Why the CFL’s new Grey Cup playoff format slaps

Photo: Reuben Polansky/3DownNation. All rights reserved.

“Oh, the humanity!”

Given the online reaction to the Canadian Football League’s changes to the 2027 Grey Cup playoff format, you’d think any broadcaster would be right to quote the famous line that was uttered during the Hindenburg crash in 1937.

Fans from all nine teams are threatening to cancel their tickets and stop watching games because the regular-season has been “rendered meaningless.” Eight of nine teams will make the playoffs and now a terrible team could win the Grey Cup!

Apparently, the league has lost all credibility as a sporting organization, as the “woke mob” ensures that everyone gets a participation ribbon. All of this rage without any thought invested into why this new format will be great.

Here are my thoughts:

The math

Credit to my 3DownNation colleague John Hodge for correctly identifying that a winless team can qualify for the playoffs in the new system. Should two teams lose every game and tie each other in both games they play, each team would finish 0-16-2 and tiebreakers would put one of those teams in the playoffs.

This sounds ridiculous, until you sit down and do the math to determine that under the current system, an East Division team needs only three wins to begin thinking about a home playoff date. This is unlikely, but it is mathematically possible for the three worst teams in the East to all have three or fewer wins over the course of an 18-game season, should they split games amongst each other and lose the rest of the slate.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth that would occur when that team hosted a playoff game, while a West Division club with far more wins missed out on the playoffs, would rival anything we’ve seen over the last few days.

Far from meaningless

The new structure will mean that every game until the final week should have meaning. No longer will we be looking at the games in which both teams are playing for their jobs next year because at least one team in every game will be playoff-bound.

Reseeding the teams after the first round also means that it now matters if a West team is playing an East team in the final week because it could move them ahead of the other and turn a road playoff game into a home playoff game instead.

No longer will teams be resting their star players weeks in advance of the playoffs because their overall picture can’t really change. The “mushy middle” seeds five through eight often change in the final weeks of the season, and playing at home matters. This also applies to the teams at the top of the standings as the second round of playoffs will be seeded by overall league standings, rather than division.

When the two best teams are in the same division, this means they could now meet in the Grey Cup, rather than the division final being the final time to see the best teams go head-to-head.

Imagine a Winnipeg-Saskatchewan, Calgary-Edmonton, or Hamilton-Toronto championship week that wouldn’t require any of those teams finishing fourth in their respective division and crossing over. It’s been a dream of many fans since the crossover rule came into existence, but never materialized.

Now that the fourth-place team in a division may host a playoff game instead of going cross-country and trying to find their way into a championship run.

Fewer lost seasons for great teams

The one-and-done format of the CFL playoffs has generated substantial heartbreak for top teams that steamroll through the regular-season, only to get tripped up in the division finals.

Teams that wrapped up the regular-season division crown currently have a month or more between meaningful games, then are at risk of being upset by lower-seeded teams that were sharpened by the fight to the finish.

Those teams will soon be allowed the chance to have an off-week without having the season become a lost effort. The new format puts those teams back into the mix with the second round of the playoffs hosting the winner of the “play-in games.”

Imagine what the history of the Grey Cup might look like if the best teams every year didn’t have to go into the playoffs cold?

Think back to 2017, when there were four teams in the West Division with a better record than the East Division champion Toronto Argonauts. Given re-seeding, would Toronto have won if they had to play the semi-final against Saskatchewan in Regina instead of at home in Toronto?

In 2016, the Edmonton Football Team went into Ottawa in a similar fashion and lost to the Redblacks, who had the best record in the East Division, but only the fifth-best record in the league.

This new format would have given the better team the home-field advantage.

The money 

The playoffs will soon nearly doubled in size, going from five games a year to nine. This means a ton of extra revenue for the owners in a league that annually cries poverty.

While there will be outlier seasons, more than half the league should host at least one playoff game, and two teams will host two playoff games. That’s a massive revenue boost nearly league-wide.

More revenue means a higher salary cap and a higher salary cap means more money to spend. Having more money to spend could make the league more enticing to talented American players who are deciding between a CFL salary and giving up football to sell insurance back home.

Having more talented players means seeing more spectacular plays. More spectacular plays means more views on social media and more buzz about the league. More buzz means more tickets sold and higher ratings. Higher ratings and more tickets sold means more revenue.

If you need to know what more revenue means, jump back a few sentences.

The future

I made this same argument when the league changed the field dimensions, bringing them in line with the requirements for a “large stadium” by FIFA standards. This is a change being made towards league expansion, without explicitly stating that is the case.

If you’re a city that already has a thriving soccer franchise, you can now not only join a long-tenured football league, but you can join a league where making the playoffs isn’t that difficult, as eight of the now-ten teams would make it to the dance.

For any traditionalist that would still complain about it, I will remind them the CFL for many years existed in a place where only two teams didn’t make the playoffs and no one was complaining about it at the time or asking for the playoffs be shortened as a result.

I have no doubt that expansion is the driving force behind all the changes we are seeing. I, for one, can’t wait for the 10 or 12-team league where two or four teams are missing the playoffs in a new system that quite frankly, slaps.