs Tigers-Cats
Alouettes vs Redblacks
Schooners vs Lions
The general idea is if you’re only going to have one game, give your fans the game they want. The one exception is probably the East meets West matchup between the Lions and Schooners but something had to give somewhere.
How would the playoffs work? I don’t know. Everyone is in the pool, I guess. Tie-breakers could come down to point differential, touchdowns, or who won the coin-toss.
There isn’t much point in putting too much thought into it since it’s not possible at this point unless the RSEQ (Quebec conference from Canadian university football) wants to put in an all-star team since they seem interested in playing football this year still.
So, since we can’t have the spectacularly dumb one-game season, I present to you, the two-game season:
Week 1:
Roughriders vs Blue Bombers
Argos vs Tiger-Cats
Edmonton vs Stampeders
Alouettes vs Redblacks
Bye: Lions
Week 2:
Lions vs Alouettes
Redblacks vs Argonauts
Bye: Roughriders, Blue Bombers, Tiger-Cats, Edmonton, Stampeders
Week 3:
Blue Bombers vs Tiger-Cats
Roughriders vs Stampeders
Edmonton vs Lions
Bye: Argonauts, Alouettes, Redblacks
Overall, we get games that people will probably want to watch. Rivals and divisional matchups are the majority, but some crossover is unavoidable. One of those games is still a Grey Cup re-match between what should be a couple of pretty good teams.
Eight teams could still make the playoffs, as the idea of one team being left out is hilariously dumb. No one would want to be known as the one team that didn’t make the playoffs that one year.
Obviously, this would never actually happen for a variety of reasons. It’s just something dumb I thought about and I love embracing the dumb.
