Article by Josh Thomas
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats decimated the Toronto Argonauts to move to .500 for the first time since 2023.
A trio of touchdowns from Kenny Lawler helped Hamilton to a 51-38 victory in front of the Argos’ faithful on Friday. Bo Levi Mitchell led an all-out aerial assault with 332 yards and 5 touchdowns, and the defence continued the trend of creating turnovers at a higher clip than they have in years past.
Here are my thoughts on the game.
A good response
The bad news is that giving up the first score of the game is becoming a trend for this Tiger-Cats team. The good news? They have been really good at providing an immediate response.
Toronto received the opening kick and Hamilton did not touch the football again until Argonauts running back Kevin Brown crossed the goal line to make it 7-0.
A quick two-and-out later, Toronto was staring down the possibility of a 14-0 lead. Dashaun Amos snuffed out the drive with an interception, and one play later, Kenny Lawler was celebrating a 35-yard touchdown catch.
Hamilton has only been able to draw first blood once this season. Fortunately, being behind the eight ball has not deterred them from getting to their game. In both of the Cats’ wins, interceptions erased the possibility of a two-score deficit.
The Tabbies are finding ways to respond, and it starts with the secondary creating turnovers.
Fool me once…
A memo to the Toronto Argonauts defence: you cannot cover Kenny Lawler one-on-one.
After Lawler caught his first touchdown over two defenders, Toronto made the inexplicable decision to leave him alone against his DB with zero safety help over the top on the next drive.
If you give any good receiver in the CFL 10 yards off the ball with no safety help, you’re going to get hurt. Do it against Kenny Lawler and you’re going to get torched. Whether it was a miscommunication or a bad play call, Lawler’s eyes must have been gigantic when he saw his Tarvarus McFadden sitting flat-footed and nobody in blue behind him.
A quick jab step to sell an outside route was all Lawler needed to cook him on a skinny post. A few seconds later, Lawler was a walking Randy Moss meme with two receptions for 114 yards and two touchdowns. He finished the contest with a ridiculous six receptions for 207 yards and three touchdowns with a long of 79 yards.
I don’t think we will see Toronto play without a safety over the top ever again.
Mr. Consistency
I dropped the ball last week by not talking about Marc Liegghio. It’s easy to take a perfect performance from your field goal kicker for granted when you win your first game of the season and your second-overall pick has a monster game.
Take a step back to look at Liegghio’s entire body of work for Hamilton, and it will become crystal clear how valuable he has been.
Football fans, myself included, have a bad habit of throwing stones at kickers from the comfort of our glass houses. Most of us couldn’t put a ball straight through uprights with any consistency from even 30 yards out. Still, we expect kickers to be robots who do not miss from anywhere inside the 50.
Kickers like Liegghio are the reason fans take the position for granted. He is an automatic field goal kicking machine. Wind him up and watch him go.
Wind, the snap, the hold, how well the blocking holds up, the range, and where a team is on the field all play a part in making every kick slightly different than the last. None of it has affected Liegghio during his time in Hamilton.
He has connected on 89.1 percent of his kicks for the Cats and officially claimed the title of most accurate kicker in team history with his first against the Alouettes last week.
There was a time the Tiger-Cats were competing for Grey Cups with a kicker who struggled to find the 70 percent mark and was extremely prone to missing field goals or extra point attempts in key moments. Through two losing seasons and a promising start to 2025, Liegghio has been one of the most valuable players for the Tiger-Cats.
He was money again on Friday, hitting his only kick of the game from 44 yards out.
Vintage Bo
If Bo Levi Mitchell smells blood in the water, it is going to be a long night.
The Tiger-Cats used to suffer losses like this to Mitchell’s Stampeders on a regular basis and it was maddening. The kind of game where you’re always within reach but never really in it.
Every time Hamilton scored, Calgary would be in the endzone a few plays later. The offence could be firing on all cylinders, and as a fan, you knew it did not matter because they couldn’t get a stop.
It feels so good being on the other side of it.
Every time Toronto cut their deficit, Hamilton put a touchdown on the board in quick succession.
Mitchell used the adjustments the Argos made on the first two Lawler TDs to find Tyler Ternowski for his first score of the year, before delivering yet another deep strike to Lawler. When it was all said and done, Mitchell torched the Argos for 332 yards and five touchdowns. Kiondre Smith also found the endzone. A total of seven receivers had receptions. Complete dominance.
The Tiger-Cats are going to be hard to beat if this is the version of Bo Levi Mitchell we’re getting in 2025.
Reverse trickeration
Remember earlier this season when I said there were far too many open lanes when defending kick returns?
The Argos certainly noticed when they designed a reverse to Janarion Grant on a kickoff early in the third quarter. The reverse to Grant left him one-on-one with a lone Ticat down the sideline. One egregiously missed block in the back later — this is not a gripe, film doesn’t lie — he was free to trot his way into the endzone.
It once again cut the Argos’ deficit to one score and kept them in the contest. The miscue was erased almost immediately by the Hamilton offence, but this is still an area I need to see improvement in. Neither of the kicks they have let go for scores have hurt them in the long run. One is going to come at the worst time possible if they don’t clean up on kickoff.
Pressure creating diamonds
The scoreline was a little misleading for me when it comes to looking at the Tiger-Cats’ defensive effort. By no stretch of the imagination is giving up 31 defensive points to a Nik Arbuckle-led Toronto offence a representation of Hamilton’s A-game on defence.
It wasn’t their worst game either, though. The bulk of Toronto’s scoring came in the second half after they already had a game’s worth of possessions thanks to Hamilton’s recurring trips to the endzone.
Early on, it was the defence that stood their ground and allowed the offence to get going. The 14-point swing provided by Amos’ interception — the lone turnover of the game — completely flipped the contest on its head.
When they did get off the field, it’s because they were making life extremely difficult on the Argos’ o-line. They only got home for one sack, but the pressure was there for the second week in a row. It is allowing the DBs to make plays on the ball, and stopping teams from methodically driving the field.
Improvement in the trenches is a big reason Hamilton is 2-2.
Great for the league
There were seven touchdowns thrown and nearly 700 yards of offence in the air in this game. The teams combined for a total of 89 points.
I’m sure the narrative is going to be that it was a ‘garbage football’ game from the defences. If you can get past Luke Willson snoring on the sidelines, you realize this was an incredible game to showcase everything the CFL can be.
A high-flying, edge-of-your-seat, pass-heavy brand of football with electric kick returns, huge momentum swings, and world-class plays.
Is the league perfect? Not by a long shot.
If I only picked on games where teams ran out the last eight minutes of the clock, or ran the ball up the gut 60 times a game for three yards, you would think the NFL is boring too.
Sure, bad games in the CFL are under the microscope because there are fewer teams in the league. Thursday Night Football has been hot garbage in the NFL for the entirety of my existence. Nobody diminishes the league based on low-scoring games or proposes rule changes when one position group dominates another.
Especially when every suggestion the ‘CFL is broken’ crowd has is to essentially Americanize the game further. They say Canadian o-linemen can’t play with American d-linemen; they tell you the ratio is a big part of why it’s broken. The same tired points are regurgitated every single time if it’s not the most exciting game in CFL history.
Again, the CFL is not perfect. Some of the issues being raised are accurate, and Willson is not the first person to point them out. It is not some perfect entity that its fans should protect at all costs. I’m all for small tweaks which will improve the overall product on the field. Rewarding teams who can’t figure out how to run a capable o-line under the current ratio rules won’t make those teams better. The ratio is part of the chess match in the CFL.
It’s a unique wrinkle and a positive, not a negative. If you can field the best Canadians in the league, you have a really good shot at being in the hunt in November. The best Grey Cup Champions have great American players, but you can’t have Willie Jefferson, Adam Bighill, and four or five other stud Americans if you don’t have good Canadians to fill other positions.
Like any professional league, there are all time classics, and there are stinkers. I’ve watched triple overtime hockey games in the NHL. I’ve also seen teams beaten by double digits.
It’s fair to say the CFL has less leeway when it comes to rolling out bad games. It’s not fair to use every one as an opportunity to point out all of its deficiencies, just like it would not be fair to expect every game to produce lightning in a bottle.
The same league, same players, same ratio, which produced ‘hot garbage’ two weeks ago, just put on an absolute show.
Becoming another failed American summer league isn’t going to get more people interested in the CFL, and I am tired of hearing it might. If it were as easy as putting teams of talented fringe NFLers fresh out of college together, the UFL, XFL, Arena League, AAF, and countless others wouldn’t have folded while the CFL endures.
Our game is 150+ years old because it is unique. It does not need to be more American. The ratio is not the problem. The on-field product isn’t the problem. The problem is that until two seasons ago, the league’s marketing strategy had been stagnant for 15 years. They are finally entering the 21st century when it comes to making the league more appealing to young people. This is where they’re going to improve.
You can tweak whatever rules you like, football will be football. There will be good games, there will be hot garbage games. Tweaking the ratio will do nothing to improve the product, despite the best efforts of some to prove otherwise.
Owning the Double Blue
There’s a saying in Hamilton: your season is a success if you beat the Argos. While Hamilton hasn’t had the same playoff success as their rivals down the QEW, the Tabbies have certainly had Toronto’s number when the two teams have met the past two seasons.
The win on Friday makes it four straight over the Argos. It was by far the most decisive of the four, though it is worth noting Argos starting QB Chad Kelly was sidelined with an injury.
It sets the tone for a massive Labour Day Classic between the two teams, where Kelly should be available. There was a lot of chirping between them on Friday, even more than usual, another indication that the rivalry is heating up.
The more these two teams hate each other, the better it is for the CFL.
